Outsourced Birth: Why Antinatalism Must Embrace Abolitionist Veganism

By Omar Formini for The Aponist Society's blog on August 1, 2025

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The Quiet Cradle of the Barn

Dawn broke over the low metal roofs of an industrial hatchery in a muted glow. Inside the building, rows of incubators hummed softly as hundreds of eggs warmed to life. A lone fluorescent bulb flickered, illuminating dust motes that danced above stacked plastic trays. In this manufactured sunrise, a chorus of newborn chicks greeted the morning with faint peeps. The scene felt deceptively serene. Each chick’s emergence into the world was routine and by design – a birth orchestrated not by a mother’s will but by the cold timing of production schedules. The barn’s quiet was the quiet of inevitability, a cradle of life engineered for utility rather than love.

As the sun climbed, the hatchery’s purpose came into sharper relief. Workers gently lifted the new arrivals, sexing and sorting the chicks with mechanical efficiency. The pastoral ideal of farm life was nowhere to be found; instead, the barn revealed an uncanny mirror. In that mirror, human anxieties about procreation and responsibility appeared reflected back through non-human lives. For antinatalists – those humans who believe it is unethical to create new human life – this barn is a metaphorical looking glass. It discloses a paradox at dawn: even as they renounce having children to avoid causing harm, many antinatalists sit down to breakfast financed by the mass production of someone else’s offspring. The gentle morning light on the hatchery obscures a grave contradiction between antinatalist ideals and non-vegan behavior. The very people who reject cradle and crib for themselves may still unknowingly perpetuate a cycle of cradles in the barn, outsourcing the role of parenthood onto billions of hens, sows, and cows.

Within this quiet barn lies the antinatalist’s displaced burden. Every tray of hatching eggs and every stall of a dairy barn represents human procreative anxiety projected onto other species. We see in these places a displacement of moral responsibility: the reluctance to impose birth on a human child finds an outlet in the convenient, unseen births of livestock. The barn thus becomes a metaphysical mirror – its confined maternity wards reflecting back the uncomfortable truth that rejecting human birth while consuming animal products merely shunts the ethical problem down the species hierarchy. Recognizing this hidden mirror is the first step toward integrity. This essay’s aim is to unravel that displacement and restore consistency between antinatalist theory and practice. By aligning antinatalism with abolitionist veganism, guided by an Aponist ethic of non-domination, we seek to ensure that the commitment to avoid imposed birth extends to all sentient beings. Only through such alignment can antinatalists fully honor their guiding principle: minimizing suffering by not forcing life into existence.

Breeding Economies as Proxy Pronatalism

Animal agriculture is built on a foundation of coerced, continuous reproduction. In dairy, egg, and meat supply chains, the bodies of cows, pigs, and chickens are treated as biological capital, yielding dividends of milk, eggs, and flesh only if kept reproducing in perpetuity. A dairy cow, for example, does not give milk unless she gives birth; thus she is kept almost constantly pregnant and calving. Farmers artificially inseminate dairy cows over and over … for their entire childbearing lives¹, ensuring a steady cycle of births to trigger lactation. Each calf is taken from its mother shortly after birth so that human consumers – not the calf – can drink the milk meant for her young. After a brief recovery, the cow is bred again, locked into a relentless rhythm of pregnancy and milking until her body is spent. The same systemic pressure governs the lives of egg-laying hens (bred to lay unnaturally frequent eggs and replaced as soon as productivity wanes) and breeding sows (impregnated each heat cycle and confined to gestation crates). In each case, an animal’s reproductive capacity is refined into a production system, a kind of assembly line of lives.

