I've got another take on this and like most of the shit I post, it has to do with fish. Gambusia, probably the most invasive species of freshwater fish in the world, are prolific breeders. They're livebearers like guppies, so they give birth to free-swimming fry. Throw a dozen in your pond and you will have literally hundreds by the end of the year. You will never run out of gambusia if you have a stable population in a pond.

But the thing is, these fish are actually somewhat difficult to spawn in a tank. The females have the fairly unique ability to delay giving birth - sometimes for months - until there are no predators nearby, including the male parent. I've only had one give birth in my tank and the fry got eaten immediately. The gambusia simply aren't going to waste the resources that go into childbirth if it's unlikely that the next generation will reach sexual maturity.

I think anti-natalism as a movement is silly, but I understand why people hold to it as a personal philosophy. We want to give our young the best chance of survival, and when that's no longer an option, rejecting the idea of raising children altogether is a perfectly reasonable response. Look at the states where birthrates have been hit the hardest - these are some of the worst places to live in the US. The movement is problematic because of the underlying premise that population control is the answer, but simply refusing to have kids until things change and even politicizing this decision is perfectly acceptable. There ought to be a competing narrative - maybe a voluntary "birth strike" of some sort, we can we workshop it - so that left-leaning adults don't fall into an ideology with proto-fascist trappings.