Posted on Monday, May 19, 2025
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by Outside Contributor
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The FBI identified 25-year-old Guy Edward Bartkus of Twentynine Palms, Calif., as the suspect in a car bombing that occurred May 17, 2025, outside a fertility clinic in Palm Springs. Photo Credit | FBI
A people-hater did something hateful.
The FBI is linking a suicide bombing against an IVF clinic to the anti-natalist ideology of the perpetrator, according to news reports.
The attack, which only killed the bomber but could have been much worse, is an act worthy of perhaps the dumbest and most poisonous ideology on the planet right now.
Anti-natalism is not based, like other cracked worldviews, merely on misbegotten economic theories or illiberal political ideas; it goes much deeper than that. It opposes human life, as such.
Communism and other forms of totalitarianism are often said to be anti-human. Anti-natalism takes it a step further and is purely antihuman. There are no other mitigating ideals like, say, equality or unity.
Anti-natalism doesn’t make invidious distinctions among the people it opposes — say, the kulaks or the Jews — but finds everyone equally unworthy.
A Today piece on the ideology explained, “Antinatalism is a spectrum. Some believe that there should be no sentient life, including animals or even technology with the potential for sentience, like artificial intelligence. Others think it’s just humans that should go extinct.”
For them, the sweet meteor of death is not just an internet meme, it is something to be devoutly wished for.
In its report on the clinic attack, Vanity Fair inevitably included a jibe at the GOP. “The fertility clinic bombing,” it noted, “comes as access to IVF has come under threat from some Republicans across the country — and the attack could deepen concerns for people attempting to start their families through in vitro services.”
I’ve spent a lot of time around Republicans in my time, and I’ve never met an anti-natalist Republican, let alone a pro-life anti-natalist, which makes about as much sense as a capitalist socialist.
A pro-life terrorist has always been a grotesque contradiction in terms, but a pro-death terrorist much less so (and the IVF attacker, Guy Edward Bartkus, reportedly described himself as “pro-mortalist”).
Pro-lifers are morally opposed to some IVF practices because they destroy human life; the bomber targeted the IVF clinic because it facilitates the creation of human life.
At the end of the day, we should be glad that the vast majority of anti-natalists aren’t consistent in their beliefs, or the clinic bombing wouldn’t be such an outlier.
If human life is a blight, it follows that it should be destroyed, although anti-natalists tend to retreat to the position that it is the creation of life in the first place that is the problem. If everyone stopped having kids, we would go extinct without the bother of mass murder or suicide.
They object to bringing new people into the world without their consent. Since the exercise of free choice is a function of being alive, though, this is a nonsensical point. Once someone is with us, then he or she can make all sorts of choices, including to perversely consider humanity itself a mistake.
Anti-natalists fret that this vale of tears is a vale of tears. Yet almost everyone prefers being alive and fears death.
“I’d rather be dead” is the sentiment of someone who is clinically depressed or is being subjected to horrendous mistreatment. The answer is not to say that this person is correct, and not just for himself but all of humanity; rather, if he’s depressed, it is to get him help, and if he’s being mistreated, to stop the mistreatment.
Even the soft version of anti-natalism — that overpopulation is dangerously overtaxing the planet — is false.
Surely, very few anti-natalists support antifertility terrorism of the sort allegedly carried out by Bartkus, who reportedly struggled with depression. By their way of thinking, though, they must believe that it was an entirely avoidable crime.
If we didn’t exist, it never would have happened.
Rich Lowry is the editor in chief of National Review.
Reprinted with permission from National Review by Rich Lowry.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.
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