The deadly bombing of a fertility clinic in Southern California is shedding light on a lesser-known ideology that is emerging as a force to be reckoned with. 

“Anti-natalism” — a philosophy that condemns procreation as inherently unethical or unjustifiable — was thrust into the spotlight this weekend amid reports that the credo may have underpinned Saturday’s car bomb attack.  

The 25-year-old suspect, Guy Edward Bartkus, who is believed to have been killed in the blast, left behind anti-pro-life and anti-natalist writings, law enforcement officials announced on Sunday. They said that the documents put on display Bartkus’s “nihilistic” views and indicated that the attack was targeted.  

Detectives are also looking into a 30-minute audio message, potentially recorded by the suspect, in which a man is heard detailing his opposition to in vitro fertilization and his anti-life positions before lamenting that “nobody got my consent to bring me here” — a view that aligns with the anti-natalist complaint that humans don’t get a say in whether they are born. The speaker also shared a goal: to “sterilize this plane of the disease of life.” 

Bartkus’s anti-child-bearing philosophy, though controversial, is not as fringe as one might think. To the contrary: The movement has been quietly gaining ground for years, primarily among young progressives whose discontent with the direction of humanity has dissuaded them from bearing children. 

Concern over climate change is a major factor: According to a 2024 Pew Research poll, more than a quarter of adults who said that they did not want children cited concerns over the environment as a “major reason.” 

Some seek to protect their future children from suffering under what they believe to be an imminent environmental catastrophe. Others are concerned that their future children may negatively affect the environment and argue — without much scientific evidence — that abstaining from having children will help save the planet. 

Climate anxiety, though, is just the tip of the iceberg. According to the same Pew poll, 38 percent of adults claimed that “concerns about the state of the world” deterred them from starting a family. That reasoning was the third most selected, ranked only behind those who claimed that they “just don’t want to” and those who “want to focus on other things,” and ahead of those who said that they couldn’t afford to raise a child. 

Those incentives, among others, have together brought America to the point of a historic drop in fertility rates. The average number of births per woman in America, which has been steadily declining since 2007, hit an all-time low of 1.62 in 2023. That’s significantly lower than replacement-level fertility, which comes out to roughly 2.1 births per woman. 

Amid America’s plummeting fertility rate, anti-natalism’s counter-movement, pronatalism, has seen a resurgence. The pro-child-bearing effort has become popular among conservatives who rally behind the current administration’s efforts to expand access to in vitro fertilization and incentivize childbearing. Pronatalists worry that a declining birth rate will hamper economic growth, strain Social Security, and create challenges for tax policies. 

President Trump, who in April named himself the “fertilization president,” has been weighing numerous policies designed to motivate couples to have children. The proposals span from doling out $5,000 cash bonuses to new parents to developing new government programs to educate women about their menstrual cycles. 

The movement has also been buoyed by the influential Tesla head turned White House adviser, Elon Musk, the father of at least 14 children with four women. He proclaimed that low birth rates are “a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” Vice President Vance has expressed a similar sentiment, professing bluntly in January, “Let me say very simply: I want more babies in the United States of America.” 

Saturday’s bombing, though, ultimately failed to destroy the Palm Springs clinic’s IVF lab. According to the fertility clinic’s director, all of the staff were unharmed and the lab is “intact, untouched, unharmed.” 

“We were able to save all of the embryos at this facility,” the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, Akil Davis, said on Sunday. “Good guys, one, bad guys, zero.”