@Polyphemus Not when making a determination of morality, no. But when making a determination of how to allocate resources and effort, yes.

There's nothing that forces you or anyone to have children, the choice not to have them is open to you. But let us say for the sake of argument that this is the correct moral decision ... is it moral to impose that personal moral decision on others? No. So you're left with persuasion, and good luck with that. Life is finite, nasty, and short; expending your life force on the quixotic is fine if you want to do it, but it's not going to be a priority for me. I need at least some things to be achievable.

I'd be more optimistic if we saw that poverty, suffering, disease and want tended to depress birth rates but it seems to have the opposite effect, unless perhaps said suffering befalls someone born to privilege in the first place. In fact, education, prosperity and leisure is what actually depresses birth rates, so maybe if you are concerned about population and the morality of imposing even potential suffering, you might indirectly address it by advancing causes that tend to produce more stable and civil and prosperous societies. You might even support biological immortality, because, counterintuitively, if people were not in such a goddamned hurry to have children before they die, they'd probably postpone it indefinitely.

@Polyphemus Thanks. Trust me, I understand the ethos behind antinatalism and on my bad days I feel I had no business bringing my children into this world. On my good days I recognize that my daughter very much feels her life is worthwhile, and that's for her to decide (or be deluded about). My son didn't make it to his 31st birthday and I think he probably would rather have not been born if he were honest about it. So it ends up a wash in my case from that perspective of net harm as judged by the actual effected parties. The point as I understand it is that even if both my children were thrilled with their existence it wasn't for me to expose them to nonzero harm potentials without their input, which is inherently impossible.

But that brings me back to the practical side of things. Natural selection will bestow a primal drive to reproduce on any living organism, a drive so powerful that maybe your quarrel is with natural selection rather than with parents.

As a practical matter I ask myself, what argument would I have listened to in my 20s when my then-wife was pressuring me to get her with child? I was light years from being able to accept antinatalism or overpopulation arguments (those were outside my intellectual ghetto at the time) but I might have listened to my future self if I said something like, there's no hurry, this is as much your decision as your wife's, you have legitimate concerns about your wife's mental stability, you are not financially stable yet, etc., so it's too soon to make this decision". I might have had the frigging sense to buy that argument.