Here’s a fun experiment: At your next neighborhood potluck, casually float the notion to the Prius-driving, trash-separating couple up the street that they should rethink having another baby because their hypothetical bundle will further harm a planet already in grave trouble. Cite a stat or two about per-capita carbon emissions, or mention how, according to a United Nations report, 40 percent of humans will face water shortages by 2030. Offer to email links to supporting data. In the ensuing uneasy silence, ask someone to pass the lima beans.
Sure, you’d be a jerk. But would you be wrong?
Take two couples. One — Lauren and Louis — are religious about recycling, install solar panels on their roof, and never forget to bring cloth bags to Whole Foods. The other couple — Gail and Gary — run the AC with the windows open and fling their empty Dasani bottles into burbling mountain streams. Lauren and Louis have a couple of cute kids. Gail and Gary did not procreate. Long term, when you factor in the impact of multiple generations of resource-sucking bipeds, who is being a better buddy to Mother Nature?
Attempts to link environmental concerns to family size is an invitation for trouble. Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us (St. Martin’s Press, 2007), has called it the third rail of environmentalism. When Al Gore mentioned “fertility management” at last year’s World Economic Forum, it became grist for the conservative outrage mill, and Gore was deemed an eco-imperialist, a disciple of Margaret Sanger, and other assorted terms of endearment. Never mind that he was merely talking about making birth control more available in poor countries.
Yet even among liberals, the topic is usually dodged. One reason is that adding children to the back-and-forth over global warming is unlikely to persuade conservatives who believe that it’s all a giant hoax anyway, created to drive capitalism to its knees. But beyond that it’s just, you know, awkward. You’re talking about very personal decisions. It feels intrusive.
So obviously the very last thing you’d want to do in such a fraught, semihysterical atmosphere is to publish a book arguing not only for the reduction of family size as a legitimate environmental strategy, but also arguing against the rights of parents to plan their own families minus governmental interference. That would be setting yourself up for scorn! Asking for ill will! Who would do that?
When I spoke to Sarah Conly not long ago, she was preparing to hike across England. We chatted about the picturesque villages she would encounter along the way. We also chatted about the death threats prompted by her last book, Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and by the New York Times opinion piece she wrote titled “Three Cheers for the Nanny State.” Her thesis is, in short, that the bellies and credit-card bills of Americans are growing more substantial and, because we struggle to rein in our snacking or our spending, there should be laws that protect us from our stupid selves.
Predictably, not everyone embraced this idea. The word “coercive” tends to turn people off, and coming out against autonomy places you at odds with nearly everyone. Many readers of her book — or, more likely, those who had seen it summarized — sent her emails letting her know that they didn’t much like her point of view, or her, for that matter. She wisely deleted most of them, but one surviving missive captures the tone: “Who is your mother?” a stranger inquired not long ago. “What did she do to make such a loathsome creature?”
Conly can look forward to still more charming emails prompted by her new book, One Child, (Oxford University Press) in which she argues that parents do not possess the right to unlimited offspring and that the government can and should, if necessary, step in and discourage them from doing what comes naturally. “Procreation,” she writes, “is not a private act.” (She’s referring here to the product of procreation rather than the act itself, which I hope we can all agree should be private.) “When people say ‘Well, you can have as many children as you want,’ they’re ignoring the fact that it’s doing harm,” Conly told me. “It seemed like a good time to say what’s obvious, which is that you don’t have a right to do this in this particular context.”
She writes that producing “biologically related children at the cost of the rest of society’s welfare isn’t, it turns out, a manifestation of generosity.” Instead we have to accept that “what people once had a right to can become something that we no longer have a right to when circumstances change and the practice becomes dangerous.”
This is an extremely tough sell. Conly knows that. And those who favor such regulations need to “be prepared to be unpopular, because no one likes to be told what to do.” When China announced last month that it was ditching its much-despised one-child policy, the move was generally seen as an overdue reform. Conly wrote an essay for The Boston Globe arguing that, while the Chinese government’s enforcement was unacceptable, the idea itself has merit. Online commenters deemed her a “useful idiot” peddling “Malthusian claptrap.” Another reader emailed: “Your parents should have aborted you.”
