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I found myself awake at 3:52 a.m. Wednesday morning, thinking about Calla Massari’s “Should a person bring kids into this world?” (July 10). It’s something many are asking themselves these days.
My own answer to that question was half-asleep in my arms. And the reason I was awake: I was feeding my almost-8-month-old daughter.
Massari’s worries about the world are not unfounded — she fears what her kids’ lives would be like in an unstable world. And it’s ultimately up to her how to weigh those worries against her dream of a family, which she has now relinquished. She can decide that for herself, as can anyone else. For my husband and I, the scales came out the other way. As concerned about the world as anybody, we wanted to invite more people into it. Why?
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First, babies born today are likely to live better, healthier lives than ever before. The child mortality decrease in the modern era is shocking: In 1800, 46% of children did not survive to the age of 5 in the U.S. Today, it’s just 0.7%. That figure still represents tragedy and heartbreak that we must work to mitigate, but this is astonishing progress. Many people alive in the world today, particularly in countries like the U.S., lead lives unimaginable to even 17th-century kings — with access to clean, hot, running water; effective medicine; central heat. Saying that the world today is too dangerous for children implies that no human before modern times should have had a family at all. (And also that people in poor countries without the same infrastructure shouldn’t have families, either.) The world has always been dangerous — wars, disease, disaster — yet every generation carries on.
Some would-be parents today specifically cite concerns about the climate as a reason not to have children. They are right to be troubled by our treatment of the planet, but having fewer kids won’t solve this. Bringing fewer people into the world now wouldn’t affect the climate enough, or in time, to matter. We need serious cuts in emissions and in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by midcentury — not fewer kids. As Michael Geruso and Dean Spears write in a recent New York Times essay, “Depopulation Is Coming. Don’t Expect It to Solve Our Problems,” even if all humanity decided in 2030 to not have babies again until 2050, the population would only decrease by 14%. And if that were our only climate solution — if progress in this realm were suspended entirely — emissions would only decrease about 14%, too. That decrease, they write, “would be a failure, slower than the pace of per-person the pace of per-person emissions reductions actually achieved in Europe and the United States over the past 20 years.” All while the U.S. population has increased, I might add. Any future kids’ lives are not doomed in a world where decreasing emissions is doable, and future technology and research offer further hope. We need to do what actually works — not forgo having families if we want them.
