THE ANTI-NATALIST
Alexandra Cuc is an anti-natalist. “I will never have kids. And I don’t think others should have children as well.”
She runs an organization, Stop Having Kids, and passes out condoms on weekends.
Most anti-natalists are motivated by environmental concerns — ecological destruction caused by overpopulation, human contributions to climate change, and so on. But for Alexandra Cuc, it’s deeper than that. “Even if the climate was in decent shape, I would still be an anti-natalist.”
She’s had her tubes removed. She even made her boyfriend get a vasectomy. She got pregnant
when she was nineteen and had an abortion. “I felt a lot of relief.” Alexandra lives in Canada. She was born in Romania. She claims her mother did a number on her, and her grandmother did a number on her mother. “Living through communism, there was that scarcity mindset. My mom never felt like she could really get what she wanted.” Her grandmother wouldn’t even buy her mother a dress. “So with me, she basically gave me absolutely everything that I ever wanted.” But her mom had “that coldness,” which she got from her grandmother. Communication was lacking. “So when my grandma found out that my mom was pregnant, which my mom hid from her, my grandma just stopped talking to her. They lived in the same apartment building, but my grandma was furious. She didn’t talk to my mom. Even when I was born, my grandma wasn’t there. My grandma wanted nothing to do with my mom or me as a little baby for, I think, six or seven months of my life.”
She was “really colicky.” Still not an excuse.
But this was tough on the family. Her parents were young, in college, working, not sleeping.
“It was a huge struggle for them.”
People have issues. And these issues are getting bigger ... and crazier. And because the way society is now wired — the internet combined with a strain of political correctness — everything is fair game. But we can’t pay the price for your problems. You don’t need to pay me back for your suffering because I had nothing to do with it. How to fix it? Here’s a start: just be better than your parents. For most of you, that’s easy.
Adapted from Get It Together: Troubling Tales from the Liberal Fringe by Jesse Watters. Copyright © 2024 by Jesse Watters. Published by Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Excerpted by permission.