A man in Mumbai is trying to sue his parents for creating him. It’s not possible for people to ask children for consent before they are created (he calmly explained to the BBC) therefore it’s wrong to have them at all.
I read this on my phone at 3am as my daughter snored beside me, her chicken pox gleaming in the moonlight. She had been retching into a bowl half an hour earlier; before that, screaming with horror-film fear as we attempted to dab at her with calamine lotion. The smell lingers.
Raphael Samuel, who is 27 and describes himself as a business executive, likens the act of being born to being kidnapped. On his Facebook page are posters where his face is surrounded by phrases like: “Isn’t forcing a child into this world and forcing it to have a career, kidnapping and slavery?” And: “Your parents had you instead of a toy or a dog, you owe them nothing, you are their entertainment.” His story came back to me throughout the day like a series of jabs in the soft meat of my side. “You are their entertainment,” echoed particularly as I suggested something called “an oat bath” to my child, an idea that appeared to translate itself mid-air into the news that she must now live in a wardrobe of glass and bees so noisy was her response. I was not entertained.
But in this week of sickness, were she given the language and her own email login, I don’t doubt my four-year-old would agree with Samuel’s philosophy of “antinatalism” and join him in his quest for justice and therefore, extinction. His argument, popularised in the early 2000s by David Benatar in a book called Better Never to Have Been: the Harm of Coming into Existence, is that “those who never exist cannot be deprived”. If you don’t live, you can’t be hurt. Or, as I heard screamed across the playground at a wet dad parking a scooter in the wrong place: “I wish I’d never been born.”
“Coming into existence, far from ever constituting a net benefit, always constitutes a net harm,” Benatar wrote. “The only way to guarantee that some future person will not suffer that harm is to ensure that the possible person never becomes an actual person.”
Transposed to real life, it’s the same argument that seems to have been internalised by the long-haired time-wasters dicking my friends about on dating apps, unwilling to risk half a bad feeling in the future by meeting them for a drink tonight, instead dribbling little messages across the space of a year for the micro-validation that comes with their phone lighting up. Better to have loved than… Nah screw it, it’s raining.
Chicken pox is a curious sickness in that it makes a child physically repulsive right when they need the most attention. I still have the scar from when I plucked a scab from my face as a toddler, and offered it generously to my mum’s friend. This vileness is built into the illness, one that brings to mind ancient words such as “riddled” and “go away”. Mid-pox, midway through another day locked inside to avoid locals catching it by accidentally licking her, not only did I believe my child would side with Samuel, but I was starting to come round to his philosophy, too.
People should not have children – they talk too much, they don’t accept care gracefully, and they are mean about the perfectly nice pasta sauce you made from the leftover courgette. What’s more, mine appears to already be a staunch anti-vaxxer. And not only does she shun all trips to the doctor, loudly, but also the chemist. She is an anti-Calpoler. She is an anti-drink-some-water-er. She is a clinical nightmare. I frantically searched Mumsnet for advice, finding instead an insistence of mothers that agree with her, saying all painkillers are awful and we were born to suffer. I read between the lines: the end of the human race would be the kindest thing.
When Samuel called his mum to say he was going to sue her, she replied: “That’s fine,” and not only can I hear her tone through the BBC reports, but I can taste it, her weary acceptance. She knows him. She knows how he thrills to co-opt contemporary politics, words such as consent, much like the Dutch 69-year-old who (saying his request was consistent with people changing their gender) started a legal battle to change his date of birth, saying he “identified” as someone 20 years younger.
Samuel’s mother has lived almost three decades with this boy, she has had many thousands of arguments with him about vegetables and money and whether Blu Tack stains, and at this point she’s just, yeah, OK baby. You do your little court case, I’ll see you for tea, it’s fish. “Mum said she wished she had met me before I was born,” he added, in an aside that made me shudder with empathy, “and that if she did, she definitely wouldn’t have had me”. The pox continues.
One more thing…
I didn’t think bones could make me cry, until I saw a picture of a burial discovered by archaeologists in 2014. A prehistoric couple, found in a cave in Greece, were found spooning each other among the rubble.
This Time with Alan Partridge starts soon, with Alan returning to the BBC after the unfortunate smell my cheese incident of 1997. He joins a One Show-style programme as guest presenter, bringing with him his sensual arrogance and joyous neuroses. Alan (now with the brilliant Gibbons brothers writing with Coogan) is one of few TV characters who’s got even better as he ages. My king.
Last week, above a picture of a shiny bum-bag, the US Pop-Tarts Twitter account put out this tweet: ‘I like my tarts where I like my money. Right in my fanny.’ If one thing can unite Britain right now, its our agreement that no, this is not a thing that we will be doing.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter@EvaWiseman
