It is difficult to ignore, in the fiction and poetry of Thomas Hardy, a persistent skepticism concerning the moral implications of procreation. In Hardy, having children seems an ethical dilemma; the infanticide scene in Jude the Obscure is only the most spectacular representation of this doubt. This essay asks how such a tendency can be accommodated within the form of the novel, typically understood as giving life rather than denying it. How can fiction represent a wish not to be—indeed, not to have been created in the first place? This is not only a representational question: it is a question about sexuality in Hardy’s fiction (where contraception is absent), and it is a philosophical one, connecting Hardy to contemporary procreative ethics, especially the extreme position of antinatalism.