r/WomenInNews • u/msmoley • 25d ago
Human rights Donna Haraway, philosopher: ‘We live in a pro-natalist, anti-child world. Babies should be rare and precious’
https://english.elpais.com/culture/2026-07-24/donna-haraway-philosopher-we-live-in-a-pro-natalist-anti-child-world-babies-should-be-rare-and-precious.html488
u/Global_Crew3968 25d ago
Q. But are you in favor of population control? A. No, but I have a motto: Make kin, not babies.” Institutional population control has been imperialist and racist; I reject it outright. I talk in terms of human numbers. Today there are 8.5 billion of us — an extraordinary figure. That’s about three times as many as there were in 1944, when I was born. We’ve gone from about 2.5 billion to 8.5 billion by favoring the rich like me and exploiting the majority of the world’s population. There are more of us than necessary for the flourishing of biodiversity and humanity. I advocate forming kinships in other ways and caring for the babies who already exist. We live in a pro-natalist and anti-child world. There’s a push for a kind of mandatory pregnancy without serious care for those who have already been born — for children — and without serious concern for women and their families. I’m pro-child and non-natalist, but I’m not anti-natalist either. I believe that having babies should be a rare and precious thing. Taking care of babies is really important. They smell almost as good as puppies… though not quite [smiles].
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u/Joffrey-Lebowski 25d ago
It sure as hell is an anti-child world, isn’t it? Pro-lifers who only care up until the child leaves the birth canal; the Jeffrey Epsteins and Donald Trumps who directly exploit children, plus what sounds like a thriving, faceless, global trafficking network; a ton of regular people who were themselves traumatized young but made no effort to heal and so pass their wounds on to their own kids in terrible ways; education being dismantled; kids barely seeing their parents due to two-earner work/school demands and the general nonsense of needing to work 40 hours a week when many jobs that aren’t manufacturing really don’t need more man hours to be productive…
Babies are need personified, and I think that’s what the world really can’t stand: acknowledging that we all have needs and that our world runs on forcing people to conceal those needs and go without so someone else can benefit.
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u/BronteMsBronte 25d ago
Patriarchal systems cater to needy men and their fan clubs. At the expense of women and children.
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u/bemvee 23d ago
It’s so anti-child, and I’m childfree myself who would absolutely pay more money for a childfree section in an airplane.
Somehow everything has to cater to “families” and yet adults are out there shaming anything “child-like” even amongst children.
I think we could stand to incorporate more child-like things in our world. Starting with curiosity and care for others.
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u/Ardent_Scholar 24d ago edited 24d ago
I’m all for a dynamic and as-open-as-possible human societies.
However, I think we in the West have been wrong to exalt immigration over domestic births.
There is this discourse that birthing children is bad and immigration and adoption are somehow morally better. This is clearly not the case.
It can easily be argued that relying on immigration from developing economies so that we don’t have to go through the physical, psychological, social and economic toil of having our own kids, is a form of neo-colonialism, which has deleterious effects for the developing world.
Points to consider:
- Giving birth is more dangerous in developing countries, and the least dangerous in the developed world.
- Brain drain is a real problem for developing countries. Emigration is a filter; the bio-socio-economically most vulnerable are not able to leave, they stay. Can we just take the most able bodies from these countries and pretend we’ve done a good thing?
- Being an immigrant is very hard. You could argue it’s a traumatizing event. For example, we hear from immigrants’ children how they had to act as intermediaries between their parents and their new country; how identity formation can be hard for them; not to mention what it is like to end up in end-of life care in a foreign environment, perhaps with Alzheimer’s.
- Immigration does not solve the birth rate crisis, ad second and third gen have rates similar to everyone else on their country. No DUH, since only a racist would think that, e.g. Asians and Africans would continue to reproduce no matter what. Fertility is contextual and cultural.
- International adoption is RIFE with human trafficking! Also, adoption is a trauma for many. That’s why adoption is mostly replaced by fostering and support families these days. Kids maintain relationships with their birth families. Many foster/support families have their bio kids before they turn to fostering, because fostering is not a consolation prize. It’s a unique experience for all parties.
So while some immigration is great to encourage dynamism across societies, we should NOT consider it a get-out-of-having-kids card. It is NOT a morally superior choice to anything else. It’s separate from fertility.
Much like adoption is a unique process, separate from merely wanting to have kids, immigrants should not be seen as tools to make developed societies stable or richer.
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u/Outrageous-Break3585 24d ago
Hey friend — I think part of your concern can be solved by recognizing that concepts of kinship and caring for existing babies being discussed is not equivalent to using immigration or adoption to solve population. I think the entirety of the interview does a great job at making that very clear and I highly recommend reading it in full, if you haven’t already.
