The climate crisis is a reproductive justice crisis: How do you protect your health and your children in an increasingly dangerous and toxic environment? How do you decide whether or not to have a baby when a healthy and stable future is increasingly jeopardized? Even with access to fertility regulation, no one makes reproductive ‘choices’ freely in the face of so many economic and environmental pressures.  

Some of us look to the future and can’t imagine bringing children into such a hot, troubled world. For some of us, exposure to the fossil fuel industry has already jeopardized our health, or the health of our children. Parenthood has galvanized many of us towards greater action. For most of us, the threats to our reproductive freedom have been radicalizing. The climate impacts we see are unfolding during a time of increasing restrictions on reproductive self-determination and access to healthcare.


Climate action is often framed as ‘for the children’ or ‘for the next generation.’  For us, unlike for many of our leaders, ‘future generations’ is a practical matter: It is impossible for us to become parents without considering what kind of world our children will face. Our leaders have repeatedly favored big fossil fuel business over a habitable future for our next generation. The climate crisis is encroaching on any conceivable future, and amplifying the injustices that already threaten many lives.



Climate change has been an internationally recognized threat for over thirty years. In that time, lawmakers have broken trust with us again and again by subsidizing the fossil fuel industry with tens of billions of dollars a year. Without government support, we can’t shelter our children from another Katrina or another Harvey, a California wildfire or Washington mudslide, and we can’t feed them when drought destroys our food supply. We need government support to keep carcinogenic fracking chemicals out of our water table, and to combat the spread of Zika.


Our elected officials must stop giving away our tax dollars to the industry that is killing us, and must stop attacking our reproductive sovereignty and access to affordable care. We fight for a resilient, safe, and just society, and we call on our leaders to support this vision.

We demand the right to make reproductive decisions free from massive, avoidable, government-supported harm.

We demand that the US end fossil fuel subsidies as an act of commitment toward our generation and those that follow.

We offer these testimonies as an act of conscience for our nation’s future.

The Analysis

As the  climate changes, all the stakes are raised. We don’t need to look overseas or to a distant future to see life-threatening environmental and health impacts intensified by greenhouse gas pollution.

These increasing disruptions to ordinary life also threaten access for the vulnerable to needed support: infants and children, the pregnant, the elderly, people with disabilities and chronic illness, people escaping domestic abuse, all depend on caregivers and systems of support that are already overstretched and underfunded. In emergencies, those networks are often conscripted into service for the general population. At the same time, states of emergency will create more opportunities for human and civil rights to be curtailed, including access to family planning services. On these issues Leah Quimby, a volunteer for Planned Parenthood, reflects:

“Reproductive choices are super important, considering the effects of climate change on the environment, on people. Now we have Zika virus coming, and they show maps of it coming into Texas, and in the meanwhile you have the government cutting down on abortion, birth control, and access to reproductive healthcare in Texas, leaving people in a real bind.”

Some people feel that their commitment to climate work would foreclose the possibility of parenting. Activist and Climate Disobedience Center co-founder Jay O'Hara says:

“In thinking about my role in bringing about the changes that I think we need to make [my] model is, in some ways, a religious model. I’m a Quaker–and this is not to say that Quakers have had anything against raising children, but there’s a lot of history in religious life of putting aside the commitment that one would have to make to family and to children in favor of a higher commitment.”

At the same time, parents have described to us feeling locked out of activism, or struggling to stay involved because time and money is short, because activist spaces do not often accommodate children, or because they find themselves dismissed as ‘merely’ a mother, not meeting the conventions of radicalism.  What is clear is that, despite an array of technologies with which to regulate our fertilities, no one makes reproductive ‘choices’ freely in the face of so many economic and environmental pressures.  

We need to welcome, support and hear the full chorus of voices: people who are childless by choice or circumstance, parents, parents-to-be, and people who are undecided. Only by seeing how we are interconnected, what we share and can’t bear to lose, do we build a movement.

There is a lot to talk about, to defend against, and to prepare for. Climate change impacts every social issue and will test every community, and everyone’s vision of justice. Allyship can not just be a theoretical ideal as the crisis deepens. In order to address these challenges head on, we need to build a bridge between two movements with a poor track record of working together. Environmentalists need to get right on reproductive issues: no more scapegoating mothers and mothers-to-be for the climate crimes of big business and our leaders; an end to Big Green’s support for coercive use of birth control and incentivized sterilization programs in poor communities and developing countries. No more scare-mongering about the Populations Bomb in the face of a much more combustible threat.  And the reproductive justice movement needs to foreground real climate solutions before the climate crisis further undermines the reproductive protections they’ve fought so hard to attain.

We are working to help people speak out about why they are fighting. When we can tell our truths clearly, we find the strength to take greater actions. When Camila Thorndike of Our Climate testified in front of the DNC 2016 Platform Drafting Committee, she told them:

“Plenty of my peers, including myself, have questioned whether the world is safe to have children. And I think we all need to really consider our priorities if that’s what this generation of Americans is asking ourselves.”

After attending a Conceivable Future house party in Massachusetts, Aly Johnson-Kurts traveled to Paris as a youth delegate to COP21, and publicly challenged her governor, Peter Shumlin, to end his support of fracking in Vermont. Michael Foster, who later served prison time for turning off an emergency valve on a Washington pipeline and stopping the flow of tar sands oil into the US along with four other activists, testified about fatherhood and climate action in 2016 at a house party in Seattle.

It is only when we get together and acknowledge the depth of the well of our feeling, the size of the risk we are facing, the enormity of the crimes that are being committed, that we can take the kinds of actions this moment requires. Climate action matters because Black Lives Matter. Climate action matters because we hold all genders to be equally precious. Climate action matters because reproductive rights are human rights and a knowledge of history demands justice. If we hope to arrive in a just future, each step we take must be made from that same material.