BIRTH STRIKE:
A STORY IN ARGUMENTS

An Argument Against Fear

In an interview on UK morning TV in March 2019, two women in their twenties and early thirties were discussing babies. I was supposed to be doing something, hooking one productive hour onto another, but the babies caught my eye for the reason that they would never exist. The sound of them would never crawl out of a hypothesis. One of the women had founded a campaign group, whose aim was to demand urgent governmental action on the climate crisis, including a decarbonisation of the economy, but also to open a space of solidarity with others who were too afraid to become parents due to environmental collapse. ‘You don’t want to pass that fear on,’ the interviewer offered, nodding, as if this particular fear was a genetic condition, lurking in the blood. ‘I’m concerned there is no future,’ the woman, Blythe, said in answer, which should put an end to any condition, blood-carried or otherwise.

The most recent climate models demonstrate that we’re heading for 5 °C of warming by the end of the century, depending on the roles of aerosols, cloud cover, feedback loops. If I had you now, you’d be over eighty years old by 2100.

The strip at the bottom of the screen read: ‘The women not having kids because of climate change’. It didn’t mention that they were choosing not to bear children. The existence of a choice appeared to go without saying, as if the climate crisis couldn’t force childlessness upon anyone, or make us do anything that we don’t want to do.

Over a cup of coffee and on an average morning, laughing at your father’s improvised songs and barefoot filth covering the carpet, eighty years seems ancient. What promised an autumnal lid of a day with thick rain on the inside has lifted to reveal blood red, pumpkin orange, a river green — the possibility of change in all directions. Eighty years carry an uncertain, therefore endless, number of our weirdo, theatrical mornings.

As if what the climate models said was: we guarantee that your child will live till eighty. They are rather saying the opposite — that I’d never be able to tell you, honestly: ‘don’t worry, you’ll live until you’re very old.’

[As opposed to the main text of this essay, the italicised sections are based on notes I made at the time when Adam and I joined Birth Strike. They also include excerpts from a sound piece called ‘Brain Child’, which we created together for the event ‘Is There a Future?’, in London, July 2019.]

Sitting at our kitchen table, chomping on oat cakes, this ‘not having kids’ acted as a lifeline, making it deceivingly straightforward to grab, to hold on to. I kept chomping, one bite elation, one bite ‘what the hell is this new thing now?’, whilst immediately looking up the Birth Strike website. I sent them an email with the subject line ‘Others who feel like this’. Next, I texted Adam who was at work, equal parts bored and terrified for quite a few months now. Rude customers never give you the impression that they know about existential threats; the need for impeccable service overshadows any sharing of vulnerability. Lately, more young children had started coming in to the shop where he worked, which was unusual, considering it was a whisky shop. He described them as ‘flirty’, by which he meant that they tried to engage him in conversation as he shelved Lagavulin. Their parents would look over to him and say things like ‘oh, she likes you!’ — always with a thicker-than-usual Northern accent when he was relaying the scene. My theory was that encounters with small humans took him back to Bradford. He didn’t know what to do with their willingness to acknowledge him as a fellow inhabitant of earth, and his subsequent reaction: something like joy. It seemed so perfectly possible to have that kind of life, to parent someone into the future, just not for us and in this late segment of history.

Private and Public Arguments

‘To put it in perspective,’ says one of the world’s leading climate scientists, ‘how many of us would choose to buckle up our grandchildren in an airplane seat if we knew there was as much as a 1 in 20 chance of the plane crashing? With climate change that can pose existential threats, we have already put them in that plane.’

You are hungry, and way too hot. I blow my fevered breath on the space between your eyebrows. You learn to walk and there’s either a scorched earth or only water under your feet. I find myself picking you up all the time, restricting your contact with our uncertain ground. The aeroplane image makes me realise I’m very unspecific when I hypothesise about injuries to your body — that the future, in spite of so many scientific articles, remains vertiginous, as the suffering of others always does. It’s as difficult to imagine what dying in a plane crash looks like. The gap between the knowing and the ground.

If I do not have you, if you do not exist, then something we know for sure is that you won’t go anywhere near that plane. The problem persists for every other child, but at least I save you by not having you. Your suffering is possible, as anyone’s is, only if preceded by your being born. This kind of certainty counteracts the very nature of futures.

