Reproductive Anxieties, Tensions, and Meaning Making in an Era of Climate Change

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5. Reproductive Politics: Anxieties, Risks, and Decision-Making

Abstract

In this paper, we explore how climate-aware individuals decide whether or not to have children in the era of climate change and how they make sense of their lives on the other side, or in the midst, of making that decision. Concerns about environmental sustainability have driven waves of interventionist policy aimed at controlling women’s fertility, mirrored today in pronatalist panic about changing demographics and fertility decline. At the same time, individuals are coming to terms with their personal reproductive decision-making amid ethical considerations of having children in a future they believe will be full of suffering. Choices about childbearing are not made in a vacuum and are best understood in their social context. Our project uses in-depth interviews with individuals living in both “climate havens” and locations that have experienced climate change-related natural disasters to explore the meaning-making behind individuals’ choices to have children (or not) in an era of climate change, how their conceptions of the future and how to prepare for it shapes their reproductive decisions, including their parenting practices, and how they think about the relationship between larger macro-social issues like population growth and climate change. Our findings are organized across levels of analysis, from the micro to the macro including individual feelings, family life and community engagement, and political connections. Concerns about climate change deeply impacted participants, resulting in feelings of grief, anxiety, and hope. Participants experienced tensions at the nexus of individual decision-making, climate awareness, and their communities. Many of them made significant changes to their lives as a result of climate concern. They articulated different understandings about the relationship between population and environmental degradation that focused on the extent to which “overpopulation” is a cause of climate change. Ultimately, climate change concern shapes behaviors, ideas, and meaning making about reproduction at every level.

Authors

• Jamie Louise Budnick, Cornell University

• Anna Claire Church, Cornell University