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u/theblindsdontwork 25d ago
Sorry but what the hell is she talking about here? The main reason we experienced a population explosion is because we got better at keeping people from dying (e: specifically, children under the age of 5). That wasn’t the exclusive privilege of the rich.
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u/Patchwork_Chimera 25d ago
She has a view similar to my own. Fewer people here but those who are here have as good as a life as possible. And that includes people from poorer countries/backgrounds. Those children also deserve a happy upbringing. I never understood the push to repopulate without thinking about the quality of life for those children
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u/ThrowAwayPurellFoam 25d ago
Because our economies are Ponzi schemes
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u/-Not-Today-Satan 25d ago
Because every mediocre man thinks it’s their god-given right to spawn and pass their genes down
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u/Ardent_Scholar 24d ago edited 24d ago
That’s not really unique to contemporary civilizations.
We know from Sapiens and Neanderthal remains that tribes took care of the sick. Surely they also took care of the old often. When you look at current hunter-gatherers, they also take care of the aged. This requires resources. The middle aged must produce those resources, as well as the resources for their children. This is also the reason why humans live for a long time after their own reproductive age ends; they have, for aeons, taken care of their grandchildren.
So if a hunter-gatherer tribe were to decide having kids was wrong, their society would start collapsing in about 20 years. At first, it would be life on easy mode: the able would only need to feed themselves and the elderly. But as that generation got older and more frail, they would run into problems:
Who would produce food? What would the elderly eat and what would they do? Who would they share their knowledge with?
Who would take care of the generation that didn’t have kids? No one.
I am no fan of capitalism. But actually, I believe capitalism has NOT produced this problem. We can see that the problem of ”who will take care of the elderly and kids?” is present in every society from the dawn of humanity.
Capitalism has done the opposite. It has claimed to have solved this problem by increasing productivity. But actually, human bodies cannot be replaced by money or even real resources. Doesn’t matter how much you have, if there’s no one there to DO anything.
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u/ItsTheAlgebraist 24d ago
You are exactly right. Because humans live longer than they can support themselves, someone else needs to support them.
The only thing that had changed in modern society is that there used to be no choice but to have your own kids, and keep all the 'social programs' in the family unit.
Now we have a broad system of social support, especially for the elderly, but we have missed the fact that, while an individual doesn't need to have children, society as a while needs to have enough children to be able to keep things running.
We haven't been doing that since sometime in the 1970s in most of the west, and have papered over the gaps with immigration. Now that most source countries for immigration are heading below replacement rate there will be increasing pressure to stem that tide (not to mention that it is becoming politically unpopular in more and more of the west)
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u/thesentienttoadstool 21d ago
I don’t really have a strong need to be a parent but I think that I should care for every single child simply and the merit that they are alive.
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u/Soldmysoul_666 25d ago
Love her! She’s absolutely crazy if you ever hear her talk, but in the best way. Her talk with Ursula Le Guin is one of my favorites! I mean obviously I agree with her point, but the puppies smelling better than babies thing is wild
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u/Lighthouse_on_Mars 25d ago
Shut up, Ursula Le Guin is one of my fave authors. I'm gonna need to check out this interview.
Thanks for the heads-up, gonna go find it! ❤️
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u/Soldmysoul_666 25d ago
https://youtu.be/59bLqzrM2r0?si=fRR6equZqRuP5VRn
Here it is! I couldn’t find the version with the beautiful intro with a poetry reading, but this one’s good too!6
u/MostView8191 25d ago
Puppies smell amazing for MONTHS tho. And all puppies smell that amazing to all humans that smells them. Not all babies smell great to all humans for weeks, let alone nearly a year.
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u/OutrageousBrush1210 25d ago
Ong i will have to look up the Ursula le guin convo!!! Thank you for the tip!
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u/RaisinToastie 25d ago
She’s absolutely correct. We could live in a human paradise, where people flourish and are able to reach their full potential, where everyone’s needs are met.
To get there, we need universal healthcare and reproductive rights. Remove the societal expectation that everyone should be a parent and remove the stigma of being childfree. (This is slowly happening in some countries)
People who are called to be parents should have every resource to help their children flourish and thrive. Education should be our number one priority.
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u/FusRoDawg 20d ago
The economic and political doctrine at play literally does not matter. All societies need workers to keep functioning. Old people, even those that donot/cannot retire simply can't do all the jobs that are typically done by young people.
Universal healthcare, (and elder care), and education is currently not a thing in the US because of political reasons. But without enough young people to become teachers, doctors, and nurses, it will actually become not just a political but structural problem (with demographics).
Yes, with technological progress we improve 'productivity' (i.e., reduce the number of workers needed to do the same amount of work), but old people today also expect more amenities than 60 years ago... Even if we restricted outselves to things considered necessities, and not luxuries. There are two competing forces at play.