Conly doesn’t pretend to be a climate scientist. Instead what she’s doing is attempting to construct the intellectual framework for laws that would make having more children than the government prescribes a finable offense. She’s assuming that we will collectively arrive at the conclusion that there need to be fewer of us, but that we lack the fortitude to follow through. The philosopher is here to buck us up.
This is not entirely new territory. The classic work in the-kids-are-not-all-right genre is Bill McKibben’s 1998 treatise/memoir, Maybe One (Simon & Schuster). McKibben, who was sounding the alarm back when climate change wasn’t a household phrase, explains in the book that he and his wife originally considered not having any children in order to ease the burden on a crowded planet, but that they “kept thinking, kept wanting,” and concluded that a solitary son or daughter might be ethically permissible. (They had a daughter and stuck to the only-one mission.)
More recently, Christine Overall’s book Why Have Children? (MIT Press, 2012) poses a question almost no one asks. Overall, a professor of philosophy at Queen’s University, in Ontario, inspects the issue from every conceivable, so to speak, angle. For instance, she shoots holes in an argument made by the philosopher David Benatar in his oddly amusing 2006 book, Better Never to Have Been (Oxford University Press), that nonexistence is preferable because existence can often be a bummer. Overall concludes, on the contrary, that being alive can be worth the potential downsides.
Unlike McKibben, Overall is not primarily concerned with the environment, but she does work her way around to overpopulation and the possibility it will lead to human extinction. She decides that couples should have no more than two children — enough to replace themselves, but no more, a rule she believes is “easily justified.” Only having one child, Overall worries, might lead to a world without enough nurses and doctors to care for the elderly. Also our numbers might be reduced so significantly that our kind eventually disappears from the planet — which is not Overall’s goal.
Encouraging couples to have only two children is not a terribly radical position, at least not in the United States. The average number of children per woman is slightly under two, so if every adult had “one each,” the population would actually increase. Overall sees two as an upper limit; if some couples want to have one, that’s OK by her.
Both McKibben and Overall tiptoe around mandates. McKibben doesn’t wish to offend friends who drive minivans weighted down with progeny. “I don’t think it’s necessary for every family to have but a single child,” he writes. “All I want is to remove ‘population’ from the category of abstraction and make it the very real consideration of how many children you and I decide to bear.”
Of course, you might see how, after reading an entire book about how having only one kid is morally superior, those parents of multiples might feel a teensy bit defensive.
Likewise, Overall is only giving advice, not advocating restrictions. “I am not suggesting this reproductive limit be legally required or enforceable or that its violation be legally punishable.” Nor does she support measures that would provide families incentives for having fewer children, because that would indirectly penalize the more fruitful. Instead she sees it as a matter of “individual moral responsibility.”
You might see how, after reading an entire book about how having only one kid is morally superior, those parents of multiples might feel a teensy bit defensive.
This is where Conly breaks ranks. She favors laws and punishments. Her position can’t help but bring to mind China’s one-child policy, along with that government’s abhorrent record of forced abortions and sterilizations. Conly naturally finds that record repugnant, but doesn’t think that because one government abuses its power that all governments should surrender theirs. She imagines a humane system of financial penalties on a sliding scale “with much greater fines for people with much greater incomes.”
None of the three makes a case for childlessness. Overall advises people on the fence about having children “not to miss” the experience, while simultaneously reminding them not to go overboard. Conly notes that “our standard model of a good life typically involves having some children,” and doesn’t question that model. McKibben raises an eyebrow at those who decide children are simply too much bother. While he doesn’t outright condemn the child-free among us, he admits to having “no wish to become them.”
It’s left to cheekier writers then to disparage babies. In her essay, “Children: Pro or Con?,” from the 1978 classic Metropolitan Life, the congenitally cranky Fran Lebowitz notices that tiny humans “do not look well in evening clothes” and “tend to be sticky.” The first assertion is subjective, the second indisputable. Corinne Maier’s 2007 book No Kids: 40 Good Reasons Not to Have Children, which often adopts a Lebowitz-like tone, was a best seller in France. Maier is the author of more sober fare, including a book on Jacques Lacan, along with the playfully provocative Hello Laziness! Why Hard Work Doesn’t Pay.
