Is it OK to Have Kids?

On a bleak winter’s day in early 1975 — just after my 32nd birthday — I made the most radical and feminist decision of my life. I arranged to have an operation that would leave me sterilized. To get my “tubes tied.” While I shared this with a few close friends at the time I soon learned to avoid discussing it because it was so defiant of social expectations. Unnatural in a world that defined giving birth and motherhood as the most natural act. After all, I was raised during an era of patriarchal culture that saw little value in women until they became mothers and ergo assumed every woman wanted babies. Even my fellow radical feminist collaborators were shocked. I never told my mother.

So, it is with great curiosity and concern that I have learned about the decisions of increasing numbers of young women and couples of child-bearing age to forego having kids. Even in southern Mexico, my young local Spanish teacher explains that his friends are discussing this question.

The driving factor today in this conversation and decision is the climate crisis.

This spring (2019) there was hardly a webzine or publication that did not publish a thoughtful article on the subject of whether to have kids…