In over 30 years of practice, Dr. Errol Billinkoff rarely saw a man without kids come into his Winnipeg clinic to get a vasectomy. But since the pandemic began, he says it's become an almost daily occurrence.
And he's not alone.
"At first, I thought I was the only one who was noticing this," Billinkoff, who brought a no-scalpel vasectomy procedure to Winnipeg in the early 1990s, told CBC News in a November interview.
"But I am part of an international chat group where doctors who do vasectomies participate and the topic came up, and it's like everybody notices it."
It's not some big gotcha: it's unethical because consent is impossible to achieve. You have to have been alive for quite a number of years before you even have the cognition and experience to form an opinion about existing.
But that doesn't just mean creating new beings is good because it's impossible to consent. How would that apply to anything else?? By some logic (if you ignore obvious pain signals) animals can't "tell" us they don't consent to being butchered and eaten but that doesn't make eating meat ethical either (I'm not vegan btw.) Having sex with an unconscious person is rape, because they can't consent.
There may be suicidal animals who want to be eaten and there are certainly people who enjoy non-consensual sex and people who like being alive and believe their existence is a gift. The outcome still doesn't excuse the act in these cases.
That doesn't logically follow. Ethics isn't predicated on a universal consensus.
There are a host of arguments for and against childbirth in the modern era. Much as there are a host of arguments for and against industrial mining or nuclear power or second hand smoking. But "the non-existent entity can't signal consent" isn't a material consideration, its a theological one. You're assuming an entity capable of consent that isn't available to converse with.
It's also totally unprovable. How do you show pre-born people didn't consent. If we're going into the idea of unborn souls being dragged out of the ether into mortal bodies, what means to have to prove they weren't volunteering to be here?
How do you take a breath without asking permission from everyone around you by infringing on their supply oxygen? How do you take a shit without first verifying everyone in your neighborhood approves of the turd you're adding to their groundwater?
So much of this really does boil down to "My only ethical move is to kill myself". Like, you're deliberately backing yourself into this corner, and then complaining that someone else hasn't relieved you of the burden of pulling the trigger. It isn't ethical, its infantile. You are, in effect, bemoaning the fact that every aspect of existence isn't shaped to your personal beliefs.