Viewed through an economic lens, this system functions as a proxy pronatalism. “Pronatalism” usually refers to societal forces encouraging human procreation, but in the marketplace of animal products, consumer demand operates as an impersonal but powerful pronatalist mandate. Every purchase of a carton of eggs or a gallon of milk is a vote cast for the birth of more chicks and calves. The market compels new generations of animals to be bred because without constant reproduction, the supply of animal products would collapse. The result is a vast, indirect regime of forced birth. More than 100 billion animals are bred and killed for meat, dairy, and eggs globally each year – a number so large that hundreds of millions of sentient beings are born every single day under this mandate². The consumer’s breakfast thus conceals a chain of decisions that amount to a legislated birth policy: to satisfy demand, hens must lay more eggs (necessitating hatcheries full of chicks), sows must deliver more piglets, cows must calve annually. What antinatalists reject in the human realm – the expectation to produce offspring – is being outsourced to farmed animals through the cumulative effect of ordinary grocery store choices.

Crucially, these animal births are involuntary in a very literal sense. Unlike even the most pronatalist human society, which still relies on individual parents to conceive by choice or coercion, the livestock breeding economy removes all pretense of consent or agency. Animals are not asked whether they wish to reproduce; they are impregnated on a schedule determined by efficiency metrics. The industry sanitizes this reality with euphemisms that mask violence. Breeding is benignly termed “animal husbandry,” a phrase that once implied care-taking but now serves as a linguistic buffer between consumers and the truth of what is being done. In practice, this husbandry entails systematic violation of animals’ reproductive systems – from the use of “breeding guns” in artificial insemination to the separation of mothers from newborns who desperately cry out for each other. Even the word “livestock” frames living, feeling creatures as stockpile goods to be managed. Such rhetoric allows consumers to remain comfortably distant from the intimate coercion that brings their food to the table. Under the gloss of terms like “farm management” and “stock replenishment,” the routine reality is that sentient beings are being compelled to create life on a mass scale.

By financing these practices, consumers become de facto pronatalist agents in the animal realm. The antinatalist who prides herself on having no children might inadvertently support the birth of dozens of animals each year through dietary habits alone. The typical omnivore’s consumption over a lifetime will necessitate the breeding of thousands of animals to supply meat, eggs, and dairy for that one human’s nourishment. This stark contrast – voluntary childlessness for oneself, versus outsourced multiplication for others – represents a deep ethical inconsistency. It is akin to someone loudly opposing sweatshop labor yet unknowingly running a small sweatshop in their basement. The everyday act of buying animal products turns the consumer into an unseen legislator, passing economic decrees that more sentient beings shall be brought into existence, without regard for their suffering or consent. Antinatalists, who so vehemently oppose imposing life on a hypothetical child, cannot with moral coherence ignore that their grocery list may be imposing life (and death) on countless non-human young.

To fully appreciate the stakes, one must unflinchingly expose those euphemisms and the gulf between language and reality. Terms like “breeding stock” or “culling” convert individual lives and family bonds into sterile concepts of input and output. Husbandry carries a paternal connotation – the husband as caretaker – yet in modern animal agriculture it perversely signifies a regime in which farmed animals have no husbands, wives, or natural families at all, only handlers and breeders. The violence is not only physical but metaphysical: it reduces birth, which ought to be an intimate and uncertain miracle, to a premeditated manufacturing step. In doing so, the system hides the profound ethical trespass occurring. Antinatalists condemn the creation of new human life as an imposition of harm; by the same token, the animal agriculture industry’s breeding apparatus is a vast machine of imposed births. It is pronatalism by proxy – a way for humans to enjoy the benefits of new life (milk, eggs, meat) while shifting the ethical and bodily costs onto non-human mothers and offspring.

Logical Collapse of Non-Vegan Antinatalism

If antinatalism is founded on the principle that it is wrong to impose existence on another being without consent, then that principle cannot arbitrarily stop at the species border. An ethic opposing involuntary birth collapses into self-contradiction if it excludes non-human sentience through a speciesist double standard. Speciesism – discrimination against beings on the basis of species – is widely recognized in moral philosophy as a prejudice akin to racism or sexism. Peter Singer notably argued that “speciesism is a prejudice no less objectionable than racism or sexism,” since it likewise uses an irrelevant criterion (species membership) to excuse differential consideration of interests³. A non-vegan antinatalist, however, finds themself in exactly that prejudiced posture. They hold that suffering carried by an unwanted human child is morally intolerable, yet they excuse or ignore the suffering of a calf born only to be separated from its mother and slaughtered young, or a chick hatched only to endure a life of confinement. This selective concern rests on speciesist exceptionalism: the implicit belief that human births matter in a way that animal births do not. The inconsistency is structural. It mirrors, in form, the very hierarchies antinatalists often critique (such as valuing some lives over others based on arbitrary traits). An antinatalism that centers only humans and neglects billions of non-human sentient beings invokes a hierarchy of moral relevance that cannot be justified by any rational measure of pain or innocence. It becomes an ethical solipsism: our offspring warrant extreme preventative concern, while the outsourced births of other beings are beneath moral notice.

