AS THE CLIMATE CRISIS RAGES, THE COST OF LIVING SPIRALS AND GLOBAL INSTABILTY GATHERS PACE, IT’S NO WONDER BIRTH RATES ARE PLUMMETING. HERE, ONE WRITER EXPLORES HER DECISION TO BRING A CHILD INTO A WORLD THAT SEEMS EVER MORE PRECARIOUS
AT A WEDDING RECENTLY, SOMEONE asked me if my pregnancy – I am almost eight months along at the time of writing – had been unplanned. I guess they were reacting to the fact that when they’d said, ‘Are you excited?’ my reply had been a muted, ‘I don’t know if I’d call it “excitement”.’ My boyfriend interjected, ‘No, it wasn’t unplanned, we talked about it,’ which is true, and which made my trepidation about motherhood seem all the more incongruous.
The fact is, those two blue lines crystallised for me a few uncomfortable truths about the precarity of the modern world. Dr Heather McMullen, a social scientist at Queen Mary University who has studied reproductive trends, describes it best: ‘It’s been a heavy few years in terms of Covid, plus the information we’re getting about the climate; there are a lot of global crises and conflicts that are really present in the news right now, and in the UK we’ve had austerity and a cost-of-living crisis to contend with. I think what some people are saying is, “This feels like an unbearably vulnerable choice for me to make under the current circumstances.”’
This will be a year of landmark elections in both the UK and the US (as well as Russia, India, South Africa and many other countries around the world). The baby – my baby – is due at the end of April. By November, Donald Trump could be making his way to the White House again and Labour might have finally wrestled back power in the UK, breaking a 14-year Tory stranglehold. When I found out I was pregnant, I suddenly had this sense that the world my child would be born into would look very different to the one I had grown up in, too different perhaps for me to help her navigate.
The unbearable vulnerability of parenthood is something that Aga Marszalek also confronted in her early thirties. ‘I considered having children,’ she says. ‘More than “considered” – I started buying baby clothes because I thought, “This could be for me”.’ Now 47, and childfree by choice, she sees this as a formative period in her climate activism. Aga has been interested in environmental issues since teenagehood. ‘Even back in the 1990s we learnt in school about the environmental impact that humans were having on the planet and it filled me with a sense of dread,’ she says.
But, she adds, it wasn’t until the prospect of motherhood became more reality than far-off fantasy that she was finally forced to reckon with what that d
