Since publication of David Benatar’s monograph Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence in 2006 the debate about antinatalism has steadily gained momentum in the West. Human beings, it is argued by its advocates, should stop having children for reasons of compassion and, more recently, environmentalism and climate protection. The primary aim of this seminar is to offer a contextualization, expansion and refinement of the arguments involved in the current discussion and to examine and understand better literary texts and films addressing antinatalism and infanticide directly or implicitly. A sheer inexhaustible range of writings and films offers itself for analysis, ranging from Euripides’ classic Medea, the poetry of William Blake, Thomas Hardy, Louis MacNeice, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton to the plays of John Osborne (Look Back in Anger), Sam Shephard (The Buried Child) and Sarah Kane (Blasted), novels (Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, K. Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go), and films like the horror movie A Quiet Place (2018) or Lars von Trier’s controversial Antichrist (2009).