The people who believe this stuff don't have kids, so they lose out in the Darwinian race, and the people with pro-natalist beliefs continue the human existence and more often pass down those beliefs. So regardless of who thinks they're right, evolution wins in the end.
I am a parent. The amount of responsibility I feel towards my child is all encompassing and absolute. The love I feel for them is immeasurable, as is the joy they bring me.
The guilt of this selfishness, however, is not entirely weightless either.
My child being created is, 50% my doing, I created them into a world I cannot control, without their consent. Every pain they will experience, will rest on my shoulders, until I die, and even from beyond my death, it will be due to me.
I will do everything in my power to prepare them to achieve a good life, this does not mean shielding them from pain, because experiencing pain is part of life, and learning how to deal with it appropriately, increases the quality of life they can have. This is the worst from both worlds, it is the parent who feels all their pain, and it is the parent that recognizes that it is part of becoming a full human.
My parents were very loving and caring, they wanted to have me, they wanted a child, and they gave me life. I am not grateful for them giving me life, in fact, that they did that is something I do not appreciate. But I am grateful for the love and care they showed me, and I love them very much, despite them creating me.
If you feel there are contradictions here, think harder.
"Evolution wins in the end", well, in the end I guess entropy wins.. But, you attribute a goal to evolution, but evolution, as a concept, really boils down to "the laws of physics also apply to life", it's not like we know it to be trying to do something in particular.. the life that continues is the life that continues, it's not that life really finds a way, it's just that there's enough variance that some of it will likely survive a change, not that every species does that.. but I don't really think that matters to whether knowingly creating life is moral or not.. it's not like nature or life is inherently moral.. it'd probably be a stretch, but one could say that, at least when perfectly executed, the least moral are most likely to succeed.
You're thinking about this in the backwards immediately obvious way.
Anti natalists are people who wouldn't want to be born if their parents had asked them. This means that anti natalism is the flip side of natalism.
A natalist can only succeed if they give birth to natalists and the only way they can do that is by giving their children a body and life worth living, making them anti natalists in disguise.
> The people who believe this stuff don't have kids, so they lose out in the Darwinian race, and the people with pro-natalist beliefs continue the human existence and more often pass down those beliefs. So regardless of who thinks they're right, evolution wins in the end.
Not necessarily. Parents aren't the only source of beliefs: as an extreme example indoctrination in forced boarding schools for young children can nearly totally eliminate parental influence.
So if anti-natalists want to beat evolution, they've got a window right now to crank up the indoctrination to keep humanity on a glide path towards extinction. IMHO, procreation has historically driven by a desire for sex, but technology has decoupled those. It'll take some time for explicitly pro-natal psychology to get equivalently powerful.