Philosophically, such a position is untenable. Antinatalism’s core claim is that coming into existence is a harm, because life inevitably contains suffering that one would have been better off never experiencing. David Benatar, a prominent antinatalist philosopher, applies this logic universally to sentient life. In fact, Benatar directly rebukes the notion that bringing animals into existence for human use could ever be a “benefit” to those animals. He calls it “an appalling argument” to suggest farmed animals are better off existing and suffering than not existing at all⁴. The very idea, he notes, would be obviously outrageous if applied to human babies bred for slaughter, revealing that it is only accepted for animals due to speciesist bias. In other words, delegating reproductive harm down the species hierarchy merely relocates the moral problem – it does not resolve it. The calf bred into a short life of separation and butchery experiences a harm of existence as real as any human child born into adversity. Antinatalists cannot claim the mantle of reducing suffering while effectively participating in a system that breeds sentient creatures into certain pain and early death. The ethical protest against creating new sufferers must extend to all who can suffer. To exempt non-humans is to arbitrarily close one’s eyes, which undermines the very foundation of the antinatalist stance (a commitment to impartial, universal minimization of harm).

Non-vegan antinatalists often raise several counterarguments to defend this partitioned view. One common contention is that animals lack the reflective awareness to consider existence an imposition; a cow or chicken has no articulated desire not to be born, so (the argument goes) their reproduction falls outside the moral purview of antinatalism. However, this objection misunderstands the basis of antinatalist ethics. The wrongness of forcing life upon someone does not hinge on that being’s intellectual awareness of the imposition; it hinges on the experience of suffering that life will contain. An infant or cognitively disabled human also lacks reflective awareness, yet antinatalists still count their potential suffering as morally relevant – often especially so, because such individuals cannot comprehend or contextualize their pain. Likewise, a lamb or a piglet does not need to conceive of “the meaning of birth” to endure harm from being brought into existence. They avoid pain, fear death, and seek comfort just as instinctually as any human baby. Ethical concern “by centering sentience rather than cognitive self-projection” reveals that forced animal reproduction indeed constitutes a violation under any principle of non-harm. The absence of conceptual foresight in animals does not absolve humans of responsibility; if anything, it places a greater onus on us not to exploit beings who cannot fathom why they suffer at our hands. In antinatalist terms, animals are pure victims of creation – lacking even the minimal agency adult humans might have to rationalize or mitigate their condition. Thus, their lack of reflective awareness strengthens the case against breeding them for our purposes; it does not weaken it.

Another frequently cited defense is nutritional necessity: the claim that abstaining from animal products is unrealistic because humans need certain nutrients (protein, B12, iron, etc.) that are best obtained from animals, thus making veganism an undue burden. Contemporary nutritional science flatly contradicts this notion. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics states that appropriately planned vegan diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and suitable for all life stages, including pregnancy and infancy⁵. Every nutrient derived from animal foods can be obtained from plants or supplements without the need for continuous animal breeding and killing. Vitamin B-12, often cited as a critical nutrient, can be produced microbially and added to foods or taken as a supplement – a cruelty-free fortification method that obviates any alleged “need” to force animals into existence. In truth, the vast majority of humanity’s animal product consumption is driven by culture and habit, not survival. What is “necessary” is not meat or milk themselves, but nutrients; and those nutrients do not morally justify the existence of industrial hatcheries and insemination syringes. The defense of nutritional necessity, then, masks habituated taste preferences and cultural inertia rather than any genuine life-or-death imperative. It is an attempt to override moral principle with personal convenience. For an antinatalist committed to reducing harm, leaning on this defense is especially self-defeating: it says, in effect, “I oppose creating life unless it makes my dinner marginally easier,” which reduces a philosophy of ethical urgency to a matter of palate.

