Having Babies Amid Climate Chaos

Should one have a child in a climate-changed world? Many young people are increasingly agonizing over this fraught question. Climate activists Meghan Kallman and Josephine Ferorelli have been there. The sociologist from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and Chicago-based writer and illustrator met at a party in 2014 when they were in their early 30s and discovered they were grappling with similar questions around having babies, reproductive justice, personal vs political action, and what, at the time felt like, a “White, largely male,” savior narrative dominating the climate movement.

That first conversation eventually led them to create Conceivable Future, a forum for people to share their concerns about bringing new life into our rapidly changing world. Kallman and Ferorelli help organize house parties for people to meet and share their stories in a judgment-free space, and even record their thoughts, as testimonies, to share with the general public. The aim is not only to open up discussion on this emotionally charged topic, but also spur people to climate action. “Parenting and being a member of a family is as close to a universal experience as we get,” says Kallman, who was elected to the Rhode Island Senate last year. “So we hoped that these conversations would help bring public perception of the crisis from something abstract to something that impacts them in a deeply personal way.”

I spoke with Kallman and Ferorelli recently about their efforts to unravel the complex connections between climate justice and reproductive rights and change the narrative of what people construe as climate action. An excerpt.

Can you tell us a little more about how Conceivable Future came to be conceived?

Josephine: From when I was maybe eight or nine years old, when I first heard about what we were calling global warming then, I just couldn’t picture the future. And as I got older, that meant that I never really had fantasies about being a parent. Even five years out seemed incomprehensible to me because I always knew that there was this thing looming that I didn’t understand, and that we weren’t addressing. Sometime in 2010, I think, there was this picture on the cover of a newspaper of Obama shaking hands with Xi Jinping over a climate accord, and, weirdly, the first thing that popped into my head when I saw that was, Oh, maybe I could have a baby now. And it just really surprised me, but that was the level of the lid that I had on my imagination for the future.

“We’d been socialized to talk about climate and reproduction, in really, really limited ways.”

So I told that story to Meghan and it was like the lid flew off. And I felt like if we could talk about everything that we thought about this we could be free to do some really radical reimagining of what activism looks like. You know, talk about things like: How does the movement respond to needs instead of just sort of promoting this falsely optimistic, or this male hero narrative? What are we actually going to need to do as we get older in this environment?

So you envisioned it as a place that makes space for these conversations?

Meghan: Ideally. It’s not that for everyone, but we were trying to create a space to start to have some more expansive conversations. One of the things we discovered as we started having the conversations was that having them was hard, not because, necessarily, it was tapping into people’s hearts the way it was, but because we’d been socialized to talk about climate and reproduction, in really, really limited ways.

Josephine: And one thing that we understood pretty early on was that, especially for middle class people, especially for White people, especially for women, there’s this unquestioned received wisdom that having a baby is bad for the world. That basically if you’re a really conscious person, you should feel guilty about it, which I think is a really familiar structure of feeling for women. Regardless of what the issue is, there’s always going to be: You should feel bad about it.

Meghan: And that guilt was very intentionally used as a cudgel to shut down any conversation. Mercifully it’s a little less common right now as this conversation is becoming a bit more mainstream, but yeah, you were selfish if you had kids, you were selfish if you didn’t have kids.

Did you find some overarching themes in the conversations you convened?

Meghan: There tends to be a range of concerns starting with one end of the spectrum, which is like: What harm will my child do to the world in terms of their carbon emissions in the amount of dirty diapers they will produce, in the amount of plastic straws they will use over the course of their life, etc.?, all the way to What harm will a hotter and meaner and less stable and less predictable world do to my child?

We try to focus our conversation on the on the latter piece, which is less about individual consumption, and more about the systemic factors that produce that kind of outcome. But things that stand out to me: One, there is a gendered piece of this. If you’ve been socialized as a woman from the time that you’re very young, you tend to have a slightly different experience of this because, since you’re very young, you are taught that your job is to have babies, that your eventuality is going to be married with kids. In some ways those pressures have kind of gone underground because it’s not considered appropriate to say it out loud anymore, but the expectations are still there.

Another thing that stands out to me is: If I don’t have children, the conversation goes, how do I share my love with the next generation? In middle class circles, particularly, family is considered a very sort of discreet, nuclear household. So the option for many participants who are in that socioeconomic category is, either have your own kids or have no contact with the next generation. Which is a pretty stark choice.

Those are things that resonate with me. There are many other themes, like men tend to relate to this slightly differently… Josephine, I’m curious, what stands out to you still after all this time?

Josephine: People who are [resolutely] not having kids because of the climate tend not to show up to our events, maybe because they don’t feel troubled by this question. The people that we heard from primarily were people who are painfully undecided. We also heard from a lot of parents who had one or two children and were thinking of having a second or third child, and that was becoming a really weighted decision. Or they were wrestling with some painful feelings around the future of the children that they already had.

“The narrative that we are trying to push back on is that having one fewer kid for climate reasons is political activism.”

I know anecdotally, from older testimonies, a lot of people who were in one place then are in a really different place now. People who said they wouldn’t have children have had children, people who were confident they wanted children, for various reasons, didn’t have children. And I think that’s really nice. That’s one of the things that I like about this. What they’re expressing is a moment in time [not a binding oath, giving people the gift of their vulnerability and of their insight.