I tell Blythe — wondrous musician, and nowadays good friend — that I’m writing this piece. I explain that I want to better understand what our versions of Birth Strike were, what happened to them, and that I need to ask her a few questions to fill in gaps. We have a long Zoom call and laugh at how I appear to be interviewing her now, after all the times we were interviewed by others, about our wombs mostly — about what we would and wouldn’t do with them. There were a few months when I imagined myself walking around with a picture of my empty womb as a necklace, a kind of scarlet letter I’d hung there myself, which was never the same letter to any two people reading it.

I’m asking Blythe the questions I should already know the answers to (what made you go public with such a private choice? Did you feel alone when you first started? Were you worried about being judged?), but it is precisely because I think I know that the questions are necessary — so much of this story is about assumptions. Just because Blythe and I share in each other’s stories doesn’t mean that our stories are the same.

‘Birth is something most people think about at one point or another in our lives,’ she says, ‘whether we become parents, give birth, or not.’ Birth Strike was a way of telling a story that would affect people around her, and make them listen in a way which scientific news often can’t. In her experience, the decision to not have children due to fear of climate collapse was still ‘a bit hush-hush’ around the time she started Birth Strike, even in activist circles, and it certainly wasn’t talked about in mainstream media. Making her private decision public was essential for that reason: the way people weren’t talking about it was itself a part of the cognitive dissonance around climate collapse in our part of the world, in our section of that part of the world.

Any parent is constantly scared for their child’s safety. I’m told this by parents as well as non-parents, and I don’t have the resources to draw on for a reliable counter-argument. I don’t know how reality might shift if you rode into town.

Here are some things I do know: 5 °C is, of course, a global average. In the pole areas and inland, it could be twice as hot. The last time the earth experienced 4 °C above pre-industrial levels was about ten million years ago. We have never seen a world like this one before. I can’t guarantee anything when it comes to this shitstorm you would call life. In theory, no one ever could, for their children, but this, I know.

My first interview as a representative of Birth Strike was meant to be for The Guardian. I was told it would be serious and sensitive, that it would avoid sensationalism, so I agreed, then backed out the next day, blaming the timings and a sore throat. Really, there was something wrong with the light. In the mirror, brushing our teeth, I thought Adam and I looked like the kind of people who would make us nervous. After that, we both agreed to appear in a short documentary. ‘Are you absolutely sure?’ he said. ‘I think so,’ I said, stomping forward, forward, intent on bum-rushing the fear, and then I backed out of that too. The network wanted us to be filmed with one of our friends’ children, at our home perhaps, for added emotional impact. I called to decline, then stood for a while with my back against the front door, as if they might still come knocking.

Something similar happened a few times. One day, we’d decide that this particular magazine, podcast, or website understood this story, and would ask useful questions — the kind that could possibly lead to someone finding their own response. Twenty-four hours later, I’d change my mind because of a particular phrase (‘personal loss’ or ‘rejecting parenthood’, ‘the carbon footprint of a child’) which came jabbing like a strobe light in the face. Adam was always better at holding back, considering how it would impact us before taking that desperate forward step, before revealing more. I think he understood, from the beginning, that the door between private and public can never be closed completely: it leaks and it doesn’t fit the door frame. Every time someone opens it, it’s still just us in there, with a very unfinished story.

The moment I feel you, the moment your presence shows on me, or the moment I carry you — which one of these moments will make me into what I think of when I think of ‘mother’? Which one will give me a different relationship to my body and everything it does?

During the first interview we did go through with, we sat on the floor of our lounge. Both were squeezed into the space between the couch and the coffee table, without moving the coffee table, for a lower point of gravity, or the protection offered by hard surfaces on all sides. Through the speaker of one of our phones, placed on the table, level with my chin, we spoke to a US-based journalist who may not have had breakfast yet; she sounded starved but resolute, very professional, and extremely young. One of her first questions was: ‘How did you arrive at this decision?’

So, we were already heading off-piste. Look at us, I felt like saying (although she couldn’t see us), do we look like people who have arrived? We’re in our thirties and swaddling ourselves with our Gumtree furniture. The engine driving her initial question was malfunctioning. Although we were publicly talking about it, the arguments about kids or no kids were very much ongoing, still en route, the decision made every day, then remade once more:

And your father says to me without (I am the one who can tell and I could never have imagined this before I met him) meaning it:

What if this is all alarmist and we’re all going to be fine? What if we’re the deluded ones?