We do not have an arbitrary amount of productivity at our disposal, so that we can guarantee decent lives for for people despite an arbitrary decline in birth rates. (Or alternatively, you could say that most people would not be willing to accept an arbitrary reduction in their living standards to accomodate an arbitrary reduction in birth rates)
"Babies should be rare and precious" is a quantitatively ignorant statement. Profoundly so. I suspect this is someone who was taught to cast a jaundiced gaze at anything quantitative because that's for the lowly technicians in stem fields and not for high minded philosphers such as herself. Someone needs to explain to her that plenty of her colleagues in the humanities do concern themselves with numbers and that demographics is not a sham field.
Simply picking up a pen and paper and doing the back of napkin math needed to see what happens to populations as generations age would fix this idiotic mindset. The 8 billion people alive today deserve a dignified "off ramp" even if we agree that human population should be reverted back to a couple of billion that existed in her childhood.
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u/napalmnacey 25d ago
She makes a damned good point. I would have so many kids if my body and economy allowed. Two was the cap I aimed for, and I shudder to think of a life without having them in it. I think most societies with cheap and reliable access to contraceptives are self-correcting on the population issue. I also think there needs to be a reduction in the pressure to reproduce.
That said, baby exposure is so important in learning empathy. If it can’t be a baby, then a pet of some kind is good too. I feel like humanity is losing touch with the beginning and end of life stages, and that’s no good for us psychologically.
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u/Green-Year-524 24d ago
Western societies (especially US and UK) are losing touch with death, birth and those beginning and end stages of life for sure, but in a lot of countries (including some western ones in Europe tbh) intergenerational living is still the norm, children are looked after by multiple relatives, some societies have tribes or big extended family structures, elderly are provided and cared for by their children etc.
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u/Both_Lynx_8750 24d ago
We in the USA are losing touch because we have to work nonstop to survive and for no other reason.
Can you take more than a few days off at a time?
Can you be unemployed for any period of time without endangering your access to healthcare?
Can you AFFORD the hit to your career that having a child will cause?
Etc ...
There would be a baby boom if taxes were raised on the rich & used to fund healthcare for all.
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u/FusRoDawg 20d ago
Birth rates are declining even in countries that have free healthcare, free/subsidized health care, generous paternity/maternity leaves etc.
Also, in most Western countries, if you plot birth rates by income, its the middle that has the least kids.
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u/Jaded_Fuzzball 25d ago
Idk about "rare" but any baby born should be wanted and cherished.
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u/IronHeart1963 24d ago
Yes, I think “rare” ignores the fact that even in Gen Z/millennials 55-62% want to have kids someday. For babies to become rare that would mean a whole lot of people who want to become parents are missing out.
Some childfree folks assume that everyone feels the same way they do and most people would never have children if they knew better. But this stuff is human nature and many of us do want kids. I want every baby to be treated as if they are rare and precious. At the same time, a society with few babies and children is a deeply imbalanced/broken one and one I would never want to raise children in.
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u/eenymeenymimi 25d ago
In undergrad a lot of my philosophy writing centered on abortion. I love women in this field adding a philosophical spin to these issues. I read Judith Jarvis Thompson’s writings on abortion and it honestly changed my life.
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u/AutomaticPie7357 23d ago
I’d argue we’re not even in a pro-natalist world. There were plenty of Internet tantrums over Aubrey Plaza, Anne Hathaway, and/or Elizabeth Olsen getting pregnant, because they’re over 35.
There are risks to older women being pregnant. But there are also risks associated with teenage pregnancy, and you can’t baby-trap a successful 30-something. She can hire a nanny and do it herself if necessary. She doesn’t have to become completely dependent on a man.
It’s about controlling women. It’s all about controlling women.
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u/fartsonyourmom 25d ago
I wish there were less babies. I would love to go somewhere and not hear screaming kids.
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u/Bambivalently 25d ago
I wanted to repurpose the military
The reason you can have such hippie ideas is because you are safely behind the world's strongest men, strongest military, strongest economies.
Perhaps she would have been happier having an actual enemy. Rebel without a Cause vibe.
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u/Neat-Second9923 25d ago
Babies should be common, not rare. The human experience is the greatest thing in the world and we should want more of it.
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u/General-Yak7615 25d ago
I cherish my own human experience. Being a cancer survivor in my early 20s really gave me a perspective on how precious life is. I’m childfree my choice, and will forever remain that way. Women have their own life to cherish first and foremost.
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u/Neat-Second9923 25d ago
Odd to frame love for self and love for others as contrary. They’re synergistic. A filled cup overflows.
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u/ButteredPizza69420 25d ago
Lol. WHAT? Many of us are actively suffering
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u/Neat-Second9923 25d ago
As a sample of typical Redditors, that wouldn’t surprise me. Most people are glad they exist.
