To breed or not to breed?
Couples worry about effect of climate change, other factors on potential children
Before she married her husband, Kiersten Little considered him ideal father material. “We were always under the mentality of ‘Oh yeah, when you get married, you have kids,’ ” she said. “It was this expected thing.”
Expected, that is, until the couple took an eight-month road trip after Little got her master’s degree in public health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“When we were out West — California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho — we were driving through areas where the whole forest was dead, trees knocked over,” Little said. “We went through southern Louisiana, which was hit by two hurricanes last year, and whole towns were leveled, with massive trees pulled up by their roots.”
Now 30 and two years into her marriage, Little feels “the burden of knowledge,” she said. The couple see mounting disaster when reading the latest climate change reports and Arctic ice forums. Anxiety about having children has set in.
“Over the last year I thought, ‘Oh my God, I have to make a decision; it’s not that far away,’ ” she said. “But I don’t know how I could change my mind. Over the next 10 years, I feel like there are only going to be more reasons to not want to have a kid, not the other way around.”
Such fears are not necessarily unfounded. Every new human comes with a carbon footprint.
In a note to investors this past summer, Morgan Stanley analysts concluded that the “movement to not have children owing to fears over climate change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline.”
There is much debate, however, over the idea that having fewer children is the best way to address the problem.
In an interview with Vox in April, Kimberly Nicholas, a climate scientist and co-author of a 2017 study of the most effective lifestyle changes to reduce climate impact, said that population reduction was not the answer.
“It is true that more people will consume more resources and cause more greenhouse gas emissions,” Nicholas said. “But that’s not really the relevant time frame for actually stabilizing the climate, given that we have this decade to cut emissions in half.”
Nevertheless, the concern seems to be gaining traction. Among childless adults in the United States surveyed by Morning Consult last year, 1 in 4 cited climate change as a factor in why they do not currently have children.
Another poll in 2018 by Morning Consult for The New York Times found that among young adults in the United States who said they had or expected to have fewer children than the number they considered ideal, 33% listed climate change, while 27% named population growth as a concern.
While economic concerns remained paramount, with 64% citing the high cost of child care, 37% cited global instability and 36%, domestic politics. To some, those issues are all rolled together. In 2020, the birthrate in the United States declined for the sixth straight year, a dip of 4% believed to be accelerated by the pandemic.
The trauma from nearly two years of coronavirus has also given some prospective parents pause. For Marguerite Middaugh, a 41-year-old lawyer in San Diego, the pandemic, coupled with climate-related devastation, prompted her to hold off on fertility treatments for a first child. “Seeing people not getting vaccinated, not taking care of their community,” she said. “That really made me pause about whether I want to bring a child into this world.”
While spiraling housing costs, college-debt burdens, not to mention the so-called sex recession for millennials (the oldest of whom are now 40) factor into family planning for many, existential threats, too, are now part of the procreation calculus.
A rise in political extremism, at home and abroad. A pandemic that has killed more than 5 million. Thousand-year floods that wiped out western European towns. West Coast wildfires that grow more unimaginable in scale each summer. Faced with such alarming news, some prospective parents wonder: How harmful might it be to bring a child into this (literal and figurative) environment?
To Jenna Ross, 36, a potter who lives near Fredericton in New Brunswick, her decision to remain childless in a world threatened by climate change springs from a protective instinct. “Harnessing the love I have for my unborn hypothetical kid comforts me in sparing them an inhospitable future,” she said. “In this way, my choice feels like an act of love.”
Such views do not always travel across lines of geography, politics or social class — particularly since climate change is often painted as
a partisan, not scientific, issue in the political arena.
In the 2018 New York Times survey, the people who cited climate change as a reason to have fewer children were significantly more likely to be college-educated and Democrats, and slightly more likely to be white, nonreligious and high earners.
Educated professionals also have greater access to abortion and birth control, and the economic means to choose either lifestyle course, although recent restrictions on abortion in Texas, for example, also complicate the procreation calculus.
Regardless, such questions are creeping into the cultural dialogue in a manner that recalls the hippie-era “ecology” movement, when “The Population Bomb,” the seismic 1968 bestseller by Stanford University biologist Paul R. Ehrlich, predicted a barren, exhausted planet where hundreds of millions would die in famines during the 1970s.
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez both have broached the question in recent years, with Ocasio-Cortez, in a 2019 Instagram Live, asserting “a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult,” which leads “young people to have a legitimate question: Is it OK to still have children?”
Celebrities including Miley Cyrus and Seth Rogen have also raised the issue, as have writers like New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and Katha Pollitt, the poet and essayist.
“Does the world need more people?” Pollitt wrote in an essay in The Nation in June. “Not if you ask the glaciers, the rainforests, the air, or the more than 37,400 species on the verge of extinction thanks to the relentless expansion of human beings into every corner and cranny of our overheated planet.”
While climate change is hardly a new concern, the worsening crisis has forced the issue for many prospective parents, said Josephine Ferorelli, a founder of Conceivable Future, an organization that hosts house parties for prospective parents to discuss how climate fears are shaping their reproductive lives.
“Something happened this past summer,” Ferorelli said. “Three months ago, our inbox was empty. But in the past two months, we’ve been hearing from people all over the country who are upset and distraught.”
No wonder some people who put off having children to pursue careers or other interests now wonder if the kindest thing for their unborn is to keep them that way.