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My husband and I have decided not to have children.
Neither of us feels that call to transcend specifically by inheriting our genes and our memories to a new and tiny human being.
But, in addition, this is a decision that is strongly aligned with a certain sorrow that we share about the state of the planet on which we live.
A rather pessimistic perspective on the life that is going to be possible on this Earth that we would leave to that new generation.
A debacle that, despite our own activist and combative spirits, we do not see as having a remedy and that, in its state of unstoppable deterioration, it would cause us much suffering and anguish to leave that new being to whom we gave life.
In our pillow talk or over dinner, we have questioned whether it makes sense, in such a crowded world, -according to the UN,
by 2050 we will be 9,700 million human beings-, and with resources so depleted, to continue with something that at this point seems more like a mandate to which we should at least dare to ask questions.
Do we really have to keep having children?
This is a personal column, because that, the decision to have children or not, is and should continue to be a personal decision.
However, I would not be honest if I did not confess that for a long time I nourished that decision lovingly made together with my partner with the fantasy that, in this way, we were also doing something really coherent and relevant for this land that we love so much.
As feminist movements say so clearly, the personal always ends up being political.
But… Was it true then that there could be a way to slow down the environmental catastrophe a little if more women like me, more couples, stopped having children,
or at least decided to have one less?
Could I still believe that not bringing a baby into this world made us a little more respectful of him and his needs?
A first search among scientific investigations seemed to confirm that yes.
A popular report titled 'The Climate Mitigation Gap: Education and Government Recommendations Override the Most Effective Individual Actions', published in 2017, by Seth Wynes and Kimberly A Nicholas, considered a wide range of individual lifestyle decisions and calculated its potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in developed countries.
After the analysis, the scientists recommended four high-impact actions with the capacity to substantially reduce personal emissions per year.
The first, indeed, was not to have children or to have one less.
“Having one less child would mean an average reduction for developed countries of 58.6 tons of CO2 emissions per year.
Living without a car would reduce 24 tons of carbon.
The study added comparative figures of this type: "A family in the United States that chooses to have one less child, would provide the same level of emission reduction as 684 adolescents who decide to practice integral recycling for the rest of their lives."
Precisely, the report concluded that, instead of paying attention to minor actions that have been the most widespread, such as turning off the light that is not being used at home, recycling or taking three-minute showers, the science books of the Young students should be emphasizing these four actions that, according to these figures, would bring considerable impacts.
Very well!
I had my science-backed figure for the potential amount of CO2 we would save the planet by not having a baby.
But the question that immediately arose seemed to me more complex to solve.
If we were to think about expanding this idea further, could women all over the world decide on their bodies like I was deciding on mine?
“Deciding what to do with the body is something that is deeply affected by power structures.
Deciding what to do with the body is, in reality, something that very few women can do, and that includes the decision to have children or not,” Diana Ojeda, associate professor at CIDER, from the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia, told me forcefully. and co-author of the paper Confronting Populationism: Feminist Challenges to Population Control in an Era of Climate Change.
The naive idea that many times had crossed my mind of doing more militancy and convincing more and more women and couples not to have children in order to help this planet was undoubtedly based on my own privileges, ones that made me believe falsely that all women and couples have the same resources and freedoms that my husband and I have.
The reality is obviously very different.
"There are material reasons such as the lack of sex education, or access to effective contraceptives behind the fact that millions of impoverished, racialized, marginalized people are deprived of that power to decide whether or not to have children," continued Diana Ojeda, who made me see that the problem went even further.
“It also goes beyond the material.
In many parts of the world, women are still mere wombs, their value is reduced to being ships where babies go.
For these women it is much more risky if they want to question the possibility of being mothers, because sometimes their own lives depend on it.
Not to mention the number of women who are raped in the world (15 million adolescent girls between the ages of 15 and 19 have experienced forced sexual intercourse worldwide).
In fact,
My idea of not having children so as not to contribute to the environmental crisis was correct, because any free decision we make about our bodies should be correct, because as feminism promulgates so well, there is no environmental justice without social and reproductive justice.
However, if this idea of not having children that has not only occurred to me and my husband, but slowly begins to gain adherents and pop leaders who publicly express their desire not to be mothers or fathers, will escalate to the point of being attractive at the level of political estates, everything could be very problematic.
The idea of reducing the global population is part of important currents of thought that since the 18th century with the "first demographer" in history, Thomas Malthus, wondered about the ways in which so many people were going to be fed, considering that the The problem was people, -which grew exponentially, while agriculture grew arithmetically-, and not that the problem was how that food is distributed and given access.
This idea of population decrementism, in fact, has led to restrictive policies such as the one experienced in China from 1979 to 2015, which only allowed having one child and which brought terrible collateral effects such as, for example, an entire generation of lost girls. because when families had to decide to have only one child, they sought at all costs for it to be a boy and not a girl.
“Governments have no right to regulate how many children people can have.
Instead of 'optimizing' its birth policy, China should respect the choice of the people and end any invasive and punitive control over family planning decisions," said Joshua Rosenzweig, Amnesty International's China Director, at the time. the announcement in 2021 that up to three children per family would be allowed.
“These measures have not been effective.
What would really serve to stop climate change?”, insists Diana Ojeda, “closing companies, stopping capitalism, stopping the level of consumption, less effective measures that mess with the individual, such as asking us not to have children or eat less, do not work. meat.
A very small percentage of the richest people in the world are the cause of the largest amount of emissions that have caused global warming.
So what we have is not a problem of the number of people, but of economic patterns of production and consumption.”
Problematizing our decision does not mean that we do not deeply believe in it.
My husband and I will not have a child, not a biological one at least.
If one day that desire that parents talk about so much appears, we may decide to adopt a baby and thus contribute to a better distribution of the resources of this earth.