This article was originally published on January 27, 2020 in NYT Parenting.
For several months after her daughter was born in 1991, Lori Day had terrifying anxiety dreams about failing to protect her baby.
Decades later, the recurring nightmares about her daughter’s safety have returned, triggered by the prospect of catastrophic climate change, said Day, 56, an educational consultant in Newburyport, Mass.
Last winter, Day stumbled upon the Facebook page for BirthStrike, a group of about 650 people, based in Britain, who have pledged to forgo having children because of “the severity of the ecological crisis.” Though Day used to yearn for grandchildren, as she wrote in a post to the BirthStrike group page, her environmental concern has grown and she is now relieved that her daughter does not plan to become a parent. “I would be worried sick,” Day said. “It would haunt me.”
Day is one of a growing number of people who say their alarm over global warming has led them to adjust — or even abandon — hopes for biological children or grandchildren. Scientists recently confirmed that 2019 was the second-hottest year on record. In December, the global nonviolent protest group Extinction Rebellion held a “feed-in” demonstration outside political party headquarters in London; rows of mothers sat cross-legged feeding their babies, under a banner that read, “Climate Change Kills Children.” The ethics of having children at a time of ecological crisis has emerged as a focus in celebrity interviews with Miley Cyrus and Prince Harry, igniting passionate discussions on social media. In recent months, the notion of family planning as a means of fighting climate change has emerged from the eco-warrior fringe and entered mainstream public conversation.
Those most concerned about climate change in the United States tend to skew younger and female. Researchers from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that women are more likely than men to believe that global warming will harm future generations and will harm them personally.
A 2018 Gallup analysis revealed a “global warming age gap” in beliefs about climate change: 70 percent of adults aged 18 to 34 said they worried about global warming, compared to 56 percent of adults aged 55 or older. An online survey published by Business Insider last March found that 38 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds believe a couple should consider climate change when deciding whether to have children. In 2018, in a survey of conducted by Morning Consult for The New York Times, 33 percent of the respondents — a nationally representative sample of 20- to 45-year-old men and women — cited climate change as a reason they had or expected to have fewer children than they considered ideal. Some research suggests that having fewer children may be one of the most effective ways for an individual to alleviate climate change: In 2017, a study published in Environmental Research Letters found that, in developed countries, having one fewer child would result in an average of 58.6 tons of CO2 equivalent emission reductions per year.
Overall, American women’s “fertility intentions,” as demographers describe hopes or desires regarding family size, have decreased, said Alison Gemmill, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Women want fewer children now than they did a decade ago, and, in fact, they are having fewer children; the fertility rate in the United States reached a historic low in 2018, falling to 1.73 average births per woman from a 1957 peak of 3.77 births per woman. Though Gemmill has not formally studied the effect of climate fears on fertility, anecdotally she hears it mentioned as a factor in reproductive decision-making.
In recent months, forums have cropped up online for those who have made the decision not to have children to share their feelings. In September a student at McGill University in Canada launched a campaign called “#No Future, No Children,” pledging to not have kids until the Canadian government takes more significant action to combat climate change. Over 5000 people have pledged support; the group’s page offers a space to share stories about the emotional toll of the decision.
Conceivable Future, a network led by women and based in the United States, gathers testimonies on how the climate crisis affects decisions around childbearing and parenting. On the popular parenting community blog BabyCenter, posts about the impact of climate change on parenting have proliferated in recent years. “The environment (and the fact that our human race is destroying it) is the main reason we are OAD [One And Done]”, wrote a poster in 2016. A Reddit thread from early 2019, asking if it was “immoral to have children when climate change catastrophe is inevitable” garnered 175 comments. Posts on these forums tend to follow a similar pattern, describing a yearning to have children, followed by expressions of guilt.
The BirthStrike Facebook page also functions as a kind of support group, said Blythe Pepino, 33, a London-based musician who founded BirthStrike in 2018. Members post about having to break up with partners who still want children, or how to cope with the emotional turmoil of staying childless. Pepino herself went through a grieving period after she decided not to have kids, she said, and described a sense of “emptiness” when she imagined what kind of parent her partner might be, or rubbed a pregnant friend’s swollen stomach.
“When you look at the environmental crisis through the lens of BirthStrike, it’s a real shock to the system,” Pepino said. “You’re straight into how existential it is. You can’t creep around it.”
Mason Cummings, 34, said he almost breaks out in tears when he thinks about his nieces, a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old. Cummings, a producer for the Wilderness Society who lives in Durango, Colo., had a vasectomy in 2016 after deciding that he couldn’t “morally bring a child into a world that doesn’t have a secure future,” he said.
Anna Jane Joyner, 35, a consultant and writer, moved home to Perdido Beach, Ala., a few years ago, when she became worried the area wouldn’t survive catastrophic climate change. Around the same time, Joyner resolved that she would not have children, she said, less because she hoped to help mitigate climate change than because of the “selfish” worry that her child wouldn’t be safe.
Joyner had always expected to become a mother, she said, and still struggles with anger over her sense that she could not responsibly plan on having children. “It enrages me that this is actually something I have to consider,” she said.
Many of these stories start with an aha moment, often stemming from the United Nations climate report released in October 2018 that depicted a strong risk of an early climate crisis. Jessica Johannesson, 34, a writer and bookseller in Bath, England, recalled scrolling through her phone in bed on a Sunday morning, seeing headlines about the report, and thinking “Anyone who is born into this world is in danger,” she said. A few months later, she signed the BirthStrike declaration.
When Johannesson joined BirthStrike in 2018, it was the year she and her partner had planned to have a baby, she said, and they often talk about what sort of international action on climate change she’d need to see in order to reverse her decision. “I’d be thrilled,” she said. “It would make me so happy. But it would take a lot.”
Dani Blum is a news assistant at The New York Times.
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