An Efilist Just Bombed a Fertility Clinic. Was This Bound To Happen?
18th May 2025
On Saturday morning, a parked SUV exploded outside the American Reproductive Centers fertility clinic, killing its driver and wounding at least four bystanders. Federal agents branded the blast an act of terrorism aimed at in-vitro fertilization. Shortly after, a bare-bones website—promortalism.com—surfaced, where the bomber, 25-year-old Guy Edward Bartkus, condemned “the disease of life,” and urged visitors to mirror and share “the recorded stream of my suicide & bombing”1 234before censors intervened.
Bartkus’s rhetoric will be familiar to not only anyone who’s followed my reporting on efilism and promortalism, but anyone who has watched the strange after-life of utilitarianism (and early heterodox YouTube debate culture) on the Internet unfold. What you see in efilism is something you see across the web—a distinct style of moral bookkeeping.