When a young man detonated a car bomb in the parking lot of a Palm Springs, California, fertility clinic last week, killing himself and injuring four others, I assumed the attack was related in some distorted way to pro-life politics. Despite the Trump administration’s recent embrace of in vitro fertilization, some pro-lifers, especially conservative Catholics, are opposed to the practice because it can lead to the disposal of embryos. That fact, coupled with the historical association between extreme anti-abortion sentiment and clinic bombings, led me to anticipate a news cycle concerning radical efforts to restrict abortion.
I was wrong. The bombing, carried out by a 25-year-old California native named Guy Edward Bartkus, was an attempt to prevent couples from accessing IVF, not because the process produces some embryos that wind up dead, but rather because it produces some embryos that wind up alive. Bartkus, who left behind an online screed titled “Fuck you pro-lifers!” complete with an index of links and an .mp3 file explaining his agenda, was an avowed “pro-mortalist”—someone who objects to the creation of new people because, the reasoning goes, no one can consent to being conceived, and that initial unfairness only exposes new consciousness to the suffering of life and the inevitability of death. This is the mind virus that Bartkus was hoping to spread with his attack and its explanation. For that reason alone, it deserves refuting: Life is good and worth defending.
Bartkus’s manifesto is arranged like a “frequently asked questions” section, in which he expresses his philosophy and addresses possible counterarguments. “Understand your death is already a guarantee, and you can thank your parents for that one,” he wrote. “All a promortalist is saying is let’s make it happen sooner rather than later (and preferably peaceful rather than some disease or accident), to prevent your future suffering, and, more importantly, the suffering your existence will cause to all the other sentient beings.” In Bartkus’s view, to have children is to act as “willing agents for a DNA molecule”—that is, to blindly submit to an animal urge to perpetuate one’s genes. None of this is novel, as Bartkus himself pointed out when he cited his philosophy’s kinship to negative utilitarianism, abolitionist veganism, and “efilism,” an evidently Reddit-based phenomenon that views humans as mere slaves to DNA. “Pro-mortalism” is a derivative riff on anti-natalism, a philosophy whose most learned proponent is the South African academic David Benatar. (Benatar has maintained a higher-brow version of the argument against reproduction for the past two decades.) But its most infamous proponent is Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, who sketched out an extremely dark version of the same morbid theory in his library of audio recordings and then enacted it.
The FBI has classified Bartkus’s attack, which devastated the clinic’s offices, as terrorism, though he failed to actually destroy any embryos; the facility’s lab is located offsite. Perhaps the spectacle was intended more to provoke a response from the public than to prevent any particular embryos from developing—and his death surely will be marshaled by both sides of American politics to represent our current failings. To many on the left, the bombing may register as another episode in the country’s ongoing mental-health crisis, with Bartkus as the avatar of dangerously ill youth who could have benefited from early intervention to counter what appears to have been long-term suicidal ideation. For many on the right, the act may read as more overtly political—a sign of the anti-life left’s derangement. Bartkus did address his missive to pro-lifers, and his philosophy is directly contrary to the kind of anti-abortion politics the Trump administration is very deliberately cultivating.
Both analyses contain elements of truth. Bartkus described himself as having borderline personality disorder, and his manifesto is at times rambling and incoherent (as in a subsection where he declares his preference for Satan over God). Although he wasn’t clear about what kinds of suffering make life unworthy of living, he did provide an explanation of his timing by referring to the recent death of a long-distance friend, who he said had died after asking her boyfriend to shoot her in her sleep, which the boyfriend then did, multiple times. Bartkus also appears to have been under the influence of one of those toxic internet subcultures that acts like a transmissible mood disorder, imparting not only grim ideas but also a certain climate of mind. From that vantage, goodness and joy are rendered irrelevant, and all of life’s pain and suffering are read as justifications for their chosen resentments. But sickness and grief don’t negate the fact that the ideas behind Bartkus’s manifesto are serious, deranged responses to current politics, as acts of terrorism frequently are. Attacks like his aren’t representative of any mainstream tendency—but they do reveal what’s simmering below the surface of society: in this case, angst and uncertainty about whether perpetuating human life is an altogether good thing for humans or the planet.
It’s difficult to persuade someone convinced otherwise that human life is more of an affirmative good than a hazard. “Oh, what can you do with a man like that?” John Cheever once wrote. “How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless?”
You can’t, it seems. But for anyone on the fence, or who finds themselves somewhat tempted by Bartkus’s premises, I wish they could see that life is indeed good, even when it isn’t easy or pleasurable. Humanity is capable of unique greatness—not only via the spectacular achievements of artists, scientists, and philosophers in which all of us share by nature of kinship, but also in moral terms: the daily miracle of individuals encountering complicated and frustrating situations and choosing to do the right thing anyway. The world is full of such people, though they may be overlooked by those cynical toward humanity’s contributions to history. Their perseverance in goodness is sufficient argument for more of us, more human excellence, great and small. May the future always belong to humankind.
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