It's time to take the antinatalist variable seriously: new perspectives from procreation ethics and moral judgments

Declining birth rates and rising childlessness are commonly attributed to structural and life-course drivers, including economic insecurity, the direct and opportunity costs of childrearing, labor market conditions, partnership dynamics, and work-family incompatibility. While these variables are the traditional elements used to describe the reasons behind decreasing birth rates, they do not fully capture an increasingly visible motivational domain: morally grounded evaluations of whether procreation is permissible under perceived social deterioration, climate change, or moral judgments over life, existence as harm, and suffering. Antinatalism refers here to the normative views that procreation is morally impermissible, either always or under a significant set of conditions. This could be understood as a measurable range of evaluative judgments both from conditional reasons and on stronger moral unconditional reasons. The article identifies a gap between traditional explanatory frameworks, and the moral content already present in stated reasons for deciding against procreation. The goal is not to elevate antinatalism as the dominant driver of fertility decline but to incorporate it into a more complete account of the current demographic phenomenon that deserves empirical investigation. Then, the incomplete picture that demographic research has calls upon the need to take the antinatalist variable seriously.