Who Else Was in the Room When They Weighed Having Children

Nine Americans have described in public, in their own words, weighing children against a warming future. In every account, climate shared the decision with partners, paychecks, jobs, parents and fear.

Mary Annaïse Heglar buys her nephew books about animals. In a 2024 podcast conversation with the climate journalist Amy Westervelt, Heglar, a climate writer then living in New Orleans, said each one comes with a little guilt. She wonders whether the animals on those pages will still be around when he's grown. She talked about "how much I love my nephew," and about what she owes the children who are already in her life. Of children of her own, she said, "I'm not totally sure that children are in my future," and added that the uncertainty is there "even outside of climate."

That last phrase is easy to pass over. The public argument over climate and children tends to sort people into two groups: those having kids despite the warming and those refusing because of it. Give people room to talk at length, though, and the climate question rarely shows up alone. It arrives with a spouse who always pictured a big family, a graduate program starting in the fall, a salary that finally feels steady, and parents who keep asking about grandchildren.

Below are nine Americans who wrote or spoke about this in essays, radio interviews and podcasts published between 2011 and 2024. At the time they went on the record, three had decided to have a child or to try for one, three had decided against it, and three didn't know. Those positions describe the moment they spoke, and for most of them the public record stops there. I've grouped them by what sat beside the climate question in their own telling, not by what they chose.

The people they love

In 2016, NPR's Jennifer Ludden spoke with Travis Rieder, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins. Bioethicists study moral questions in medicine and science, and Rieder's research on climate and procreation had followed him home. His work pointed toward restraint: "Maybe we should protect our kids by not having them." His wife, Sadiye, had long wanted a large family. They talked it through many times and settled on one biological child, leaving adoption open if they wanted more later. Their daughter was two when the story aired, and Rieder called her "the most amazing thing we've ever done with our lives."

Surveys ask one person what they think. Inside a household, the answer usually gets worked out between two people, and sometimes their parents have opinions too.

Meghan Hoskins felt that pull from several directions. She was 23, a graduate student in environmental studies, and undecided when NPR met her in Keene, New Hampshire, at a gathering run by Conceivable Future, a group that brings people together to talk through climate change and the decision to have kids. She had always wanted children. She pictured "little redheaded babies." Her parents wanted grandchildren. She didn't expect the boyfriend she had then to understand why climate made her hesitate. Part of what weighed on her was the future, and part of it was whether there was anyone she could talk to about it. The gathering was one answer to that second problem: a room where she didn't have to explain herself before she could start.

In a 2018 essay for Asparagus Magazine, a publication about sustainable living, the writer Jessie Szalay described the children she and her partner, Ryan, might have. She wrote it while the two of them were still deciding. Much of what she imagined was about passing things down. She kept up Jewish family traditions partly with those future children in mind, and she wanted to share travel and culture with them. "My children would be wanted and loved," she wrote. Her question was what that love would be handing them.

Amber Abram, 35 and raised in Kansas City, told KCUR, the city's public radio station, in 2022 that she and her husband had decided together not to have children. The reporters noted that climate shaped both that decision and the work she chose. The decision then had to hold up in a community that expects marriage to lead to babies, and she gets judged for it. "We feel really comfortable with our decision," she said. They made it as a couple and now field the pushback together.

The money

Elizabeth Rush, a writer in Providence who would go on to have a son, had spent years reporting from communities living with floodwater. By 35 she had what a lot of people wait for: "a stable, loving relationship and a paycheck." "I wanted to have a child," she told Climate One, a climate interview program, in 2023. Having financial footing is part of what let her take that wish seriously.

For Lisa Hymas, an editor who called herself a "financially comfortable American" in a 2011 essay for Grist, money pointed somewhere else. She could afford a child, and her essay mentions no hardship. What she looked at was how much energy and how many resources a comfortable American life uses up, and the assumption that a woman in her position would of course have kids. "For environmental as well as personal reasons," she wrote, "I've decided not to have children." She put both reasons in the same sentence and didn't rank them.

Szalay, still deciding with Ryan, was confident the two of them could keep their own children secure for decades. That confidence was part of what bothered her. Plenty of other children wouldn't have that security. Being comfortable didn't settle her question; it raised a second one, about why her kids should be protected when so many others wouldn't be.

All three of these money stories are about having enough. That may partly come down to who I picked, but I suspect it also says something about whose accounts get published in the first place.

The work

Rush's paycheck came from her work, and that work brought an invitation to Antarctica. Saying yes meant putting off trying to get pregnant for about a year. She went, carrying both the wish for a child and a willingness to rethink it. A work trip set her timeline as much as anything she knew about rising seas.

Allie Seroussi was 27, living in Seattle, and about to start graduate school when she spoke with Here & Now in 2019. She had decided not to give birth, at least for now. "I'm about to go to graduate school," she said, and much of her reasoning followed from there. Finishing school would push motherhood into her early thirties, which meant a small child growing up in exactly the years she feared. Adoption, fostering and being around for her friends' kids all stayed open. She called her decision personal and changeable, and said it wasn't advice for anyone else.

