My cousin had a baby two months ago – and what an adorable poppet she is. Looking at pictures of her posted online, I felt a swell of pride on my cousin’s behalf.
Did it provoke a twinge of maternal longing for myself, too?
It did not. I am 35, at the height of the ticking clock years, but I know I will never have a baby. It’s not that I’m infertile – at least to my knowledge – nor that I dislike children. I love children.
Yet, at my request, my husband has had a vasectomy – doctors refused to sterilise me, though I did ask – and we have pledged never to start a family.
For how can I bring an innocent warm bundle into the world when none of us can say that the world will even be habitable for them? In the past few weeks, two new sets of statistics have emerged – the first to widespread hand-wringing; the second to barely a whimper.
The first showed that the UK birth rate has fallen to its lowest level since records began. Between 2022 and 2023, the fertility rate for England and Wales decreased from an average of 1.49 children per woman to 1.44 –the lowest rate on record and far fewer than are needed to sustain an ageing population.
And the second set of stats? Those were the ones telling us that 2024 is ‘virtually certain’ to be the hottest year on record, according to the European Climate Service.
A year punctuated by deadly heatwaves and catastrophic storms will end up 1.5C hotter than pre-industrial levels, and for the first time breach the symbolic point beyond which we stop being able to avoid the most disastrous consequences of climate change – a series of knock-on effects which could see the widespread extinction of animal species and even wipe us out.
For me these two statistics are not unrelated. Raising a human being in today’s world is hard. As reasons not to do it, women cite childcare costs, the hit they’ll take to their career and the difficulty in finding a decent man to have a baby with. As a happily married businesswoman with her own sales company, those reasons don’t apply to me.
Why bring children into a world when we don’t know if it’s going to exist in 100 years? asks Jessica Lorimer
I won’t have a child because of the threat posed by climate change.
Those world leaders who gathered in Azerbaijan for the COP29 climate conference last week should know that women like me aren’t having babies because we are too worried that adding to the global population will simply hasten its demise.
Whenever anyone asks me about my childlessness, I tell them the truth and make no apologies for sounding curt. ‘Why bring children into a world when we don’t know if it’s going to exist in 100 years?’
The most common answer to this always astounds me: ‘Oh well, it doesn’t matter to me because I won’t be here then!’ It’s such a selfish attitude.
Why have children to fulfil a biological need then not care that the world they will inhabit looks increasingly likely to resemble some post-apocalyptic wasteland? The seas barren, the skies raging, the deserts spreading and no way to turn back this ecological disaster.
In the UK we don’t feel it much yet – though look at the Valencian floods, the hurricanes in Florida and the Greek wildfires making our holiday destinations less and less viable. My father was in the Army, so I had a different upbringing to most. Living on military bases meant I went to school in Northern Ireland and lived in Central Europe and Africa.
The latter in particular showed me the harshness of life in countries where water isn’t easily accessible. More than half the world’s population already lives with ‘severe water scarcity’ for some of the year and it is only getting worse.
Water wars between regions or whole countries are not inconceivable in the next half century.
I am just one woman but my decision is not an especially rare one. One US poll found a quarter of adults without children say climate change is part of the reason – while, in 2021, analysis by a global bank found the decision ‘to not have children owing to fears over climate change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline’.
The UK-based BirthStrike Movement comprises women who refuse to procreate ‘to spare [their] child from a dystopian existence’.
I have long been terrified of what the future holds. From the age of six I had recurring nightmares in which I’d find myself being pulled through a hole in the sky, my little body shooting up into space.
In the UK we don’t feel it much yet – though look at the Valencian floods, the hurricanes in Florida and the Greek wildfires (above) making our holiday destinations less and less viable
Looking back now, I’m fairly sure the dreams were about the hole in the ozone layer. I was a child of the 1990s and the ozone layer was the big worry then. Even today I have a vivid memory of hearing experts on TV talking about it. As a girl I used to fret about people using aerosol deodorants. It seemed to me they might as well be spraying a hole directly into the stratosphere.
I have another memory of all the adults talking about serving in the Falklands and going to see the nesting penguins. I was genuinely worried that with temperatures rising the penguins would become homeless and we would boil the seas.
I think I dwelled on it especially because there wasn’t much else to do. I was always the new kid in any classroom and whenever I made friends I was forever having to leave them behind. I was sometimes bullied and struggled to fit in.
Doubtless I annoyed a lot of people but in my head I was convinced that in 100 years it wouldn’t just be penguins in deep trouble – we wouldn’t be here either.
