The U.S. birthrate is currently at its lowest in 32 years, with 2018 being the fourth consecutive year of decline. Usually births increase at times of economic stability, so these latest numbers have led demographers to wonder what else is on prospective parents’ minds.
Marisa Polowitz loves children. She worked as a nanny before embarking on a career in technology, and she considers herself a “nurturing person.” Now 34, she long assumed she would become a parent.
It is a fear that was expressed by freshman congresswoman and Green New Deal author Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez earlier this year during an Instagram live stream from her kitchen: “There’s scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult, and it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question: Is it OK to still have children?”
The graph is so-named because it looks like a hockey stick, long handle lying on the floor, short blade pointing up. That handle is the relatively constant temperature of the earth going back at least 1,000 years, and the upward sweep is the spike in temperature since the industrial age. Global temperatures have increased 1.8 degrees C in that time and are now projected to rise decidedly more than that by the end of this century.
Katherine Fisher, 38, is also doing the math. Her work at a nonprofit that studies ways to reduce carbon emissions means she knows a lot of numbers, and one she has been haunted by is a prediction for her home state of Massachusetts. By the last third of this century, she says, the climate there is predicted to have flipped such that it will be possible to live without heat in the winter, but impossible to do without air conditioning in the summer.
That was in early September. When she arrived back home, she built a website with a friend and created a pledge: “I pledge not to have children until I am sure my government will ensure a safe future for them.” It now has more than 5,000 signatures from across Canada, the U.S., Europe, South America and Australia.
They also understand that the ability to make the choice at all is a result of privilege. “I am a white woman who is going to a fancy school and has opportunities, and all my basic needs are met,” Thorndike continues. “There are women across history who have had very little and have wrestled with this same decision. Women have forever been making impossible choices about having families and protecting those families.
Her husband, she says, sees the same glass as half full. “He believes that having a child of your own gives you a stake in the future and an added reason to fight to save it,” she says. “He is by nature an optimist.”He has not felt it safe to bring children into an environmentally uncertain world for as long as he can remember. As an adolescent, he worried about “depleted resources and overpopulation,” he says, and as a young adult “global warming.
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