Yes, I appreciated how Conceivable Future holds space for diverse viewpoints on the matter because often these views can be so polarizing.

Meghan: What we often say is that it’s the fact of the question and not anybody’s answer that is important. It is the fact that people are having to grapple with this, that’s what matters.

It doesn’t matter if I have five kids and Josephine has none. What matters is that we’re in a position politically, socially, economically, geo-physically, that we need to be having these conversations. The answer will resolve itself differently for everybody. It’s not the answer that’s political. It’s the sense-making, the meaning-making, and the activation around the systems that’s political.

I will stop short of saying that reproduction is never political because I don’t believe that, but I guess the narrative that we are trying to push back on is that having one fewer kid for climate reasons is political activism. Political activism concerns itself with changing the systems that govern all of our lives.

What do you think you have achieved so far from these conversations and from collecting testimonies?

Meghan: I think there’s a question about what we hoped when we started and what it’s done. And they’re largely not the same thing (laughs). What we have done, I think, partly through the testimonies, partly through our conversations, partly through conversations with journalists, is try to change the contours of the conversation.

When we started organizing, the only discussion about reproduction and climate or environment had been in sort of The Population Bomb overpopulation argument. It is a toxic, shortsighted, classist argument, and it is so insidious. It was everywhere. Even in 2017, there was a study that came out from a university in Sweden that I’m not going to dignify by naming, that cast up having one fewer child as a “lifestyle choice,” like what you can do personally, to reduce your carbon footprint.

There are a number of problems with that argument. The first is that kids are not carbon footprints. They are human beings. The second is that consumption is a hugely important piece of this. If everybody in the world consumed the way that middle- and upper-class Americans consumed, we would need another four to six Earth’s worth of resources to support that. So, it’s not sheer numbers of people, it’s what those people are consuming, and the systems in which they live that promote such consumption.

But for us also, the equally important piece of this is that thinking about your uterus as the site of your political action encourages us to see these problems as incredibly individualistic and not as problems with our system, with our politics, with our economy. It encourages us to see climate change as a “problem that you can solve” by having one fewer child or no children, which is nonsense.

The overpopulation argument also has these not-so-subtle currents of classism in it, of racism in it. There’s always a sort of implication of who should be having babies and who shouldn’t be having babies. We have gotten told many times throughout the course of this project, that we are the kind of people who should be having babies because maybe our babies will save the world. By that I can only assume that they mean: Well-educated, middle class, White ladies should be having babies. That is classism. That is racism. The population argument has this sort of veneer of scientificity over what I think are some baser human inequities that are baked into our institutions.

So, part of your goal is to change the conversation around population?

Meghan: The goal is to expose the complexity [of this issue]. And some of the complexity is just the range of human experience that exists. The goal is to enable people to connect with the stakes, to listen to other people’s testimonies, but also to sort of help build a critique. There’s some internal, within the movement, organizing that I think happens in these spaces that is nourishing, that is fortifying. And that sort of helps build a little bit of a political edge. But yes, I think to bring forward some of these ridiculous fallacies is an important function of how [these conversations] have operated.

And are you noticing any change?

Meghan: Yes, it’s come slowly, but we are. And to be fair, it’s been a pretty big change over the course of the last seven years. The national conversation [on this] has maybe caught up to some of the conversations that had happened in the house parties, partly because the consequences of the climate crises are un-ignorable right now in a way that they were not seven years ago. That said, there’s still a lot of sort of pernicious, icky stuff underlying the assumptions and the writing and the claims that are made in the name of climate action now.

Josephine: I think we’ll probably see more of an uptick [in that kind of pernicious talk]. As a lot of people get climate aware, they’re going to show up with a lot of fear and very little nuance, and they’re going to go straight to the heaviest hammer. So I think it’s good that we have done the work that we have, and that other groups, especially reproductive justice and environmental justice groups have done in a big way, to lay the foundation for the counterargument. But I feel like we’re not really going to be having a debate in a reasoned way. That era is kind of over. I guess what I’m worried about is that there’s going to be an onslaught of policy, and we’re going to have to take much less of a kind of comfortably philosophical position and take a much more active, front-guard, activist position on these issues.

So many of the testimonies I read or watched were so intense. There’s so much pain and grief in there, it made me wonder — how do you manage to continue doing this work?

Josephine: I know what you mean. But I would say that: You’re doing it too. For anyone who looks at this issue directly, the emotional cost is enormous. There’s no way around it. You can’t make it go away. So, what do we do? One thing we do is we get together. One thing we do is we don’t shy away from it. But having said that, I’ve been tired for a while. I think Meghan’s been tired for a while. I think we have a responsibility to this framework, this way of talking about things and trying to help people get to an okay place with it. But it’s not without a cost.

Meghan: I feel like after what Josephine said, what I’m about to say it’s going to be really dry, but, the only thing that makes climate despair better is doing climate action … But I will echo Josephine that this is not something that leaves me feeling shiny and whole at the end of it. It’s something that’s like, this version of broken is better than the private, quiet, squelched version of broken, but it’s still broken. It’s going to be broken as long as we live, and it’s going to be broken into the next generations’ lives and probably for a long time after … It is awful. And we can still make something worth having out of the awful, but we also can’t pretend awful away.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.