It’s also worth noting that this isn’t the first time in history that a generation has had to ask whether childbearing is morally acceptable. Many asked themselves the same question during the Cold War, when the fear of nuclear annihilation reached fever pitch. And as the writer Mary Annaïse Heglar has pointed out, black people in the United States asked it, too, knowing that to bear children would be to enter them into a violently racist system.
One thing that has kept people having kids anyway is the idea that we can never quite see what’s around the bend. There’s hope in that. Perhaps nuclear war won’t break out. Perhaps racist laws will be struck down. Perhaps a few kids in the next generation — including your kid, maybe! — will be the ones to figure out how to use clean energy to save the planet.
That brings us to the most significant point of all. The various lifestyle choices we make on an individual level are important because they do add up. But what’s going to be far more important than how many kids you choose to have is how soon your country goes off fossil fuels. A mass transition to clean energy sources, which will come via changes in government policy, is the big win we need to concentrate on.
Even if we were to dramatically cut birthrates — even if you and everyone you know were to have zero kids — our climate would still be doomed if we don’t move away from fossil fuels.
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