Babies & A Dying World
Sitting across from my boyfriend at dinner, I told him I had just listened to a podcast episode on climate change. He looked up, nodded, and held the silence. The brown of his eyes beckoned me to continue after stating all my fears and ask the question I’d asked a million times before: How do you rationalize bringing children into a dying world?
On at least two other occasions, Jaydon had answered this question. So when he looked at me, his eyes narrowed and communicated the thought already arising in my mind: Why did I need to hear it again?
Images of South Asia underwater flooded my consciousness. Extreme heat threatening lives in North Africa, lingering a little too long after Chicago summers. Mounds of clothes washing up on the coast of Ghana. The absence of the term fossil fuels in the Paris Agreement, mirroring the gusto of big business. His chin tilted slightly, and he said a word that stood barren just a few weeks into 2025: hope.
I looked down at my hands, and my best friend’s voice rose in my ears—a sexy, smart, vegan, environmental justice advocate who’d had her partner’s signature on a mutual contract addressing my exact question for years. Despite wanting kids for most of her life, they agreed they wouldn’t — if she chose not to have kids for the sake of the environment. She has been, and always will be, powerful.
There were a thousand assumptions baked into my dinner-time inquisition. For one, when I said “bringing children into a dying world,” I was referring to my own Global North and pro-choice state circumstances—circumstances in which a consenting adult has the privilege and resources to control when and how they approach fertility options. I didn’t mean accidents, or oopsies, or horrors, or any other of the ways that children can find their way onto this planet. I was talking about planned child-producing options that are entirely autonomous and rooted not just in circumstance, but in enthusiastic consent and liberating choice.
My best friend’s perspective was grounded in the idea of selfishness and finite natural resources —both of which are planted firmly in radical truth. If you are in the position to fully control childbearing, the choice to bring a child into the world has little to do with the beliefs or thoughts of that future child, and much more to do with the self making the choice. You cannot ask an unborn child if it’s okay with coming into a world with mass climate change; you ultimately decide for yourself. You also can’t ask an unborn child if they’re willing to come into a world where they will one day die — even though death is an unwavering certainty.
It sounded morbid as I wrote it. Part of me worried the question I was posing could be commandeered and twisted by religious warriors who disregarded choice at the first site of fertilization. Or worse —this topic could serve as a springboard for patriarchal and eugenic-based arguments advocating for reproductive dystopias like The Handmaid’s Tale. Vulnerability stood rickety like Jaydon’s word: hope. And it was equally subject to gross misinterpretation. Still, I craved answers — and the comfort that lies in tiny morsels of truth.
What would the world look like at 2 degrees warming instead of 1.5 ? When will the rich run out of water? What happens when Mother Earth simply presses eject, and where will my love stand in the middle?
I grabbed a noodle from my bowl and avoided Jaydon’s gaze. It felt selfish to fall in love with someone — to want to create life with them in a dying world. Yet I knew exactly where my questions arose. They came from a person who craved a family. A person who rarely knows what they want — but met a person and knew. It permeated for the same reason that some people like blue more than yellow. And for the same reason that, for some reason, some people long for the grueling yet powerful relationship that comes from teaching another human being what it is to be human.
Alongside the selfishness argument, the biggest reason my best friend was hesitant to have children was environmental scarcity. Our population was too big, and natural resources too limited, to continue at the rate we were going. Each newborn child would consume their share of water, food, and energy. Compounded together, selfishness and finite natural resources produced a sum that left a strained planet worse off. It was a realistic truth, held up by a Black woman who has carried selflessness on her back — like the countless others who came before her.
Just as quickly as this picture was painted in my mind, a new, familiar one emerged. A world not of floods or drought, but of obedience. Streams red with poison — and still, the people still drank its water, kissing the hands of the executives who thankfully hydrated them. Smog making it hard to breathe —but still, they went to work for the people who emitted the particles into their lungs. Chicken, pale yellow and rotten — and still, they ate it because they no longer owned the seeds or livestock that nourished them.
And in this world...when Black men hung from trees, their wives found solace in the preaching of pastors who shouted: This is God’s will.
God’s will. Snow fell just beyond the living room window where I sat. I decided the Earth looked beautiful, even as it was dying. It reflected questions humanity couldn’t hold, like: How long would it take to starve, dehydrate, and annihilate the global poor until blood physically appeared on the hands of the resource-rich? How long would it take for collective selflessness to make up for years and years of mass selfishness? Who produced scarcity on a planet that gave us everything we could ever need?
Selfishness. I rolled it over on my tongue. Bit down, and tasted bitter. It reminded me of greed. CEOS. Arms full of cobalt while the baby that mined it was sentenced to die. It reminded me of me. My garbage can. The waste I emitted to satisfy my hunger.
I had no answers —just a feeling that rose up in me. It felt like folks crying in church pews who could recall nothing wrong just moments before. Illogical. Nonsensical. Unreasonable. Irrational — like consensually choosing to bring a child into a dying world.
I chewed my food and pondered the fuel behind resistance. It had to be a piece of what drove vegans to continually abstain from the consumption of eggs and chicken, mass-produced in a way that’s incongruent with the balance of nature. It had to be a piece of what drove creators to create when they were told the very thing was impossible. It had to be the thing there while snow fell, greed thrived, and people sat down to dinner with the person they loved.
The sky was releasing pieces. Pieces of my grandma. Pieces of me. I’m alive, I thought. Who could tell another the name behind their resistance besides the unnamed thing that rises up in them? Baldwin’s words crystallized: I cannot be a pessimist because I’m alive. Nor could I erase the suffering that produces the pessimist. I could only know what allowed me to rise — and that it wasn’t for sale.
The earth was being plundered, and selflessness would never be carried upon my oppressor’s back. Still, the fuel behind collective resistance required a name. While sharing air with others, I could think of nothing more selfless than actively producing a world that consumed at a rate lower than the Earth’s ability to regenerate. And for that, I needed hope.
Maybe it came in the form of childbearing, veganism, art — or all three. I couldn’t offer the name behind someone else’s resistance. I could only offer mine. If it was the very thing that fueled your resistance, I could only respect you for it. I could only call you my sister for resisting with me —for finding your own methods to bear the sword until the lake dries up, and the sun scorches, and the Earth burns.
I’d tell them he might be selfish for it. I’d tell them he offered just one word. Flimsy. Rickety. Silly. It rose up in me. This is radical, I’d tell them. It’s why I’m here.
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What are your thoughts on childbearing, given the current environmental disasters and global warming we face?
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