A new report from NPR poses a fascinating question: “Should We Be Having Kids In The Age Of Climate Change?”
The report examines a number of concerned liberals who think we should basically stop having kids, or at the very least ensure that future reproduction is heavily regulated, in order to prevent the destruction of the planet due to climate change.
One of them is Travis Rieder, a philosopher at Johns Hopkins University. He wants to promote a “small-family ethic” that does away with societal pressures to have children because humanity has a moral duty to stop populating the planet with filthy, energy-consuming children. “Here’s a provocative thought: Maybe we should protect our kids by not having them,” Rieder said during a recent talk at James Madison University in Virginia.
The report also examines a nonprofit organization called Conceivable Future, which was founded on the belief that “the climate crisis is a reproductive crisis.” Some of these folks say they aren’t ready to have children because they “don’t know what the climate’s gonna be like in 50 years.”
One of the group’s members, 67-year-old Nancy Nolan, said that when her children reached adulthood, “I said to them, ‘I hope you never have children,’ which is an awful thing to say.”
Reider is publishing a book later this year on the topic of how “How Overpopulation and Climate Change Are Affecting the Morality of Procreation.” He has some ideas for how societies can regulate reproduction. For example, the world’s wealthier nations should abolish tax breaks for having children, and institute a tax system that actually penalizes parents — progressively, based on income — for every child they bring into the world. He also wants to pay poor women to go on birth control.
“Children, in a kind of cold way of looking at it, are an externality,” Reider said. “We as parents, we as family members, we get the good. And the world, the community, pays the cost.”
Another professor, Rebecca Kukla of Georgetown, told NPR she is worried that government programs to discourage having children might be racist and promote inequality because it could create a societal backlash against poor and minority women who tend to have more children.
“What that will actually translate into is it becoming much easier for wealthy people to have children than for other people to have children,” Kukla said.
