Climate Change and Reproductive Futures


Robyn Lee, University of Alberta

Concerns about climate change are frequently cited in decisions not to have children (Dillarstone, Brown, and Flores 2023). Many people are worried that it is unethical and unsustainable to bring children into a world that is on a path to environmental devastation. Such fears crystallized in the Birth Strike movement, founded in the UK in 2019 and ended in September 2020, in which participants refused to have children as a form of protest against climate change. Climate change is known to have serious adverse effects on reproduction: increased temperatures and extreme heat events have been linked to harms to reproductive health (Barreca, Deschenes, and Guldi 2018). Increased wildfires and displacement due to erratic weather events disproportionately impact the health of vulnerable populations, including women, pregnant people, and young children (Segal and Giudice 2022). Racialized and poor people, and people living in developing countries, are especially affected by the health effects of climate change. Donna Haraway has called for dramatically curtailing birth rates in order to reduce environmental damage (Clarke and Haraway 2018; Haraway 2016). She argues for replacing pro-natalism with a focus on expanding kin relationships, with kinship understood not as rooted in biological relatedness, but rather extending across differences and species. Haraway and Adele Clarke’s edited collection Making Kin Not Population (Clarke and Haraway 2018) wrestled with the concept of population, which has often been the grounds for coercive control over the reproduction of marginalized populations. Critics of Haraway draw a parallel with Malthusian arguments for limiting population growth in order to reduce demands on natural resources; such eugenicist arguments have historically motivated forced sterilization policies towards racialized people and those living in poverty. However, Haraway has a highly critical understanding of the racist and colonialist histories underlying climate change; she therefore actually supports the reproduction of members of historically oppressed groups, even in the context of an overall reduction of birth rates. Notably, the Birth Strike movement argued that the climate crisis is being driven not by population numbers, but rather by exploitation and inequality. However, their message was repeatedly misconstrued through the lens of the population argument. Reproductive justice goes beyond frameworks of choice in analyzing the political, economic, and ecological contexts in which reproduction takes place (Ross and Solinger 2017). The reproductive justice movement, led by women of colour, addresses intersecting forms of oppression that impact reproduction. This paper uses a reproductive justice lens to critically analyze how reproductive capacities are impacted by climate change. Such an approach is necessary to avoid the individualistic framing of “is it ok to have a child?” (Meynell, Morgan, and van Ommen 2023), to instead recognize that reproductive futures are embedded in a complex social and political context shaped by historical inequalities. How do we understand the refusal to have children as an ethical and political act of protest? How can environmentally-aware kinship reckon with the racist histories associated with the concept of population?

This paper will be presented at the following session: