Calaunda Robinson and her children Amir, Ahmaud, and Ayanti in Savannah, Georgia.
Turning 50 was a bittersweet milestone. My wife threw me a big party and invited our friends and family. Because we eloped in 2020, she surprised me with a vow renewal, so the festivities also felt like a wedding reception. At the end of the party, we gathered up gift bags and coats and went home. As we drove through the mostly empty streets of lower Manhattan, steam rising in serpentine plumes from grates, I kept thinking, “I am 50. I am 50. I am 50.” I was not necessarily sad or morose about reaching a significant milestone age. My 40s were the best years of my life, and I hope the same for my 50s.
Instead, I was contemplative about the bittersweet nature of being firmly ensconced in the middle of my life without necessarily feeling like I am in the middle of my life. In fact, the older I get, the less I know what it means to feel a certain age. As a much younger person, I thought 50-year-olds were ancient crones just trying to survive their dotage. Middle age was the end of the line, the death of possibility. I know better now, of course. I don’t feel old as much as I feel older. I know, with startling clarity, that there is probably more time behind me than ahead, even if I live a long life. I also have to accept that certain choices are, increasingly, not available to me.
Mostly, I am thinking about motherhood. My wife Debbie and I don’t have children, though we do have children in our lives—a gaggle of adorable nieces and nephews, the children of friends and other assorted young folk we can spoil and entertain without the existential gravity of parenting. Debbie is 13 years older than me, so when we have talked about expanding our little family, she has voiced concerns about being judged for starting a family so late in life or not being there for our imaginary child as they mature into their 20s and 30s. I understand where she’s coming from and share some of her concerns. Would we be seen as our child’s grandparents? Would our friends think us selfish? Would we do more harm than good while trying to keep a little human alive and arcing toward goodness? Regardless, whatever my concerns, they were not so insurmountable that I wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to welcome a child into our lives.
Because I am 50, and a woman, and a feminist, what matters most to me is that women and people who can get pregnant have choices about if and when and how they have children. It is bewildering, more than 50 years after Roe v. Wade and only three years since the Dobbs decision, that our bodily autonomy remains contingent on the whims of feckless legislators and the ultrawealthy who buy their way into political power. To truly have choices, we have to recognize that the fight for reproductive freedom is not only about codifying abortion access into our federal laws, ending onerous restrictions that essentially outlaw abortion in far too many states, and ensuring that women’s bodies are unlegislated. That is merely the beginning.
To have choices means we also have to be responsible stewards of the natural world. The fate of the planet is the fate of humanity. This is not a particularly earth-shattering statement. It is simple logic. We need somewhere to live, we need space and fresh air and warm sun and steady ground to thrive. Our children need these things, too. The answer to our future is not to extract all the wealth and resources of this planet and then look to the cosmos for another planet to colonize, pillage, and destroy.
People my age, Gen Xers, were raised with the understanding that global warming was a very real danger, but one that was generations away—our children’s children’s children were the ones who would have to contend with the apocalypse. Global warming was a threat we could combat with the necessary resolve, scientific expertise, and ingenuity. Now, we are middle-aged and we know, with painful clarity, that most of the systems designed to protect us have failed or capitulated to the ravages of capitalism. The ingenuity to address global warming (so cynically rebranded by conservatives as “climate change”) exists, but the political will to direct that ingenuity toward saving the planet seemingly does not. We are disillusioned, and many of us are in a state of paralysis about how to respond to the acceleration of a warming planet.
As the prospect of having children becomes more and more unlikely, I think about all of the much younger people who feel like they won’t have the opportunity to expand their families, either. There are the emotional considerations: fear of making a mistake while raising a child, fear of perpetuating cycles of trauma, fear of being subsumed by parenthood. There are the material considerations: the threat of maternal mortality, having enough money and other resources, achieving a work/life balance, a dearth of care infrastructure coupled with the often exorbitant costs of childcare. As most parents know, to raise children successfully, you need a series of small miracles to occur.
And then there is climate anxiety: the fear that we are bringing children into a forsaken world where young, innocent lives might be cut too short by climate-related disaster, or their quality of life will be far too diminished, or the ecological impact of increasing the world’s population will only exacerbate climate change. Some people have determined that they cannot or will not in good conscience bring children into this world. An entire generation of potential parents now believes that there is no possibility that they too might receive those small miracles parenthood demands. Having children is a practical consideration or it is political—or it is both. It is not only an emotional or material decision. It is a moral one, too.
In a 2020 survey about the intersections between concerns about the environment and concerns about having children, conducted by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Kit Ling Leong, 96.5% of respondents were “very” or “extremely concerned” about the well-being of both existing and potential children. There is ample evidence, both qualitative and quantitative, that worries about having children because of climate change are not some fringe experience. For years, it was easy to tell myself that the people saying they weren’t going to have children because of climate anxiety were being a bit extra, a bit hyperbolic, a bit reactionary. Increasingly, though, I understand that these concerns are extremely well-placed.
