"[T]hey agreed on basically everything, including that new human life is not a gift but a needless perpetuation of suffering."

"Babies grow up to be adults, and adulthood contains loneliness, rejection, drudgery, hopelessness, regret, grief, and terror. Even grade school contains that much. Why put someone through that, Alex and Dietz agreed, when a child could just as well never have known existence at all? The unborn do not appear to be moaning at us from the void, petitioning to be let into life. This idea—that having children is unethical—has come to be known as antinatalism...."

Writes Elizabeth Barber in "The Case Against Children/Among the antinatalists" (Harper's). The author wants a baby.

Lots of stories of antinatalists at the link, but what I want to quote is some of the philosophical material:

“I do not think that one should have children; I observe in the acquisition of children many risks and many griefs, whereas a harvest is rare, and even when it exists, it is thin and poor,” the Greek philosopher Democritus is supposed to have said. He thought people should adopt, as “one can take one child out of many who is according to one’s liking.” 

In The Childfree Christ, published in 2021, the Belgian antinatalist Théophile de Giraud argues that the Bible is an antinatalist text, a view emphatically held by Kierkegaard, who found it obvious that the Bible instructs the Christlike not to have kids. Jesus gave his followers lots of examples of how to be good in the world, but one thing he did not do was start a nuclear family. Instead, he collected a spiritual family, like that replicated in nunneries and monasteries. 

Some Christian sects—most famously, the Cathars, who were sentenced to death by Pope Innocent III in the thirteenth century—later found cause to conclude that the Christly thing to do was not to procreate. “Better than both is the one who has never been born, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun,” writes the author of Ecclesiastes. “May the day of my birth perish, and the night that said, ‘A boy is conceived,’ ” says the miserable Job. Likewise, the Talmud has it that “it would have been preferable had man not been created than to have been created.”

The less religious of our ancestors meanwhile found in the ugliness of the human world confirmation that God had not created this mess; we had. Human suffering served no plan besides the human project to grow a workforce of replaceable laborers. Al-Ma‘arri, a Syrian atheist born in the tenth century, wrote that existence was plainly not Allah’s gift, but a life sentence, a punishment. He was blinded at four by smallpox and, as a non-believer in a believing time and place, lived alone in a cave. “I know but this,” he wrote, “that him I hold in error / Who helps to propagate Time’s woe and terror.”...