This is completely untrue and completely irrelevant. Some of us agree that children are very cute and some are less appealed. But for all of us it is simply irrelevant. Creating people is a super serious topic. The creation of a person is the most crucial decision in the life of the one who was created. Deciding to create a person because people in the infancy stage are cute is a horrifying decision in its superficiality and shortsightedness. A person is a cute child during a short part of life (if at all) and most of the time s/he is an adult. Not that adults can’t be cute, but this comment refers to the childhood stage, implying the ridiculous position that breeding is okay because children, especially babies, are cute. Even if people stayed cute throughout their lives it would be wrong for all the reasons it is wrong, the cuteness of babies doesn’t negate any of the reasons why reproduction is wrong. In fact, if anything, it emphasizes how little thought is involved in the decision to procreate and how casually the issue is handled by most people. People are not toys. You don’t produce someone so vulnerable, in such a tough and unfair world, with a life without any purpose or meaning in itself, but full of difficulties, challenges, pain, illnesses, disappointments, and death at the end, because babies are cute. This is a morally outrageous reason and even more outrageous is that it is a very common reason.
In principle, it’s hard to say that people who ask others not to procreate, largely in order to protect children from harm, are child haters. The main motivation of most anti-natalists is to prevent harm to children.
We are anti-natalists out of compassion for people, and out of compassion for all those who will be victims of new people if they are created, in no way are we anti-natalists out of hatred.
Even what is sometimes, and always mistakenly, called the ‘misanthropic argument’, meaning the argument that it is morally wrong to create new people due to all the harm that will be caused by each and every one of them, is not really misanthropic. There is nothing in the argument about the harm to others by the newly created people that implies hatred for those who are created. There is no necessary connection between hatred and opposition to causing suffering. Anyone who consumes animal products causes enormous suffering to thousands of animals during their lifetime. We do not hate any person who is not a vegan while at the same time it is absolutely clear to us that these people lead a cruel and abusive lifestyle towards defenseless sentient beings. We don’t hate them because they don’t choose this lifestyle out of hatred for their victims but out of habit, norm, conformity and fear of change. You can hold more than one idea simultaneously. One might think that a person leads a morally horrific lifestyle, and there is no doubt that this is what all those who do not adopt a plant-based diet do, and still not hate them. The same goes for people who reproduce. Life is complex enough so that not everyone who creates new people is a monster, although it is certainly monstrous to create someone without their consent, to put someone in a place of significant risk of serious harm, and in a place of certain harm, and to do it for necessarily selfish reasons, since all the ones who were created did not choose or want to be created before they were created, not to mention the person s/he was created to be, the family to which s/he was created, the time s/he was created, the environment in which s/he was created, etc. An idea so fundamentally morally flawed can be considered non-monstrous and even desirable and blessed only because it is considered normal. And as we know, countless examples throughout history (slavery, burning women accused of witchcraft, trafficking women and children, persecution on religious grounds, animal experiments, and factory farms for example) prove that there is no necessary connection between what is considered normal and what is moral.
More and more people in the world are beginning to understand that while creating new people doesn’t necessarily have to be analogous to these specific examples of morally horrible but socially acceptable things, it is definitely a specific example of something morally horrible that is socially acceptable. And that, and not hatred, is what drives anti-natalism.