How do you arrive if you don’t know where you’re heading — three, four, or five degrees above pre-industrial levels, civilisation collapse in five, ten years, or twenty — if no one can tell you with certainty how quickly you, or someone else, will get there?

We take turns in answering that question whenever it burrows into us:

Yes, but what do you mean by we? And what do you mean by fine?

Do I have to be prepared for you to be the child who’s never been fine under ‘normal’ circumstances — the heartbroken, lost, and starving, systemically exploited child — in order to honestly become your parent?

Almost two years later, we talk about this too, Blythe and I: if you’re the person who publicly says ‘I can’t have a child unless things change dramatically’ and, for whatever reason, at some point you also become the person who changes your mind, without proof of enough dramatic change, what does that say about you as a person? Does it reveal that you were never serious, or that your fear was never anchored enough in reality? What does it say about the danger itself — does it indicate that it’s not as immediate anymore, nor as deadly? That it never was? The womb-letter gains weight.

Here’s another fear: that if I did change my mind, people would think I was unbelievably selfish — that I would, in fact, be objectively so. It would mean that, all along, I’d been one of those people for whom the urge to carry a life, to house a being and be their house through life, is so overwhelming that it occludes every other person who needs housing — the responsibility we feel for our own, intimate, family’s safety greater than any responsibility for other humans who facilitate that safety. Expectations of permanence emerge the moment private decisions are made public. The public realm demands a certainty from our choices and our identities which birth, or the future for that matter, by nature do not allow. Flawed, in flux or not, the moment it becomes public, the story you tell about yourself is captured for posterity, owned by others, anonymous and known. It was pendular and highly unreliable, my commitment to this cause. How could it not be, if birth underpinned it?

The Population Argument

Rewatching the interview that introduced me to Birth Strike, I’m not surprised when numbers are first mentioned. They make an appearance less than half-way through the conversation. More than a question, the population issue arrives as an offhand formality which hardly needs argument, only a quick confirmation: ‘You don’t want to pass that fear on,’ the host says, and then continues: ‘or you don’t want to continue the impact of the population.’ A full stop at the end, instead of a question mark. ‘I’m concerned we won’t have a life,’ Blythe replies. The host reads out a few examples of online comments. ‘We would be culled if we were animals,’ someone declares, ‘instead we are culling everything. We are the threat.’

What does it say about the cause and effect of climate collapse that the carbon footprint of a child is hauled in instantly wherever climate and birth are brought up? It’s always at arm’s reach, ripe and ready to start throwing around at people, and it stinks. Before anyone talks about an uninhabitable climate that already cuts children’s lives short, they turn the other way: to the effects of a child on the climate. What does it say about which children are being referred to?

In the same present tense as your father is pointing out the gunk in my eyes, it is happening. What comes for us all between 2019 and 2100 is a trail that sinks away and swings out of touch. It’s impossible to see it without getting so high up, or so close to the ground, that you lose sight of your starting point. One of your parents gets a lot of gunk in her eyes, and the other often looks at her and says, before coming anywhere near: ‘pal, you have eye matter!’

The carbon footprint of a child will (and writing this, my stomach churns at how obvious this is, that it ever needs repeating) of course depend on who the child is: where they are born, when and to whom, what advantages in life will be theirs. After coming up against the ‘population issue’, again and again, I distilled my stance on it to three main arguments, each connected to the other in ways which the numbers themselves, at a glance, are simply unable to convey.

One: it’s not about how many we are, but how we live. I often quoted a 2019 study by Oxfam about how half of the world’s lifestyle carbon emissions (that is: the child’s food, the child’s clothes, the child’s transport, and everything else this proverbial child, the one with the footprint, needs and consumes) are created by the wealthiest 10 per cent of the world’s population.

Two: following the current trajectory of global emissions, and of heating, controlling population numbers is a distraction we don’t have time for. As a strategy for mitigating catastrophe, having ‘fewer kids’ doesn’t even live on the same scale of urgency. The window in which to make a difference is far too narrow for this to be worth discussing.

Arguments three, zero, and four at once: populationist rhetoric, racism, and misogyny have gone hand in hand for centuries, and still do. Many people connect population control with distant pasts, or authoritarian regimes, which is itself nothing but a mark of privilege: a sign that you are one of the wanted ones. A few months before I began writing this piece, reports emerged of women who had been given hysterectomies against their will while in a US detention centre. Population as a focus is not merely a distraction from the much more complicated work so urgently needed — how about dismantling an economic model based on exploitation, extraction, and endless growth? — but a deadly one in and of itself. It provides an excuse for bolstering the same structures of extraction and exploitation, using the racism at their core as yet more building material.

