Perspective of a Chinese adoptee—Megan Warner, Age 25

As a Chinese adoptee whose life was determined by one policy that violated the reproductive rights of women, I now make parallels to the ethical questions I have to consider as a young woman and a climate educator. My birth mother was forced to give me up because of the One Child Policy and the preference of males in the family over females. For me, this created a loss of culture, loss of family, and loss of identity. But for my birth mother, this created a sacrifice that I can only think of as a radical act of love.

 Now, I can’t imagine that the U.S. would ever enforce a law such as the One Child Policy in China. Yet, the fact that I have to even question my desire to have children is a reflection of something wrong in our society. For some international adoptees too, this can conflict with a desire to have a child that looks like them. Being raised in a white family, I never questioned my difference in appearance. In fact, I often joked that I was whitewashed. My hope is that DNA in one day will reunite me with members of my birth family. But who knows how long that could take? Or if it will ever happen? Climate change is a clock for me. I see my days left on Earth as a 25-year-old as precious, but limited, and the only future I envision for myself is spending the rest of my life fighting for a habitable planet and trying to stay sane in the midst of it. I can only manage to ponder how my love of hiking and being outside is being jeopardized by the threat of climate change. I can barely think about my future children, especially when I work with children on a daily basis and worry for their future. Now that I teach sustainability to K-12 students through the lens of climate emotions, I hear how much hopelessness, anger, and fear that youth have to carry around each day. To pass that emotional toll onto a young mind is my biggest fear of raising children in a climate-changed world. At the same time, the idea of having a child seems to make life worth living. Mostly though, I think I will wait a bit to see if we start acting drastically on climate change. Something in me has already stubbornly accepted that I will likely not have a child.