A climate for kids
Hephzibah Anderson
There are plenty of reasons not to have children, from economic uncertainty and competing priorities to plain and simple dislike of society’s littlest members. Nor is childlessness always voluntary. Yet among those for whom it is a decision, a new factor is weighing increasingly heavily: climate change. After decades of insufficient action, the warming Earth has come to seem like a timebomb whose ticking is drowning out even women’s biological clocks. As US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez bluntly asked last year: “Is it OK to still have children?”
Plenty of her contemporaries are deciding that the answer is no. In England and Wales in 2018, the birth rate hit its lowest level since records began in 1938, and it’s a similar story across Europe; in the US, it is at its lowest in more than three decades. Surveys show that along with perennial concerns about job prospects and housing, there’s the spectre of an inhospitable planet.