Actually, Having Children Won’t Doom the Planet

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“There’s a concerted effort by the left to convince the very demographic needed for procreation that having lots of babies is selfish and irresponsible.”

–JASON MATTERA

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Fall in love, get married, have lots of babies, and…become a climate criminal?

That’s what secular progressives want us believing, as they paralyze young people with fear that starting a family of their own is harmful for the planet.

Think not?

Meet Michaela Keegan, a young activist who hails from up north in Winnipeg, Manitoba, a Canadian province.

To kick off the New Year, she penned an op-ed for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation touting a 2019 pledge that she had signed called #NoFutureNoChildren, a pledge that was originally disseminated by the group Greenpeace.

The article is part of the CBC’s series “Should I Have Kids,” which asks “gen-Zers and millennials to contemplate the choice to have children.”

It’s no secret where Keegan lands — #NoFutureNoChildren.

Indeed, she writes:

I recalled wearing my green felt circle (a symbol of the climate action movement) on my clothing during late 2019, feeling like a veteran with a medal, and realizing at that moment that there are two things I know for sure: I will never be pregnant and I will never birth children.

It’s been four years since this now 26-year-old self-described “poet” became a “veteran” in Greta Thunberg’s green army and she is “still terrified for the future of the planet.” Upon reflection, she does admit that she wrestles with her choice to forgo children, especially when hearing the “sweet giggles” of her nieces and nephew.

Keegan, however, remains resolute in her decision, announcing that “I cannot bring an innocent life into this world when the near future is so bleak.”  She even manages to turn adoption into a signal of her moral superiority, noting that there “are so many children around the world who need homes” and “lots of us” who “won’t choose the biological route” yet “want to be parents.”

I don’t mean to pick on this girl. In fact, I feel sorry for her.

How can you not feel sorry for her after reading the unnecessary anxiety dripping from her keyboard?

I do not want my child(ren) to witness everything I am witnessing; to feel the fear I am feeling. I do not want my child to resent me for even having them and then dumping this environmental catastrophe on their generation.

Unfortunately, Keegan is representative of how easily young people are duped by cultural influencers, naively accepting the junk scientific claims that we’re on the precipice of some planetary Armageddon. Truth be told, we’ve been hearing these ominous predictions for decades now and they haven’t materialized.

And despite these failed predictions — the polar ice caps should be wiped out already — militant progressives in the West keep on pressing the panic button over the future of humanity.

Fox News Digital, for instance, chronicled how ABC’s “Good Morning America” recently spoke with the network’s chief meteorologist, Ginger Zee, on “whether or not to have children at all.”

Per the report, Zee had a tense conversation with her sister after she elected to expand her tribe. “When I was pregnant with my second child, [my sister] said in disappointment, ‘I didn’t think you were gonna do that again for the planet.’ She thought I would adopt.”

To be fair, the sister’s “disappointment” was a little understandable because it was Zee who once told her fans on Instagram that on “pure carbon emissions alone, yes, having one less child is one of the most significant ways to greatly reduce your carbon footprint.”

GMA also highlighted Prince Harry and Miley Cyrus, both of whom publicized a numerical cap on their offspring as an act of virtuous environmentalism. Or in Miley’s case, no kids at all: “Until I feel like my kid would live on an earth with fish in the water, I’m not bringing in another person to deal with that.”

Okay, that’s probably a bad example.

Do we really want the spawn of Miley Cyrus polluting the airwaves like mommy has?

In any event, GMA wasn’t alone in doling out “climate guilt” over starting a family.

The New York Times ran an article in 2021 titled “To Breed or Not to Breed?” while the Washington Post ran one at the close of 2022 with this headline: “Should you not have kids because of climate change? It’s complicated.”

In the piece, the Post gleefully observed a growing “generation of people living in the U.S. and other rich countries [who are] preoccupied with how having children may worsen the world’s rapid warming.”

I could go on and on with examples, but you get the idea: There’s a concerted effort by the left to convince the very demographic needed for procreation that having lots of babies is selfish and irresponsible.

These doomsday scenarios are nothing new, although they have assumed different forms over the years. Yet the central thread remains the same: Children are framed as blights and not blessings.

Remember Paul Ehrlich?

He’s the longtime Stanford biologist who wrote the infamous Population Bomb, which argued that the world would face devastating poverty and ravaging famines due to “overpopulation.” That was back in 1968 when the earth’s population was just under 4 billion. Today the global population stands at 8 billion and, as the Wall Street Journal put it, we’re “better fed than ever.”

In promoting his discredited theory at the time, Ehrlich outlined steps the government should adopt to “take the pressure off to reproduce.” Those steps included directing the Federal Communications Commission to ensure “that large families are always treated in a negative light on television” — like “commercials” against smoking — and demanding that the President of the United States make a declaration that “no intelligent, patriotic American family ought to have more than two children, preferably one.”

If parents did not voluntarily comply with these guidelines, then “you’ll have the government legislating the size of the family” and “throw you in jail if you have too many [kids].”

To be clear, this guy wasn’t some random kook at a nudist commune in Berkeley but was, and still is, a distinguished professor at an elite university, whose book at the time sold millions of copies. Moreover, Ehrlich continues to be featured as a “expert,” most recently on 60 Minutes, where he was making another round of ludicrous end times prognostications.

Ehrlich and his modern-day disciples will be proven wrong, once again, but in the meantime, there are real-life casualties to their malignant anti-family campaigns.

Casualties like Michaela Keegan.

Even though she’s a committed eco-warrior, there’s a nagging feeling that her pious efforts to save the planet by renouncing kids will all be done in vain.

“I still feel a bit torn in my choice to not have children,” she concedes, wondering aloud that “if something impactful is done, will it be too late for me to have biological children of my own?”

In Psalm 127:3, we read that “children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward.” It sounds like Keegan knows deep down that she’s robbing herself of that heritage and reward.

The good news is that she’s young.

Keegan still has time to wise up, snap out of Greta Thunberg’s spell, and hear those “sweet giggles” enliven her home every day.

Let’s hope she does.

She’ll find out that it’s the best — and not the worst — thing she’s ever done.

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Follow Jason on Twitter! @JasonMattera

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