Year after year, we witness or experience natural disasters on a scale that was once unfathomable, the stuff of dystopian fiction. Floods. Wildfires. Tornadoes. Hurricanes. There is no safe haven from climate change. Each time there is a raging hurricane or a relentless tornado or an uncontrollable mudslide, communities suffer. They take stock. They rebuild where they can. But the ability to recover from catastrophe is not an infinite resource. As the frequency of these catastrophes increases, I have started to wonder who we are rebuilding the world for and why, especially since we keep rebuilding the world in the exact same way as the one that was destroyed.
In Antarctica, I stood on the upper deck of a small ship, staring at the pristine landscape. The air was crisp and clean, the temperature a balmy 34 degrees Fahrenheit. For the first time in my life, I was in a place that appeared relatively untouched by the conquests of man, at least compared to the rest of the world. The water was a crystalline blue. The icebergs were massive and awe-inspiring, in so many different shapes, a lighter shade of blue. The landmass of the white continent stretched into the horizon. Yet as I enjoyed the majesty around me, I watched a massive block of ice calve from a glacier. Suddenly, the rising ocean was no longer theoretical.
My parents live in South Florida. They have survived at least five hurricanes. During Hurricane Ian, their neighborhood flooded. Neighbors paddled around in kayaks where normally they might drive. Cars and homes and businesses were destroyed. They know how to prepare: canned goods, flashlights, extra batteries, filling the bathtub with water. They know how to board over windows and stay away from them as the winds whip through everything. Preparation, though, can only do so much. Fortunately, they lived in a fourth-floor apartment, so while they were homebound for several days, the waters did not rise so far as to endanger their lives. They were lucky. But luck is a fragile, fickle foundation on which to build a future, and eventually luck runs out.
In Los Angeles, where I live, I have watched ash from nearby wildfires floating in the air and settling on every surface as far as the eye can see. I have seen the sky smudged with ominous tones of grey and orange, the air thick with smoke, making my eyes water. I’ve searched my garage for the right respirators so we could leave our home without inhaling too many carcinogens. I’ve packed a “go bag” and made a hasty assessment of what we should throw in our cars and what we should leave behind. I’ve opened up our home to friends who were evacuated as wildfires spread. I have looked at the beautiful dream house my wife and I were poised to buy burned to cinder and ash, only a jagged carcass of a foundation left standing. I know the immense, uncomfortable relief of more luck.
Yes, I would love to have a child and be part of what seems like the exhilarating and impossible experience of shaping and reshaping your life around the needs of someone else. In truth, it is not my age that gives me pause. It is knowing I would bring someone into the world as flood waters rise and wildfires burn and new calamities threaten everyone, everywhere. It is knowing I would be responsible for bringing a child into a world that absolutely could address and reverse the impact of unnatural natural disasters but that chooses not to. It is knowing I would not have a reasonable, unselfish answer when asked why I made that choice.
Like many people, I am overwhelmed when I consider how I, as an individual, can combat global warming. Sometimes, it feels easier to surrender to what seems inevitable. So long as we are dependent as a society on fossil fuels, individual lifestyle changes aren’t going to do that much. That’s what I tell myself, even though it is largely wishful thinking. If we tell ourselves our individual sacrifices won’t really help the environment, we grant ourselves permission to continue driving our cars and eating meat and engaging in all the other lifestyle practices that make our lives easier and more comfortable. Collectively, we’re choosing to focus on the quality of our lives in the immediate rather than the quality of everyone’s lives in the long term.
This is why, when we talk about reproductive choice, we have to be more expansive. We’re not merely fighting for the right to abortion access, we’re fighting for the right to safely bring children into a world that is living, not dying. Ecofeminists have been doing this work for quite some time, but we still treat most feminist ambitions as discrete projects when, as intersectionality has long shown us, everything is intertwined. We ignore the intersections to our detriment. When we think about reproductive freedom, we are also thinking about race and class and gender and the climate. When people feel like they cannot have children because we live on a dying planet, their choices are as restricted by the climate as they are by misogynistic legislation. The causes might be different, but the effect of restricting peoples’ reproductive choices is startlingly similar.
Feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, who was vigorously disinterested in parenthood, is rumored to have said, “I’m not against mothers. I am against the ideology which expects every woman to have children, and I’m against the circumstances under which mothers have to have their children.” I think about the latter part of her statement often. The circumstances into which we expect women to have children are alarmingly difficult and inequitable. When we add environmental crises to the circumstances into which we expect people to have children, those circumstances become not just difficult and inequitable, but impossible. It leaves us with no choices at all, which is antithetical to the feminist project. It means we still are not free.
It doesn’t have to be that way. We can want more. We can do better. We can create better circumstances under which women have children: abortion access, universal health care, subsidized child care, wage equity, an end to gender-based violence, equity in food access, family-friendly policies.
This sounds like utopia given our present reality, but that need not be the case. We have the tools to live with an ethos of abundance. When we advocate for women to have the freedom to make choices about whether and how and when to bear children, we can imagine and fight for the most ideal conditions possible for families to raise those children. And that includes a healthy planet where those children can live abundantly, now and in the future.
Production Marcella Zigbuo Camara Production Assistant Christina Worthington Casting Arielle Berman
This story first appeared in Atmos Volume 11: Micro/Macro with the headline, “The Abundance of Choice.”
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