Some might point out that in nature, animals routinely prey on each other – natural predation analogies are invoked to suggest that humans participating in the food chain is simply part of life’s tapestry. But equating human industrial breeding with a lion’s hunt is a categorical error. Wild predators kill to survive; they do not confine herds in enclosures to maximize offspring, nor do they possess moral agency to consider alternatives. Humans, by contrast, do have a choice. We raise and kill animals in numbers and conditions that no natural ecosystem would ever produce, and we do so driven not by necessity but by demand and profit. Invoking nature here is a classic appeal to nature fallacy: just because something occurs in the wild does not establish its moral rightness in a human context. We do not model our ethics on the behaviors of cats or wolves in other domains – we do not justify violence or coercion among humans by pointing out those exist in nature – so it is inconsistent to do so for food ethics. Moreover, if anything, the brutality of nature’s predation should inspire us to rise above it, using our unique capacities for empathy and innovation to reduce overall suffering. We protect the vulnerable within our own species from natural dangers; similarly, we can protect sentient farmed animals from unnecessary harm by simply not bringing them into the world to be killed. The fact that a lion must kill a gazelle in the savannah is irrelevant to the morality of a human paying for a calf to be born and killed when plant-based foods are available. Thus, analogies to natural carnivory fail to justify our industrialized system of reproductive control and slaughter⁶.

In light of these considerations, the persistence of carnism (the ideology supporting meat-eating) among antinatalists leads to a fractured moral stance. The protest against creating new life becomes a hollow slogan if one simultaneously bankrolls the creation of new lives for consumption. Non-vegan antinatalism begins to look less like a coherent ethics of minimizing harm and more like a personal lifestyle preference – a form of moral branding devoid of substance. It risks reducing antinatalism to a kind of anthropocentric misanthropy (“no human children, but animal exploitation is fine since it benefits me”). The logical consequence is a loss of credibility and moral force: one cannot credibly argue that existence is so terrible it should not be inflicted on anyone, and in the next breath fund the systems that inflict life on billions of pigs and chickens. To remain philosophically consistent and truly compassionate, antinatalism must extend its circle of concern. Otherwise, it stands on feet of clay. The collapse here is not just logical but moral – a failure to apply one’s principles universally results in an ethic that, when scrutinized, falls apart into special pleading. In contrast, embracing a vegan stance restores coherence. It closes the loophole through which unnoticed harm was seeping, and it transforms antinatalism from a possibly self-centered choice into a far-reaching commitment against involuntary suffering in all its forms.

Toward an Aponist Synthesis of Abstention

To resolve these tensions, antinatalist ethics can evolve into a broader stance of multispecies solidarity – one that Aponism encapsulates. Aponism (from the Greek aponía, “absence of pain”) is a framework uniting antinatalism and abolitionist veganism within a single principle of radical non-harm and non-domination. Rather than viewing veganism as a separate or optional add-on, antinatalists can see it as the natural expansion of their core commitment into the animal realm. This is a synthesis of abstention: just as the antinatalist abstains from creating new human life, the ethical vegan abstains from consuming products that require the creation (and destruction) of non-human life. Both choices flow from the same impulse – to prevent avoidable suffering by not bringing about lives that will be filled with harm. When combined, they form a consistent life philosophy that refuses to impose existence on any sentient being, whether human or animal. In practice, this means the antinatalist’s personal choice not to procreate is complemented by a dietary and lifestyle choice not to participate in forced breeding of other species. It is a comprehensive vow of non-participation in violence-driven genesis.

