I Have Cystic Fibrosis and Bilateral Lung Transplants — and I’m the Living Refutation of the World’s Darkest Philosophy
1. The Night I Almost Agreed With the Anti-Natalists
I’ve spent months of my life in hospital gowns, hooked to machines that breathe for me.
I’ve watched friends my age die waiting for lungs that never came.
I’ve coughed blood into sinks at 3 a.m. and wondered if tomorrow would hurt less if it never arrived.
So when I first stumbled across David Benatar’s argument that no one should ever be born — because every life contains unavoidable suffering — part of me nodded.
“Yeah, mate. Some days it really does feel like that.”
Then I remembered I’m still here.
I’m still laughing at stupid memes.
Still crying at sunsets.
Still choosing, every single morning, to swallow 60 pills and drag air into borrowed lungs because even the hard days are better than the alternative.
And that’s when I realised: I’m the living wrecking ball to his entire philosophy.
2. The 2,000-Year Knife That Cut Christianity Loose.
Most Christians have never heard the real story of how we became a Gentile (“average-Joe”) religion.
It wasn’t slow drift. It was one brutal week in AD 135.
Bar Kokhba, hailed by the greatest rabbi of the age as the Messiah, demanded total war against Rome.
The original Jewish followers of Jesus (led by His own family) refused to fight for a new messiah — they already had one.
The rebels branded them traitors, expelled them, killed many.
Rome finished the job: Emperor Hadrian banned every Jew (including Jewish Christians) from Jerusalem and Judea forever.
In one stroke, Torah-observant Christianity was scattered to the wind.
Paul’s “no-circumcision, faith-alone” version was the only one left standing.
That’s why 2.6 billion people today follow the average-Joe version: it survived because the original believers were called traitors by their own people for staying loyal to Jesus.
3. Fast-Forward to 2025 — The West Is Doing the Same Thing Again
Only this time the rebellion isn’t against Rome.
It’s against God’s design for family, sex, and life itself.
Kids are no longer “heritage from the Lord” (Psalm 127).
They’re carbon footprints. Career interruptions. Line-items that could have paid for a Europe trip.
And the philosophers have caught up. David Benatar now gives intellectual cover:
“Don’t worry about the empty nurseries. You’re sparing future people unimaginable harm.”
Except he’s never sat bedside while a 28-year-old with CF gets new lungs and wakes up crying — not from pain, but because the first breath felt like grace.
4. The Data Is Brutal and Beautiful
Places that rejoice in the new sexual revolution and the new anti-natalism are quietly committing demographic suicide.
Meanwhile the biblical remnant — Africa, the Pacific Islands, the underground churches of China, the growing conservative parishes in Sydney and Texas — are having babies, planting churches, and inheriting the future one cradle at a time.
5. My Lungs Are Someone Else’s Miracle
Every breath I take is a debt I can never repay and a gift I never consented to refuse.
6. Who Gets to Play God?
I was conceived just before prenatal gene screening for cystic fibrosis became routine.
If I’d arrived a decade later, a lab tech might have looked at my double F508del mutation and quietly suggested my parents “consider their options.”
I’m profoundly glad I slipped in under the wire.
Because I’ve been in those CF clinic hallways.
I’ve heard doctors gently, professionally suggest to shaken parents that “termination is available.”
I’ve seen the look on a mum’s face when she realises the expert in the white coat thinks her future child would be better off dead.
That is Benatar’s philosophy wearing a stethoscope and a kind smile.
That is the new eugenics with better marketing.
Only one Person gets to open and close the womb.
And He has a track record of choosing the weak, the broken, the unlikely, the ones the world calls mistakes — and turning them into testimonies that shut the mouth of hell itself.
7. A Letter to the Miserable Professor
Dear Professor Benatar,
You wrote that my existence is a harm.
You never met me on the days the pain was 10/10 and I still chose to stay.
You never heard my borrowed lungs laugh at a friend’s terrible joke.
You never watched my mum cry happy tears the day I walked out of hospital.
Your philosophy is airtight on paper.
It is airtight because it is airless — no room for love that defies mathematics, no slot for grace that refuses to be calculated.
I am the data point your model cannot process.
With every scarred, transplanted, still-beating breath,
I vote for life.
And I win.
8. To Everyone Reading This With Empty Arms or a Scary Diagnosis
You are not a burden.
You are not a carbon footprint.
You are not a net harm.
You are fearfully and wonderfully made,
and the same God who sustained Jewish Christianity through massacre and exile in AD 135
is the God who sustains you through steroids, night sweats, and the long transplant waitlist.
The world is running out of babies in the places that forgot how to say “thank you” for the gift of existence.
But the people who still say it — out loud, in church basements and hospital rooms and African megachurches and quiet Sydney Anglican pews — are the ones having the kids, planting the churches, and writing the future.
Choose life.
Not because it’s easy.
I of all people know it isn’t.
Choose life because even the hardest ones are still worth the ride.
Some gifts are only recognised after the wrapping is torn and bleeding.
Keep breathing, brothers and sisters.
The story isn’t over.
And I, for one, am glad I’m in it.
— A bilateral lung-transplant recipient with cystic fibrosis
who slipped in just before the gene-screening era
and thanks God every single day for it.