Today, I’m not convinced that little girl was wrong. The UK might not be in the immediate firing line, but by 2070 parts of southern England could experience annual, life-threatening heatwaves and regular 40C temperatures, say government scientists. That sounds uncomfortable but manageable, you might say. Yet for a third of the world’s inhabitants, it won’t feel like Nice, but the Sahara. Mass migration of people from uninhabitable regions within the next 50 years is inevitable.
That’s why I won’t have a child. The world will simply be too unstable on too many levels for me to justify bringing them into it. I’d be a very angry human being if you conceived me in the knowledge that by the time I grew up, the world would be so much less safe than it was for you. I can’t imagine the conversation I would have with them to explain it. Neither can I convince myself, as so many people do, that the carbon footprint of my own family would somehow be less burdensome to the planet than anyone else’s. People tell me I won’t know ‘unconditional love unless I have a child of my own’.
Again, it’s a selfish argument and I refuse to be emotionally blackmailed by it. Besides, there are plenty of children who need homes and already exist. My husband and I have discussed fostering.
The trickiest conversation I have had about my decision was with my mum. I was in my early teens when I told her I could never consciously bring children into the world. She was upset with me but more so with herself. She initially questioned her own parenting and assumed she’d done something wrong.
Not that she really took it seriously. When she told friends, they’d laugh and assume I was joking or that I was far too young and naive to know my own mind at that age.
I felt indignant at that. I was 13 and sure I’d never start a family, while they behaved like ostriches with their heads in the sand.
There was a phase in the late 1990s of protesters marching in London but my parents wouldn’t take me because we didn’t live nearby.
Besides, while they were supportive of my views, they just didn’t think I’d made up my mind about remaining child-free. They told themselves I’d change my outlook in my 20s.
In their social circle, the campaigners were ridiculed, which made me feel isolated and angry.
Today I do talk about it with friends over a couple of glasses of wine.
And yes many of them do have children – indeed, I’m lucky enough to be a godmother twice over. I don’t preach to anyone else but I do expect people to respect my choices.
I’m careful to buy my godchildren sustainable gifts, from local businesses in North Yorkshire where I live. I try to do things with my godchildren that teach them to value the beauty in nature, like long walks and collecting shells at the beach. I grow my own veg and I support local producers whenever I can.
Every day I try to do something to help. I use a lower temperature on my washing machine, drive an electric car and scrupulously recycle. I use Vinted instead of buying new clothes and I have a rescue dog. My entire business is digital: we avoid printing anything and send all documents and contracts digitally. I use public transport to travel to business events.
Some of my loved ones think I’m odd for worrying about something they say I can’t change. Others are surprised I don’t live up to the eco stereotype. No, I don’t wear hemp and smell of patchouli oil! Nor do I agree with the tactics of Just Stop Oil, especially where they cause so much damage. We need to get people onboard with the green economy and the idea of doing our bit, not alienate them.
What worries me most is the serious lack of concern among my educated peers. I think some people deliberately choose not to see what’s going on around them.
If the scientists are right and the world heats up not by 1.5C but by 3C, then it’s difficult to argue that humanity is anything other than doomed, says Jessica
How else can we ignore the temperature increases each summer? My view is they won’t care until it personally impacts on them, by which time it will be too late.
My mum supports my position and though she’s sad she won’t be a grandma – I’m an only child – it also means her own life isn’t tied down. She sees all her friends in their late 50s and early 60s spending their spare time babysitting, while she plans weekend beach walks or trips to the cinema.
I fully expect to support her as she gets older but who will look after me when I need help?
In fact, who will look after my generation as a whole if there aren’t enough young people to pay for pensions and the NHS?
Economists say the plummeting birth rate spells serious trouble for supposedly selfish women like me, whose fault it is.
But if falling birth rates are worrying political leaders, perhaps they should do something to address it by ramping up our response to climate change.
It’s not the job of younger people solely to fund the elderly (I’ve worked from the age of 16 and take full responsibility for my retirement income) but in any case, whether the state pension keeps pace with inflation may well be the least of our concerns when Norfolk and the Thames estuary are under water and wildfires are raging across our national parks.
I’m not an evangelist about this but it seems to me having children is a much greater leap of faith today than it used to be. If the scientists are right and the world heats up not by 1.5C but by 3C, then it’s difficult to argue that humanity is anything other than doomed. It’s cruel to add to the next generation under those circumstances.
It’s why I would urge any woman to ask herself: can you promise you’re thinking of them, and not just you, when you have a baby?
As told to Samantha Brick
***
Read more at DailyMail.co.uk