Envisioning a culture grounded in this principle invites us to imagine food and agriculture fundamentally decoupled from reproduction and exploitation. In a future aligned with abolitionist veganism, culinary pleasure no longer depends on a cycle of impregnation and slaughter. Farms as we know them – centered on breeding, containing cradles that lead to killing floors – give way to plant-centric gastronomy and innovative food systems that embody the ethic of absence of pain. For example, cuisine might celebrate fruits, grains, legumes, and cultivated proteins created without any breeding at all, or involve only those processes where no sentient life is brought forth and harmed. The “quiet cradle” of tomorrow’s barn would be literally quiet – no hatcheries or calving pens, just fields of crops and perhaps sanctuaries for rescued animals living out their natural spans unfettered. In such a world, the sunrise over a farm would carry no hidden contradiction: it would simply illuminate growth without sacrifice. This is not a utopian fantasy but a logical direction once we accept that our food traditions can be unbound from the mandate to create and destroy lives. By decoupling culinary culture from reproductive coercion, we align what we eat with what we claim to value – compassion, consent, and the minimization of harm.

For the antinatalist, adopting veganism can also bring a profound sense of psychological consonance. It removes the dissonance of caring about hypothetical future people while being complicit in the suffering of actual present animals. Many people experience an uneasy conflict – the so-called “meat paradox” – wherein they love or sympathize with animals yet consume them. Antinatalists who remain non-vegan live a version of this paradox, cherishing abstract non-existence for potential humans to spare them pain, yet contributing to the very real pain of existing non-humans. By refusing animal products, they dissolve this conflict. The mind finds clarity and stillness when our actions consistently reflect our principles. No longer are one’s mornings clouded by the knowledge (conscious or subconscious) that the milk in the cereal or the bacon on the plate came from a mother forced into motherhood, a being whose entire existence was an instrument for human ends. Instead, an antinatalist vegan can sit at breakfast with clean hands and a clear conscience, knowing no being was coerced into life for that meal. This psychological relief is not trivial; it opens the door for deeper contemplation and sincerity. It frees up moral energy that was previously spent on subconscious justification and compartmentalization. In essence, it allows antinatalists to fully inhabit their ethos of mercy, extending their circle of empathy without the impediment of guilt or contradiction.

Ultimately, only a unified stance that intertwines antinatalism with abolitionist veganism truly honors the imperative to minimize imposed existence. This integrated stance is the very embodiment of Aponism’s holistic non-domination ethic. It acknowledges that domination can come in many forms – patriarchal, political, or in this case, species-based – and it commits to dismantling them all. By merging ecological, social, and existential harm reduction into one practice, the Aponist approach represents a gentle negation of harm at its root. It is gentle in that it does not aggress; it negates by not doing – not procreating, not consuming animal products, not asserting power over the vulnerable. In this way, abstention becomes powerful: it is an act of resistance against needless suffering and a statement of solidarity with all who bear the costs of existence. The abolitionist-vegan antinatalist does not merely refrain from creating a child; they refrain from asking another sentient mother to create one on their behalf.

In conclusion, the alignment of antinatalism with veganism is more than a consistency check – it is the blossoming of antinatalist compassion to its full potential. It transforms a philosophy often seen as solely human-focused into a universal ethic of care. The barn at sunrise no longer needs to be a site of hypocrisy or outsourced cruelty; it can become, instead, just a barn, quietly at peace. Through an Aponist synthesis of abstention, we affirm that the kindest cradle is no cradle at all, and the kindest meal is one devoid of victims. Such a stance represents the logical and compassionate culmination of the antinatalist creed. It is only by embracing abolitionist veganism that antinatalists can ensure their hands do not help turn the very wheel of forced birth they mean to stop. In doing so, they weave a single tapestry of non-harm, where no being is made to exist just to suffer for another. This unified ethic of non-domination is not merely an ideal – it is a practical imperative if our goal is, as it should be, to lessen the sum total of suffering in the world. Antinatalism must therefore embrace abolitionist veganism, for a gentler world will be born only when we cease to forcibly birth the world’s helpless creatures. The imperative to minimize imposed existence knows no species boundary, and our moral consistency requires that neither should we.

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