Elizabeth Barber in Harper’s Magazine:
In the summertime, Alex and Dietz decided to take a road trip. The two had met years earlier on Instagram, as fellow animal-rights activists, and had discovered that they agreed on much more than veganism. Actually they agreed on basically everything, including that new human life is not a gift but a needless perpetuation of suffering. Babies grow up to be adults, and adulthood contains loneliness, rejection, drudgery, hopelessness, regret, grief, and terror. Even grade school contains that much. Why put someone through that, Alex and Dietz agreed, when a child could just as well never have known existence at all? The unborn do not appear to be moaning at us from the void, petitioning to be let into life. This idea—that having children is unethical—has come to be known as antinatalism, and in 2021 Dietz set up an Instagram account for a new organization he called Stop Having Kids. By then, the two were dating, although most of the time still living apart. Every so often, they met to hold demonstrations for Stop Having Kids, which Dietz has over time built into a real operation with donors who fund billboards that say things like procreation is not a responsibility and make love not babies.
For their road trip, Alex and Dietz met up in Tucson. Their itinerary was ambitious. They would do outreach from Texas to the East Coast and up through Ontario, occasionally demonstrating with like-minded people. But the trip ran into trouble right from the start. An hour out of El Paso, Dietz lost all his weed, more than two hundred dollars’ worth, at a highway checkpoint.
More here.