In awkward or outwardly friendly, but hideous, civilised, and painful arguments about population, these have become my three tools. They look so disappointing in my hands, never good enough on their own, in the way that nothing which obscures the infinite complexity of systems, instead of offering a taste of what it’s like to live in and of them, is good enough. The numbering is necessary because that is how arguments work: you arrange them into a line of thought, a progression of logic. In reality, inequality informs who gets a choice over their own body; patriarchy, racism, and heteronormativity inform that inequality, and the mess we’re in — happening not in the future but between every one of these lines — was caused by all of the above. The arguments are entangled, reacting to each other in webs.

In October 2019, figures from the Adoption and Special Guardianship Leadership Board show that there are twice as many children up for adoption as there are available families in England. You could be one of these small humans. That could be my response. At present, your father and I dedicate an average of ten to twenty hours a week to climate activism, on top of our full-time jobs. If I were to mother you, biologically or otherwise, the flood gates would still open and close at the same time. Survival would be about you, first and foremost, for whom I’d be entirely responsible, my nerves wrapped around you. I think I’d love it. Sometimes, I’d hate it. I tend to get obsessed by people.

Where am I most needed? To whom else do I owe my response?

With such liability at its core, the membership of Birth Strike was unsteady, more jelly than apple, now an outburst of communication, then periods of silence. Very soon, Blythe and I were handling it alone, answering media enquiries and calling on others when needed. In Birth Strike’s declaration, we explained that we didn’t see population as a core drive of climate change. We made clear that we, in fact, weren’t telling people whether they should or shouldn’t have children — only that there’s a threat so ghastly, and so ignored by those in power, that we’re too scared to have any ourselves. In spite of this, the population argument was there, waiting for us in every conversation; every pitched article and journalist request carried with it a whiff of ‘there’s too many of us’. It was the headline we were allocated by default, after we’d explained to the journalist why that headline shouldn’t be used. This wasn’t only the case with the media. Having read and subscribed to the declaration, an increasing number of members of the Birth Strike Facebook group went on to share articles and videos about the effects of population numbers on the non-human world. In response, we introduced guidelines, asking members to refrain from posting about population, and from expressing judgement about parenthood either way.

For about a year, my Facebook notifications were filled with signals from the group, this wee nook of the internet. Seeing them flash made me brace, because more often than not, I knew roughly what was waiting. The articles, the videos, and the posts about ‘humans’ as a non-specific entity which is destroying everything else never stopped, until the group itself had ceased to exist.

Arguments as Judgements

There was this guy one day who posted a video in the Facebook group. He was sitting on a beach, palm trees in the background, talking about his fear of climate collapse. He gave specific examples of what is likely to happen to ecosystems, weather patterns, and human societies in the coming years, and raged at how negligible the action of any government is in comparison to the need. As his anger escalated, he also turned prescriptive: ‘Don’t have kids,’ he said, looking at the rest of us, at anyone who was watching the video. In the accompanying post, he wrote about how grateful he was to finally have found what he saw as a group of like-minded people. ‘Don’t have kids,’ he repeated, and I thought: ‘what would you say to me if I told you that the only reason this is hard is because I have this wanting?’

I’m not saying that I don’t think people should have kids.

I’m saying that I feel like I can’t, although maybe physically I could (by this point, who knows?) and that certainly I’m very, very scared to. This doesn’t feel like a choice — a rejection or an acceptance of you, whoever you may be. A choice would be ‘I want to’ or ‘I don’t want to’, not ‘I want to but the wankers who started funding climate denial decades before I was born have made it too dangerous for you to exist’.

I removed the video and posted an upbeat message to the group, asking members to ‘please read the guidelines before posting’. The person who had posted the video responded by telling us we were a joke. I took the conversation to a private message, where I wrote that I hadn’t wanted to shut him down. I explained why I thought personal judgement wasn’t helpful (history of coercion, the human right of ultimately deciding over your own body), and then I offered to talk with him more about our reasoning. A minute later, the response came, in which he told me to fuck off. I really didn’t get it; I was just like any other climate denialist, in his view, with a rehearsed line where my spine should be. I wasn’t being consistent and my heart, obviously, wasn’t in it, otherwise how else could I censor him? At this point, I blocked him, and then I did feel like I had failed, not with what I said, but by keeping anything else from being said. I’d made a choice to talk about this stuff publicly. This is what I should be prepared for.