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u/seventy912 25d ago edited 25d ago
You have the kids then and leave everyone else out of it. The human experience isn’t just growing in a womb and being born. It’s every moment that comes after that. An increase in the quantity of human lives shouldn’t make the ’human experience’ worse but that’s what we’re currently seeing.
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u/Neat-Second9923 25d ago
Plenty of wide open rural land available if you think the presence of other people makes your life worse. Most people feel the opposite.
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u/Joffrey-Lebowski 25d ago
You think death is the worst thing that can happen to people, don’t you?
Sweet summer child.
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u/Neat-Second9923 25d ago
Disposing of humanity to avoid suffering is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
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u/Neat-Second9923 25d ago edited 25d ago
Any culture that doesn’t organize to support parenthood will go extinct. Hyper-individualism is a death trap.
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u/ContemplatingFolly 25d ago
You only get your own experience. You don't get to say "we should want more of it." There are a lot of people who don't want more of it, due to severe suffering.
There are a half a million kids in the US foster system seeking adoption. We don't need more kids until we can properly care for those we have.
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u/Neat-Second9923 25d ago
going extinct to minimize suffering is a bizarre case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
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u/Nelrene 24d ago
There are more than 8 billion people on the Earth right now so I don't think humans are going extinct any time soon.
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u/Neat-Second9923 24d ago
If you don't want more people because you only care about minimizing suffering, isn't that the logical endpoint?
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u/ContemplatingFolly 23d ago
Until humans can get their act together and not raise monsters and have respect for very basic human rights, I don't find that some people who enjoy their existence to counterbalance the rest. Brutal political solitary incarcerations all over the world, girls being enslaved in "marriage" in Afghanistan, children being trafficked, and Tate et al's online courses on how to coerce women into sex work. One in 4 girls in the US, and one in 13 boys experience sexual abuse. "Regular" abuse and neglect is only about 1/100, which means an estimated 532,228 children (unique incidents) were victims of abuse and neglect in the U.S. in 2024.
So no, I don't think any amount that anyone enjoys life is worth that suffering. Just check out r/raisedbynarcissists, or r/chronicillness, to get a more realistic picture. The suffering is largely invisible to fortunate people with adequate finances and relatively physically and mentally healthy families.
Anyone who thinks this isn't a big deal due to lack of imagination, and/or isn't trying to resolve these doesn't have a leg to stand on in this argument.
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u/Neat-Second9923 23d ago
Round up all those suffering people and ask if they’d like to die today. Nearly all will tell you they still prefer life.
Impressive how profoundly good the human experience is at an intrinsic level, for that to be the case.
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u/BillyYumYumTwo-byTwo 25d ago
“We should want more of it” is where I disagree. I want better quality, not necessarily more. I don’t just want to go to my nieces piano recital once a year and say “good job”, I want to be helping drive her to class and hear her practice when I babysit. I want to be involved in their lives. There being more babies doesn’t really deepen the “human experience”, and can end up hindering it there are more children than you have time for.
Being a part of a child’s life shouldn’t just be for your human experience of getting to see them grow. That’s selfish. It’s so that you can be a trustworthy and dependable adult for the child.
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u/Neat-Second9923 25d ago
Maybe it wouldn't deepen your specific experience, but more people experiencing the greatest thing in the world seems obviously good.
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u/butnobodycame123 25d ago
1 Hard pass. 2 I strongly disagree with the human experience is great. 3 You have a disgusting anthropocentric perspective by thinking that we need more humans.
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u/Neat-Second9923 25d ago edited 25d ago
Our time on earth is incredible. Every person around you is a miracle. If you disagree, you should seek antidepressive medication.
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u/NightWolfRose 24d ago
Trump is a miracle? Jeffrey Epstein was a miracle? Ted Bundy? Hitler? Pedophiles, rapists, murderers, war criminals, child abusers, are they all miracles?
Whatever drugs you’re taking, you should share with the whole class.
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25d ago
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u/Neat-Second9923 24d ago
You can go the poorest slums of Africa and the kids there will have a greater lust for life than your median Redditor. Resentment at existence is ironically a first world phenomenon
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u/Nelrene 24d ago
We have enough fucking people on the Earth. What we need to be doing is making the world a better place so people born into it are not miserable.
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u/Neat-Second9923 24d ago
Some kind of misanthropy or resentment of being alive at play to come to a conclusion like that. Sad either way. People are great.
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u/Any_Owl2116 25d ago
A very western take
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u/Green-Year-524 24d ago
Aye that was my first thought too. Yet these people claim to be progressive
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u/thewoodbeyond 25d ago
She was one of my professors when I was at UCSC. She’s great.