At times, No Kids reads like satire. She grouses that toddlers will spoil an otherwise lovely trip to a museum; that they keep you from sleeping in; that you can’t smoke or get drunk around them. They are, she writes, boring, demanding, and will wreck your sex life — all to no purpose: “Why wear yourself out for a future that doesn’t include you?”
But the book is more serious than those examples suggest. Maier ventures into gender politics, maintaining that even in the age of the supposedly helpful, domesticated husband, women still mostly get stuck with the dirty work of child rearing, echoing Sheryl Sandberg’s stance that if women are going to lean in, men need to be “more ambitious in their homes.” The environment is not Maier’s main consideration, but when she gets around to it she doesn’t pull punches. “If you live in Europe or America, then having kids is immoral,” Maier, a mother of two, writes. “Always wasting more limited resources for a voracious lifestyle, always overspending, always guzzling gas, always more destructive of the environment.”
It’s the sort of case you can imagine being made by Peter Singer.
As it happens, Singer has weighed in. The most famous utilitarian around believes that, as “greenhouse gases … are getting very close to a tipping point,” mandating smaller families should at least be on the table. “I don’t think we ought to shrink away from considering that as a possibility,” he said during a 2013 conference on women’s rights. Singer hopes, though, that such drastic, top-down actions won’t be necessary, that education and contraception will do the trick. But does anyone, Bill McKibben notwithstanding, truly factor the environment into their family planning?
Tim Kreider doesn’t think so. In the essay anthology Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids (Picador, 2015), Kreider, a cartoonist and essayist, declares that overpopulation and the environment are “perfectly valid and persuasive reasons for not procreating,” but that he doesn’t think anyone actually makes that choice based on those kinds of issues. “Our most important decisions in life are profoundly irrational ones,” he writes, “made subconsciously for reasons we seldom own up to.”
One knock against the one-child goal is the perception that onlies — or singletons, as they’re called in some circles — end up selfish, odd, and emotionally stunted. If that’s true, then saying we need more of them is a nonstarter. Conly mostly waves off this question, suggesting it’s probably false, or at least that there are too many variables to make sweeping statements. McKibben spends a good chunk of his book batting down the early-20th-century pseudoscience from whence the fear of only children originated.
Toni Falbo, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, is the go-to national expert on singletons. For decades, Falbo has trumpeted research showing that only children are just as well adjusted as those with siblings, that they do not fit the socially maladroit mold. But even if these kids turn out reasonably fine, what about their parents? Will having one feel like enough? Falbo thinks the evidence says yes. “By the time you’re 50, on average you’ll be perfectly happy with whatever number of children you end up with,” she says.
Falbo’s research is cited prominently in Lauren Sandler’s 2013 book One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and the Joy of Being One (Simon & Schuster), a book that is mostly cultural study with a dash of memoir. Sandler’s chapter on overpopulation concedes that less-developed countries are largely responsible for population growth, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us are off the hook. The richest countries consume the lion’s share of resources and therefore “play just as big a role in hastening the earth’s demise.” Or perhaps even bigger: According to one estimate, the energy consumption of one American equals that of 32 Kenyans.
Sandler writes that “so many greener-than-thou parents, quite literally failing to see the plundered forest for the trees when considering the environmental costs of families, debate the righteousness of what we consume, and not how many of us are consuming it.”
Conly expects the backlash from her newest book to be more vehement than what she endured after the last one. It’s one thing to propose banning cigarettes and supersize sodas. It’s another to tell someone they don’t have the right to fulfill their dream of a large, or even average-size, family. Also, while most Americans believe climate change is real, those who worry a great deal about its consequences remain a distinct minority, according to a 2014 Gallup poll. If it’s not much of a threat, then fundamentally altering your life to help slow it down seems crazy.
The conversation McKibben tried to gently start in the late 1990s remains relegated to the fringe. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth having. Maybe its time has come, and perhaps Conly’s bolder approach — she calls it a “shove” rather than a “nudge” — will succeed where milder entreaties failed. “The thing I notice in talking to people is that they have trouble arguing against the reasoning involved,” says Conly. “There are people who will reject the idea because they’re not thinking, and there will be people who are willing to think.”
Tom Bartlett is a senior writer at The Chronicle.