Looking at that exchange now, it reminds me of the time Blythe went on Fox News and was told by the presenter Tucker Carlson that she ‘should have some children’. ‘They put things into perspective,’ he said, as he glanced at his notes, this white man with a gargantuan platform, wrapping things up. For or against procreation, you’re still telling someone what they should do with their body, how they should survive in this world, and survive their body in this world. All such judgements are linked — homophobia and transphobia, as well as misogyny, are siblings in a patriarchal society. Forced sterilisation and forced birth, like conversion therapy, are acts of abuse, and they are advanced by a culture of judgement. If I say ‘I am too afraid to have children in this climate’, what someone might hear is ‘this climate is too dangerous for children’ or even ‘who could possibly have children knowing this is what the climate is like?’ The distortion isn’t a built-in mechanism — a natural instinct which as humans we can’t escape — it’s privilege defending itself, holding on to its power by exerting control over our bodies.

What kind of ‘mine’ could you be? What kind of ‘yours’ could I? Long before ‘demisexual’ was a term, released, juggled, and offered to me by new youth, and long before I met your father, I knew that my wanting never started with sex, nor with gender. Sexual attraction was never wanting’s catalyst, nor what sustains my most intense longing for another human. How does this queerness of mine, the wanting that grows very slowly, in the mind, connecting only under its own emotional terms with a kind of sexual desire, define the ideas I have of myself as ‘mother’? Or as someone conceiving through sex, carrying a child as part of an outwardly heteronormative relationship, giving birth?

I say to your other parent: ‘I remember sitting in the car with my dad once. I was definitely a teenager still, and I told him I didn’t want children. He said, “just wait ten years.” I think I said it because it’s easier to say you don’t want something than to say that it is beyond you, that your body simply doesn’t work that way.’

Arguments About Choice

More recently, I took part in a discussion on a radio show. Four of us had been invited onto the panel, live-streamed digitally from wherever we were, which meant that I was, once again, at my kitchen table, in the same chair from which I’d sent my first message to Blythe. The host began the segment by addressing me. I had ‘chosen not to have children for the sake of the planet’, she said. Could I elaborate on this?

There’s such a gap between how that question is phrased and any reply I could honestly offer that I had to retreat and adjust her question first. Otherwise, everything would have become a farce. ‘Well, first of all,’ I started, ‘I wouldn’t say I’m not having children for the sake of the planet, but for the sake of my child.’ I added that the nature of birth and decisions around it are very uncertain (back and forth, a pendulum hanging around my neck), so that, in essence, I actually remained undecided. There was a pause at that point; this was not the story they’d asked for. I waited for her to comment, or to ask a follow-up question, but instead she turned to one of the other speakers. For the next fifteen minutes, I sat and peered out of my window, where the river that day looked like dishwater, and pretended I was long-distance running on my chair to get rid of excess adrenaline, until I realised that they might not ask me anything else, that my role in this discussion was, most likely, played out.

‘If we had a child,’ Adam says, ‘how would we keep them from becoming an asshole? Genuinely, what if they choose to become a banker? Or a Tory?’

You will not be someone who’s had. And you will be had in so many ways I can’t handle.

In her book On Infertile Ground, gender and climate-change scholar Jade S. Sasser explores the role of women as ‘sexual stewards’. People with wombs carry the responsibility of perpetuating human life, but not haphazardly. We are supposed to hold our future in perfect balance between our ribs and pelvic floors, to handle it rationally, have kids at the reasonable rate, regardless of where and under what circumstances. Discussions about population, nowadays, are increasingly framed as being all about female empowerment, educating girls in developing countries, and granting them the ability to choose. This sidesteps the racist history of explicit population-control rhetoric, but the empowered girls, Sasser argues, are still based on the caricature of an entirely independent individual. ‘The private consumer choice model is so pervasive as part of American culture,’ she writes (and I would extend that to ‘late-capitalist culture’), ‘that it deeply informs our ideas about morality, individualism, and personal responsibility in a range of ways — including how we think about reproduction and environmentalism.’

