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Im pro global warming5/6/2023 ![]() Women-people who are raised women especially, but all women-face a lot more anxiety around having children, being parents, and, specifically, being mothers. ![]() Meghan Kallman: The conversation is, in my experience, deeply gendered. I think our generation is unique in the number of pressures weighing down on it. The climate crisis is only one way our leadership shows their hand-that they don’t put the health and safety of us or our potential children ahead of quarterly profits. In conversations with people of color, climate is compounded with a lot of other threats to any children that they might wish to have. I’m aware of this being really present in the reproductive-justice movement. Josephine Ferorelli: You know, it’s been an ongoing surprise who this resonates with and who it doesn’t. Our conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Įmma Green: Who tends to gravitate toward this question about how climate change should affect childbearing? I talked with Kallman and Ferorelli about why the climate crisis is different from any other crisis in human history, whether they’re planning to have kids, and how that’s related to their hope for the future. They wanted people, and especially women, to be able to share deeply held and often silent worries, and to connect with the climate issue from a personal perspective. But the question can be more nuanced than “Will you or won’t you?” Meghan Kallman and Josephine Ferorelli started hosting house parties and collecting testimonies about this topic roughly half a decade ago, in a project called Conceivable Future. “There’s a difference in caring about our climate … and asking a legitimate question about doing away with the human race,” the conservative television personality Abby Huntsman said on The View of Ocasio-Cortez’s comments.Īt the margins of the climate movement, that’s basically what people are proposing: A very small number of women in the United Kingdom have launched a “birth strike” as a response to ecological devastation. This question tends to cleave people into two camps: those who think considering climate change is reasonable and necessary when making decisions about having children, and those who find this premise unthinkable. But, it seems, they are the first to seriously entertain whether that means they should stop having children. Millennials and Gen Z are not the first generations to face the potential of imminent, catastrophic, irreversible change to the world they will inherit. Polls suggest that a third or more of Americans younger than 45 either don’t have children or expect to have fewer than they might otherwise because they are worried about climate change. Miley Cyrus vowed not to have a baby on a “piece-of-shit planet.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mused in an Instagram video about whether it’s still okay to have children.
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