Never Born

See Alex Williams, “To Breed or Not to Breed,” New York Times, November 20, 2021 →; Joshua Rothman, “The Case for Not Being Born,” The New Yorker, November 27, 2017 →; Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, “I Wish I’d Never Been Born: The Rise of the Anti-natalists,” The Guardian, November 14, 2019 →.

David Wallace-Wells. The Uninhabitable Earth (Tim Duggan Books, 2019).

Ben Ware, “The Death Drive at the End of the World,” e-flux journal, no. 134 (March 2023) →.

Théophile de Giraud, The Art of Guillotining Procreators: An Anti-natalist Manifesto, 2006. A free translation of the original French edition is available here →.

See David Graeber, “There Never Was a West,” in Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire (AK Press, 2007).

See Eliza Berman, “‘Selfish, Shallow, and Neurotic’: How the Conversation on Childlessness Got Started,” Time, April 8, 2015 →. For Childfree in Spanish see →.

See, for example, Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Duke University Press, 2004).

Soft White Underbelly, “Antinatalist Interview—Amanda,” YouTube video, September 23, 2023 →.

David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Jim Crawford, Confessions of an Antinatalist (Nine-Banned Books, 2010), 100.

efilist, “Efilism Is …” YouTube video, October 26, 2015 →.

E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born (Arcade, 1973), 5.

Geeta Pandey, “Indian Man to Sue Parents for Giving Birth to Him,” BBC News, February 7, 2019 →.

Marcel Mauss, The Gift (Norton, 2000).

Yasmine El Rashidi, “Growing up in Hell,” New York Review of Books, June 6, 2019 →.

Alex Ritman, “Cannes: Nadine Labaki on ‘Capernaum’ and Resisting the Lure of Hollywood,” Hollywood Reporter, May 9, 2018 →.

Izrael (or Azrael) is the Angel of Death in Abrahamic religions.

Ameen Rihani, The Luzmiyat of Abu’l-Ala (James T. White & Co., 1918).

Kanishk Tharoor and Maryam Maruf, “Museum of Lost Objects: The Unacceptable Poet,” BBC News, March 8, 2016 →.

See →.

Kate Whiting, “What Is ‘Eco-anxiety’ and How Can We Ease Young People’s Fears for the Planet?” World Economic Forum, October 14, 2021 →.

Alex Williams, “To Breed or Not to Breed,” New York Times, November 20, 2021 →.

Paul A. Murtaugh and Michael G. Schlax, “Reproduction and the Carbon Legacies of Individuals,” Global Environmental Change 19, no. 1 (2009): 14.

See Veronica Bianco, “Who’s Behind the Portland Billboards Demanding People Stop Having Kids?” Willamette Week, February 16, 2022 →. For their website, go to →.

Anne Hendrixson et al., “Confronting Populationism: Feminist Challenges to Population Control in an Era of Climate Change,” Gender, Place & Culture 27, no. 3 (2020).

Oxfam International, “Carbon Emissions of Richest 1 Percent More Than Double the Emissions of the Poorest Half of Humanity,” Oxfam International, September 21, 2020 →.

Oxfam International, “Richest 1% Bag Nearly Twice as Much Wealth as the Rest of the World Put Together Over the Past Two Years,” Oxfam International, January 23, 2023 →.

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “World Fertility and Family Planning 2020,” 1 and 10.

Adam Corlett, “How Big Is the Gender Parenting Gap, and Is It Improving?” Resolution Foundation, March 8, 2019 →.

Shanna H. Swan and Stacey Colino, Countdown (Scribner, 2021).

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962).

Michael Boulter, Extinction: Evolution and the End of Man (Columbia University Press, 2002).

See David Raup, Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? (Norton, 1991).