Don’t Let Climate Anxiety Stop You From Having Kids

On a too-warm day in early spring, I was sitting at a sidewalk café in Williamsburg, having a catch-up coffee with a former colleague in her early 30s. She was wondering aloud about freezing her eggs. “But then again, most of my friends are pretty much resigned to never having kids, or are at least angsting about it,” she said. “You know, because of the stuff you’re working on.”

The stuff I’ve been working on, as a writer, is the climate crisis and how people are responding to it. And in the past decade, I’ve indeed heard an increasingly loud drumbeat of concern about procreation. Some people worry about the world their children will inherit; others feel guilty about the enlarged carbon footprint that comes with an enlarged family.

The thing everyone was scared would happen with the ancestry DNA kits happened. The mosquito problem could be a whole lot worse — at least males skeeters can’t suck blood anymore. Five feel-good viral videos from this year. What the pill teaches us about the failure of women’s health care. Doctors say a 70-year-old woman in Kampala, Uganda gave birth to twins, making her Africa’s oldest mother. We love everything about this animal rescue story except the changing of the dog’s name from Jughead to Buck. And with all the other news going on, you may have missed that COP28, the UN climate summit, is being led by an oil executive.

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