Welcome to Boiling Point. I'm Haley Smith, a staff writer on The New York Times' climate team, filling in for my colleague Sammy Ross.
As an environmental reporter covering climate change in California, I often think about the challenges facing our state and the planet: global warming, worsening wildfires, deadly heat waves.
But here's another story: I am currently 8 and a half months pregnant with my first child.
“A pregnant weather reporter?” you might ask. “Isn't that a contradiction?”
In fact, one of the most common conversations I had with myself and others during my pregnancy was whether it was ethical or even wise to bring a new human into the world during a time of heightened crisis, which is one of the reasons why it took me years to come to this personal decision.
But I know I'm not alone. In her book Maternity: A Guide to Pregnancy, Birth and Motherhood, author Lucy Jones writes about how being pregnant with her daughter “awakened long-forgotten sensations, fears and emotions.”
“I looked at predictions of climate breakdown and biodiversity collapse with renewed alarm,” Jones writes. “She will be my age in 2047. How much of the Earth will still be habitable then?”
These concerns are backed up by data. Pew Research Survey More than a quarter (26%) of U.S. adults ages 18 to 49 who don't plan to have children cite “environmental concerns, including climate change” as a primary factor, according to a survey released in July.
Six percent of childless people over 50 cited the same reason, pointing to growing awareness of the issue and increased exposure to worsening climate hazards that could be driving the generational divide.
Personally, I've been thinking about this problem in two ways. On the one hand, I worry about the well-being of these children. What kind of world will they live in? Will the air and water be clean? Will it be too hot or too smoky to play outside? (Frankly, the outlook for these issues is not bright in most emissions scenarios.)
But the other side of the coin involves the well-being of the planet. Is it wrong to increase the population when resources are so tight – when, for example, the Colorado River is at a record low and the average global temperature is rising to a record high? After all, each new baby brings not just cute little footprints, but a carbon footprint.
We asked a few experts for their opinions.
Heather Hauser, a professor who studies reproduction and climate change at the University of Texas, said the discussion of children and climate has exploded in all sorts of forums over the past decade or so, but recently, rather than focusing on overpopulation, the focus has shifted to moral and philosophical questions.
“At a time when there is so much uncertainty with the climate disaster that is already underway, people are really thinking about the ethics of bringing children into the world,” Hauser said. “It's not unrelated to the issue of overpopulation, but I think it's more of a local or personal issue, especially for high-consuming, wealthy Westerners, in terms of whether it's irresponsible to add one more consumer to the world.”
Young people, in particular, are thinking long and hard about their options, especially as more of them have experienced devastating wildfires, hurricanes and other extreme weather events that are increasingly being driven by climate change.
“People think, 'Wait a minute, I've been through that. How can I help a child or a family out of that situation?'” Hauser said.
Jade Susser, an associate professor of gender and sexuality at the University of California, Riverside, takes a more in-depth look at the demographics in her new book, “Climate Anxiety and Children Matter: Deciding Whether to Have Children in an Uncertain Future.”
She found that for Gen Z in particular, climate change is one of several compounding stressors that influence the decision to have children, along with financial concerns and worries about finding the right partner — concerns that tend to be too great for the youngest members of the generation.
“Gen Z is more likely than other generations to know that population growth does not cause climate change. Resource consumption, oil and gas production, deforestation, etc. cause climate change, not necessarily population growth,” Sasser said. “Climate change is caused by politics, policies and inequitable consumption patterns around the world.”
As a millennial (older person), I am often forced to question whether things are really as bad as they sometimes seem. A common counterargument to the climate and children issues is that every generation has faced challenges, and that for many people, the quality of life today is better than it has ever been.
That may be true, but while world wars, disease, stock market crashes and nuclear threats have certainly weighed heavily on past generations, Hauser said there is something unique about the way climate change is progressing.
War may not follow many of the rules, “but compared to something like climate change, it seems to follow the rules,” she said. “Almost every month, there's a study showing that war is starting sooner than expected or in an unexpected way.”
These uncertainties could add to people's anxieties and concerns about raising children, an already unpredictable endeavor. But there's also uncertainty about how humanity will adapt to climate change, and calculations we make today about our children's future emissions could turn out to be wrong in 20 or 30 years, depending on how technology and other societal factors evolve, Hauser said.
