Angela Gott—Age 65, New York
I am now 65. I never married, nor had children. My sister is 60 and she never had children either. Both of us decided in our teens that we never wanted to have children. We were raised in Louisville, Kentucky and are college educated. Our adoptive parents had “time” to enjoy their married lives for 11 years before adopting me in 1951 and my sister in 1956.
We lived on a quiet suburban street and the children and their pets were allowed to roam free and we did. There were still farms and forests nearby and creeks too and fossil beds in the slabs of rock and crayfish and frogs and tiny fish lived in those creeks too. The 50s and the 60s were wonderful times to be in childhood and teens in the USA. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson was published in 1962 and I was 11. By the time I was 15 ½, 1967 I had decided because of the Vietnam War I would never give birth on US Soil. By the time I started college 1969 and learned about Zero Population Growth, I realized this planet was already facing a crisis due to overpopulation. Everything that I learned in my courses–the first Earth Day was in April,1970, reinforced within me that I was wise not to want to give birth on this planet. I was in graduate school in NY when Ronald Reagan took office and began to implement his supply side economic policies. I was 29 in 1981 and realized it was the beginning of the end of the middle class and there was no way I could even afford to raise a child in the US because of the economy and rising costs and that the quality of life that I had enjoyed as a child was permanently gone by the time I was 30. Now we began to have homeless families in plain sight on our streets, due to Reagan’s policies.
I began to notice when I came back to Kentucky in August to visit relatives, from NY, how hot and humid and sticky it was in Louisville summers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, compared to how it had been in the 1950s and 1960s when most households got along just fine with window fans. The ponds that used to freeze solid for ice skating every winter didn’t freeze hard enough for the kids of my friends to enjoy in their childhoods, as they raised the next generation. Kids had “tubes in their ears” now and had food allergies too which had not been around when I was a child. Everyone in Louisville now had to have central air conditioning and their cars had to have A/C too just to survive the summers. I still didn’t need this in upstate NY. There was a gradual awareness that pesticides in our water, in our soil had not only threatened the reptiles, amphibians, and fish but were now harming us too. Everyone became more environmentally conscious that chemicals in our environment were destroying our food, air, soil and the climate was changing and getting warmer and warmer. So I’ve seen a diminished quality of life over my lifetime and I am so very glad I never brought kids into this world, subjecting them to have to survive a “lesser life” than what I had so enjoyed, to grow up in during the 1950s and 1960s. I do feel the USA’s best days are behind us.
When the film “Waterworld” was released in 1995, based on the 1986 screenplay, I do not think most Americans accepted that concept as a conceivable reality, but now they would appreciate the scarcity of water and appreciate how precious it is and agree that water sustains life and access is diminishing. I do not think any of us take having access to clean water for granted anymore. It has been very hard for me to understand why members of a political party would collectively decide to refuse to recognize the obvious fact of global warming and go on about their lives, developing legislative policies benefiting oil,gas, and chemical industries as though global warming does not exist and continue to be so socially and ethically irresponsible, as their actions perpetuate and escalate the destruction of our planet. They have grandchildren and great-grandchildren and what they are doing threatens their very own progeny’s lives too. This realization has been my primary consolation, because my personal decision not to bring kids onto this planet in the first place, means I personally have no regrets, nor guilt for inflicting harm on innocent lives, for condemning them to some kind of horrific future for a life of suffering, living in fear or having anxiety about having access to shelter, food, and water, just having their basic needs met. Food allergies have increased over time and our food supply is now chemically compromised and threatened. Drought and Famine and more catastrophic diseases are going to be in the world of future mankind. My kids and grand-kids and great-grand-kids won’t ever have to endure that. I sincerely feel I gave “them” the greatest gift of all, by simply not having them.
