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Growing up in the atheistic milieu of China’s Cultural Revolution, my dad has always believed that death is the end. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when people around him began dying, he hired a lawyer and planned for his own life’s conclusion.
When I finally saw him after three years of the pandemic, my dad had grown older, balder, and more impatient. He still thinks what matters is this life rather than the next, but he makes a concession for his grandchildren. Through them, he says, he sees the future: a life beyond his own. A kind of afterlife, I suppose.
So, what if he doesn’t ever have grandchildren? What if I, his only son, stand in the way?
I told this story to Yukina (a pseudonym), a 27-year-old art student and part-time worker in Tokyo. She laughed. Pale, austere, and laced with a dry sardonic wit, she told me her own dad, like mine, put too much faith in his children.
“We have children because of social pressures,” she said. “But also because we want our children to replace us.” When her parents discovered she is a transgender woman with no plans to have a family, their hope was dashed. “Of course, it was very hard for me to accept their disappointment, although I don’t think this is a good reason to have children.”
For Yukina, there’s no good reason to reproduce. A self-identified “anti-natalist” (han shussei shugi sha), Yukina harbors the suspicion that the world is unfit for new human life—now, and maybe ever.
Over the past decade, anti-natalist social movements have emerged globally, mostly among young, urban people opposed to biological parenthood. While the term “anti-natalist” has a deeper history in 20th-century population control, since the mid-2000s it has come to refer to an ethical stance against biological reproduction. Activist organizations such as the U.S.-based Stop Having Kids and the India-based Childfree India began emerging in the late 2010s.