Another big problem (besides me for now) is that kids have a lot of Shit Ever since I became pregnant, I've been inundated with algorithm-driven content informing me of all the things I need to buy in preparation for the arrival of my baby: plastic toys, plastic sheets, plastic bottles, disposable diapers, disposable wipes, disposable underwear, fast-fashion maternity clothes, and more…oh, and all of this, delivered in cardboard boxes shipped from all over the world and delivered to my doorstep in fossil-fuel-powered trucks.
There are lots of them.
But what's important about all of this is that a lot of this pressure, along with larger ontological issues, is falling on women, or people with reproductive bodies, rather than on the oil companies, or big corporations, or international governments that are causing most of the climate change. And I don't think it's a coincidence that at the same time that women are being asked to think about the future of the planet, they're also being made to worry about their own reproductive rights and freedoms being taken away.
Sasser agreed.
“Of course, women have never been alone in starting a family. But the obligations, burdens, responsibilities and agency have always been unfairly and unjustly placed on women,” she said. “And it is no coincidence, and a great irony, that these issues are intertwined in such a significant way. It is no coincidence that, at this critical time, we place a disproportionate burden on women to have children or not, and that women who choose not to have children are mocked by people like J.D. Vance, who calls them 'childless catwomen.'”
Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, has said that childless people have no direct stake in the country's future and therefore their votes should be less valuable. He said childless leaders are “a disservice to themselves” and agreed with a podcast host who said the only role for postmenopausal women in society is to be grandmothers. He is also a strong supporter of the oil and gas industry and dismisses concerns about climate change.
“I can't think of anything further from reality,” Sasser said, adding, “The bottom line is that we never really have to confront these questions as to what we're doing with our bodies.”
But while pro-natalists like Vance and Elon Musk fret over population decline, climate change is also affecting reproduction.
For example, rising temperatures and air pollution are associated with a range of adverse outcomes, including increased stillbirth, premature birth, low birth weight, and increased risk of hospitalization for newborns and infants. Pregnant women are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate hazards, which can lead to high blood pressure and other health problems that can lead to lower fertility rates.
But climate plans rarely consider the needs of pregnant women: A 2020 analysis by BuzzFeed News looked at heat-stroke plans from 25 major US cities and found that only two, Chicago and Philadelphia, mentioned pregnant women at all.
This inequity is even worse for pregnant women of color, who are more likely to bear a disproportionate burden from environmental damages, such as air pollution from highways and oil leaks from nearby oil wells, and increased temperatures from lack of shade and urban heat islands. Indeed, Susser found that race is often omitted from demographic data on climate change and reproduction, and non-academic accounts and popular media on the issue tend to focus on young, white, middle-class people.
“People assume that people outside of that group don't care or aren't affected as badly as people in that group, and that's just not true,” she said.
National surveys cited in her book suggest that women of color are more likely to have fewer children than they would like because of feelings about climate change, and a recent study from Yale University's Program on Climate Change Communication found that Black and Latino people are more worried about climate change than white people.
Still, the debate is moving forward. In her book The Quickening, author Elizabeth Rush writes about her decision to have children the year she visited Antarctica's melting Twaites Glacier. Like me, Rush considers the impact of her future children on global warming, noting that their greenhouse gas emissions will melt roughly 50 square meters of sea ice each year during their lifetime.
At the same time, she finds some freedom in a different way of thinking, writing, “I can celebrate the idea that to have a child is to have faith that the world will change and, more importantly, to decide that you will be part of that change.”
That’s pretty much what I’ve learned over the last nine months, filled with excitement, stress, nausea, fatigue, worry and joy.
In fact, I've been surprised by how optimistic my pregnancy has made me, given that I've spent a lot of time thinking about global climate issues. Because of the nature of my work, I've seen firsthand the toll that fires, floods, heat waves, and other disasters have on people's lives in ways that few others experience.
But I've found that if I'm not careful, such concerns can often morph into nihilism — a sense that we're all doomed, so why bother?
Instead, getting pregnant feels like a radical, sometimes political, act in the face of these real and serious challenges — children are, after all, one of the clearest symbols of how we, as a society, feel about the future — and for the first time in a long time, I'm feeling pretty hopeful.
This is the latest issue of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up to get it delivered to your inboxFor more climate and environment news, Sammy Ross and Translator About X.