The trauma from nearly two years of coronavirus has also given some prospective parents pause. For Marguerite Middaugh, a 41-year-old lawyer in San Diego, Calif., the pandemic, coupled with climate-related devastation, prompted her to hold off on fertility treatments for a first child. “Seeing people not getting vaccinated, not taking care of their community,” she said. “That really made me pause about whether I want to bring a child into this world.”

While spiraling housing costs, college-debt burdens, not to mention the so-called sex recession for millennials (the oldest of whom are now 40) factor into family planning for many, existential threats, too, are now part of the procreation calculus.

A rise in political extremism, at home and abroad. A pandemic that has killed more than five million. Thousand-year floods that wiped out Western Europe towns. West coast wildfires that grow more unimaginable in scale each summer. Faced with such alarming news, some prospective parents wonder: How harmful might it be to bring a child into this (literal and figurative) environment?