Interesting Atlantic Interview On Climate Breakdown & Decision On Whether Or Not To Have Kids
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Kallman: They tend to be at least college-educated. And they tend to be, certainly, pro-choice. For the most part, they’re on the left of the political spectrum. They’re certainly, on the whole, younger. Our house parties have been not exclusively white, but they’re pretty white.
Ferorelli: One thing that revealed itself to us pretty early is that, for a lot of white, middle-class people, climate is this stunner of an issue. It’s the first time a lot of us have noticed that our well-being is not cherished by our leadership. But for almost everybody else, demographically, that’s not a surprise. So some of the conversations we’ve been having with people are just reckoning with this idea that if you decide to have children, you’re doing it against odds, in the face of harm. Those are the conditions that people of color who have children in America have had from the beginning.
Green: I’d like you to unpack that a little bit more—what that means for you. Both of you, I assume, identify as white women. Meghan, you have one of the fanciest degrees the world has to offer: a Ph.D. from an Ivy League university. In general, we live in a country with unprecedented historical wealth and vast technological innovation, and you are both in positions to benefit from that. So I guess I wonder: Why you? Why would you be the people to not have children to try to answer the vast moral challenge that is climate change?
Kallman: First of all, neither of us have chosen to have children or to not have children. We’re both in our 30s. We both have a little bit of time to make this decision. And for both of us, there are personal considerations.
There is a really, really gross class—and by extension, race—underpinning of the premise that you should have children. Your children will save X. Your children will invent the cure for Y. That comment seems to mean: Because you are privileged, because you are white, because you are educated, your kids are more valuable and therefore you should have them (a) because you’re a woman, and (b) because they’ll fix everything. The stuff to unpack in there is dense as a brick, and it’s really destructive. The point is that everybody’s kids deserve a chance at a healthy life.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/09/millennials-babies-climate-change/620032/