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Consent for an action may be overridden if the actor genuinely believes inaction results in deterioration of the individual, and the individual is not capable of realizing that and making a decision. Kids lack such decision making abilities because of their age. Thus sending them to school or the dentist is acceptable because not doing so will make things worse for them, in the short and/or long terms. Other situations are pushing an adult out of the way of a impending collision. The person can be assumed to have wanted to avoid an accident but are situationally unware of the moving object. Thus someone else can temporarily override their consent to push them out of the way to prevent a (greater) harm. One can imagine similar examples of people in coma, people being unconscious, or even simply being intoxicated. Basically any state that hinders your decision making abilities that renders you incapable of providing consent. Also notice the emphasis on belief in the first line. The reason is it’s not always possible to assess the consequences beforehand. But if there is a mismatch between consequences and beliefs one needs to attack the beliefs first. For eg. a person unaware of vaccines (say someone from an uncontacted tribe) may think that a doctor inserting a needle into a third person is equal to a person trying to harm another person. They may act on their belief and try to stop the doctor. In such a case, their misplaced beliefs need to be challenged first. (Of course if they try to harm the doctor directly, that needs to be addressed first. This act itself is like the earlier examples).

But you do need consent for an action which if not performed will not result in things getting worse for the person, but rather it’s your belief that you will be making them better off. And the greater the possibility of unintended harm, the greater is the violation of consent. For e.g., taking a dollar from someone behind their back (no consent, essentially stealing), and doubling it in a gamble and giving it back is reprehensible even if they made a profit. How much reprehensible? I’d say (significance)×(probability of harm). Notice the gain is absent from this equation. Now if it was guaranteed that the money will always be doubled, ie probability of harm is zero, then it is permissible to do so. Also, gambling with a dollar from someone else, is less reprehensible, usually, than gambling with a million dollars (i.e. the significance is higher in the above equation). I say usually because, significance of someone’s wedding ring might be more than a million dollars in sentimental value not necessarily in monetary value. If you stole that and gambled with it, it is more reprehensible than stealing a dollar, even if you returned it along with some profit.

AN comes in the picture, because it is essentially the second situation. Not creating a person is not going to harm the person, because they don’t exist. This is essentially not doing anything to them. They were non-existent for billions of years in the past. For people belonging to some religion who believe people do exist before their birth, things might be different. One needs to challenge those beliefs first, as I said earlier. But for others, this is essentially parents either acting out of self interest or some other entities‘ interest, but definitely not the interest of the person being created. If they do believe they’re acting on the interest of the person being created, it is first of all misplaced because a non existent being has no interest in coming into existence, and second, an example of an action to make things better (like doubling the money) for them.

Most people will believe the significance of a life is huge (the significance of farm animal lives, for instance, are usually considered not that huge, except for vegans maybe). At least any decent parent will consider their children’s lives extremely significant. The probability of harm is 1, because life contains a lot of guaranteed suffering. This makes the act of creating someone morally reprehensible by a huge marge (as much as you consider their lives significant).