Why a fatherless man bombed a fertility clinic — and the dark truth it exposes

On May 17, 2025, a 25-year-old named Guy Edward Bartkus detonated a bomb outside the American Reproductive Centers fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California. Four individuals in the blast periphery were injured, but since the clinic was closed, no staff were harmed. Thankfully, neither were any embryos. The only casualty was Guy Bartkus himself.

But he had already been a victim of a different kind of blast — the one that destroyed his family.

When a man doesn’t believe his own life matters, he’ll start to believe no life does.

Investigators quickly learned that Bartkus was an anti-natalist, an ideology that sees human existence as inherently painful and thus worth ending — both for the individual and others. That he chose an IVF clinic, where life is manufactured into existence, as his target aligns well with a pro-mortalist mindset.

KNBC-TV recently interviewed Guy’s father, who said he didn’t recognize the man who committed the murderous act. The elder Bartkus talked about how his son used to protect the vulnerable.

“If bigger kids were picking on smaller kids, he would stand up for the smaller kid and make the big kid leave him alone,” he told NBC News.

Yet his son had turned from protecting the smallest to targeting them.

Guy’s father continued, saying his son used to be a “good kid who liked hiking, mine hunting, rock hunting, his computer. He liked Xbox — kid things. … Something changed in him.”

Something did indeed change. And while the father, who had not seen his son for 12 years, doesn’t know what that could’ve been, statistics do: Boys who grow up without their dad are often dangerous — to themselves and to others.

The impact of father loss in boys is tragically predictable. Princeton’s Sara McLanahan found that children raised without both biological parents are significantly more likely to suffer from depression, drop out of school, and engage in violent crime. Fatherless boys, in particular, are more prone to substance abuse, aggression, and nihilism.

The Justice Department reports that over 70% of long-term prison inmates come from father-absent homes.

Sociologist Brad Wilcox has noted that boys who grew up without fathers are more likely to go to prison than graduate from college.

That’s because, as sociologist David Popenoe explains, fathers play a unique and irreplaceable role in child development: “Fathers are far more than just ‘second adults’ in the home. Involved fathers bring positive benefits to their children that no other person is as likely to bring.”

One of those positive benefits is this: Boys are less inclined to hate themselves and express that hatred in ways that harm others.

We see this not just in run-of-the-mill crime statistics but also in mass shootings. Almost every major mass shooting or public school rampage was carried out by a young man who lacked a loving connection with his dad.

The details change, but the family structure does not.

Guy didn’t shoot up a school. He bombed a fertility clinic. But the impulse was the same: Destroy life because you no longer see its value. And when a man doesn’t believe his own life matters, he’ll start to believe no life does.

Would that have changed if his father was in his home every day through adulthood? There during puberty and high school, for his son’s first heartbreak, for his first brush with the dark corners of the internet? There as a living response to his questions about identity, worth, or purpose? There to talk through why, despite the pain, life is still worth living? The stats, and what we all instinctively know to be true, say yes.

Pro-mortalism may be a fringe belief, but it grows in the soil of despair — and despair grows in homes without fathers.

Guy’s target, an IVF clinic, is disturbingly symbolic. These outlets may create life, but they often bring that life into a world intentionally void of one or both adults responsible for their existence. Babies born without their genetic parents. Starting life with the kind of deprivation that changed Guy from “good kid” to bomber.

This wasn’t just a tragedy. It was a warning.

Our culture is baffled by the kind of violence, numbness, and fatalism displayed in acts like this. But we shouldn’t be. We’ve spent decades hacking at the trunk of children’s home life, devaluing fatherhood, and insisting that “love makes a family” — aka endorsing mother or father loss. Of course that tree is going to topple. When it does, it crushes innocents in the process.

A fatherless boy grew into a fatherless man. That man, filled with pain he could not name, lashed out at the very idea of life itself.

There will be more like Guy. Not just because of ideology, politics, or even mental illness — but because the place where he was made to receive love, identity, and protection was destroyed. And from that rubble, Guy built a bomb.