Szalay worried about something more everyday: her energy. A child would take time and attention, and she wondered whether parenthood would pull her away from climate activism. Madeline Ostrander, an environmental journalist in Seattle who decided to try for a baby, wrote in The Nation in 2016 about an older fear, that motherhood would make her life smaller. Women were weighing that long before anyone said "climate change." For both writers, climate got added to the old question and sat beside it.

The fear

When fear comes up in these accounts, it usually comes as a scene.

Seroussi, the Seattle grad student, pictured one: "I would have to find my child shelter because of climate change." It's an imagined responsibility, and it shaped what she chose. Hoskins, who pictured the redheaded babies, imagined something worse: "I am afraid that they will eventually have to live in a world where there is no fresh water." Szalay, sure she could provide, still wrote, "my kids will still suffer because of it."

Ostrander's essay moves from unsure toward wanting a child. She wrote about "joy and love," and also, "I worried how to keep a child safe." Neither set of grandparents pushed much, so the decision stayed with her and her husband. "By last fall, I'd finally decided to open that door." She got pregnant and miscarried at ten weeks. She had said yes, and the essay still ends without a baby. Deciding to try, getting pregnant and giving birth run on separate timelines, and the phrase "the climate decision" tends to fold them into one.

The fear also keeps going after a child arrives. In the 2023 interview, Rush looked back over her son's early life and said, "I think I did miscalculate." She meant that the conditions he lives through might be harder than she'd expected when she chose to have him. She wasn't saying she regretted him. And Heglar, with no children of her own, already feels some of that fear when she buys animal books for a nephew she loves.

What the surveys measure

Two large surveys help show where these nine people sit. Neither can tell their stories for them.

In a 2025 study in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), researchers surveyed 2,834 Americans ages 16 to 24 in 2021 and 2022. Respondents weren't chosen at random, so the results may not line up exactly with all young Americans. One question asked whether awareness of climate change makes them question having children. About a quarter (25.2 percent) said yes, about a third (32.2 percent) said maybe, and 42.6 percent said no.

That wording is narrower than it sounds. A "no" means climate isn't making that person question it, which isn't the same as planning to have kids. A "yes" means someone is questioning, which isn't the same as having decided against. A survey that asks about the questioning can't tell you much about the deciding.

The same paper places climate among young people's other worries. In the authors' words, "Finances and career were more concerning to young people" than climate change, and they set climate worry alongside COVID-19 and world events. That matches the nine accounts, where climate kept turning up next to a paycheck or a graduate program.

In 2024, Pew Research Center asked adults ages 18 to 49 who had never had children, and said they probably wouldn't, why not. Twenty-six percent named concern about the environment, including climate, as a major reason. Thirty-six percent named the cost of raising a child. Fifty-seven percent said they just didn't want kids. People could pick more than one reason, and many did, which is about what you'd expect after reading the nine accounts. Whether any of this changes how many babies are born is a separate question; a 2025 analysis of U.S. survey data found no clear link between women's climate concern and whether they later had children.

What happened next

For two of the nine, we know what came next.

In a conversation published by Terrain.org in February 2025, Rush said, "My son is three and a half years old and my daughter is just two months old." The conversation doesn't say whether climate weighed for or against the second child.

In October 2025, the Associated Press reported that Rieder still had one child. "Having children is a deeply meaningful and important activity to people," he said. "It's also carbon expensive." He meant that each new person adds to the emissions warming the planet. Nine years after the NPR interview, he still holds both thoughts at once.

For the other seven, the public record ends where their pieces end. Szalay's essay closes with a deadline she and Ryan had set for that fall, and the line "I have no idea what we will decide." Seroussi said her choice could change. Hoskins had a boyfriend she wasn't sure she could talk to. None of them, as far as I could find, has published a later account of what they decided.

Who gets asked

Two things about who ends up in a collection like this are worth knowing. The first is that later chapters rarely get written. We know about Rush's "miscalculate" only because she kept giving interviews. Most people who hesitated and then had children, or didn't, never publish a follow-up, so the record holds their uncertainty at a single moment, or nothing at all.

The second matters more to me. The people quoted on this question are mostly writers, researchers, students and people whose jobs already involve climate. Turning worry into sentences is part of their work. Almost none of these accounts say what anyone earns. In Pew's numbers, cost outranks environmental concerns, climate among them, as a major reason. People whose first and heaviest worry is rent or childcare are seldom the ones invited to write the essay or sit for the radio interview. So the public conversation tilts toward people secure enough that climate could become the worry they put into words. Young people in Fruitvale in Oakland, or in East Houston, working out whether they can afford a second bedroom may be weighing climate too, along with everything else, and mostly no one is asking them.

These nine accounts don't add up to advice, and none of the nine meant them that way. What they share are the questions people asked themselves. Who else is part of this decision? What does my money make possible, and for whom? What would my work gain or lose? Will the fear ease once I decide? Nobody in these accounts said it did.

In 2024, Heglar told Westervelt about the guilt that comes with each animal book she buys her nephew. She was still buying them.