It’s not unlike the food industry’s response to broader climate awareness, how hope for collective survival is supposed to be speared on your fork. It’s a bit like so-called ‘flight-shaming’ (which in its original Swedish incarnation wasn’t something you made others feel but something you might feel yourself: flight-shame, interestingly, not flight-shaming). In narratives surrounding consumerism, survival comes purely from the choices we make in the shopping aisles, and our wombs appear to also have ended up in the shopping aisles. You have chosen not to have children for the sake of the planet, the women not having kids because of climate change implies that your individual power is greater than any environment your survival, and your child’s, depend on. It’s the narrative framework we step into, whenever we talk about birth and climate.

‘If we had a child,’ your father says, ‘what would be the best way to make sure they were interested in music? Should I pretend I was never a drummer and hide all the instruments in the flat? You know that kids are never interested in what their parents like.’

‘If we had a child,’ I say. ‘We could do that. We’d be allowed.’

‘What does that mean, to “have” a child?’

How may I have you in a way that’s not infected with the ownership that has us all?

Toward the end of that radio panel, I did get asked one more question. It was about personal loss — how I felt, in other words, about my choice. But now I was tired of how I felt, and tired of talking about it. How I felt was the reason I joined the group and started talking about my procreation choices publicly, but talking wasn’t supposed to stop at my feelings — it was always about raising the alarm, and bridging the gap between my feelings and the effect they have out there. To me, there’s no point in sharing the personal unless it speaks to a broader truth, unless we end up somewhere a little bit new, collectively.

So, I didn’t answer. Instead, I talked about what we had intended with Birth Strike and how it didn’t go, how judgement snuck in, what happened to the group and why. I wondered if the programme had invited me to tick the box of ‘personal’ as opposed to the other panellists (a climate scientist, a philosopher, a population-degrowth campaigner) who were there as experts, informed on the social, historical, and political connotations of birth. It might not have been a conscious intention, but we were there to do different jobs, the private and the political kept separate. This mattered. It mattered that the other three panellists, to any public knowledge, were cis men. Although I couldn’t see them, I had looked them up beforehand and knew them all to be white. Two of them were firmly against any kind of population control, but it still mattered hugely that they were asked to speak politically about birth, whereas I, as a woman, was the one asked to speak about loss. Even if his argument was aimed broadly, it also mattered that I, a queer woman of colour, was told by the guy on Facebook (who was cis and white) that it’s inherently wrong for me to procreate. None of this is solely personal, nor solely political, and the more affected we are by oppression, the more entangled the two become.

I’ve been looking into ways we could find you. It looks as though most councils and adoption agencies want there to be a room for the child, and we live in a one-bedroom flat. Your father has a criminal record due to breaking rules for what a certain policing entity, on a certain day, deemed was ‘lawful protest’. In Sweden, if that’s where you are, it becomes very difficult to adopt after the age of forty-two and we’re now in our mid-thirties.

Even if you’re out there, they may not let us meet. I imagine you riding in on a fox. I suspect it comes from an animated series I was into as a child. It was Dutch and dubbed to Spanish, about gnomes.

I think about the ‘sexual stewards’ in Sasser’s book, those women who are deemed fit to carry humanity forward. These desirable wombs, housing desirable babies, never belong to disabled people, nor to migrants, and they don’t belong to trans men. I’ve also never felt like they represented me, and my intimacies, the way I inhabit my body. In this entanglement of expectations, bigotry, and power, choices are shaped. We never make decisions in airless rooms, with no one looking in and having opinions about what we do, just like we never make them against a blank past.

‘I feel like you start a lot of these conversations,’ one of your parents says, ‘and I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry that I can’t seem to bring it up. I think it’s just too sad and I keep avoiding it.’

An Argument for Arguments

My mother, your abuelita (or you might have called her something entirely different), will never know you, having died earlier in the year in which I first came across the quote about the aeroplane crashing. Those are the parameters in which I miss both of you. Sometimes, it feels like standing in a house with no floor and no ceiling, not to suggest that you should carry us. Although I’m sorry you’d have to, inevitably, carry our weight.

Either way, I didn’t decide not to have kids because I lost my mother. I don’t think I want a child because she’s gone either. I didn’t decide not to have kids because I lost hope. None of this is the end of it. It is the ending where something else takes over.

In September 2020, Blythe and I wrote a statement about the end of Birth Strike. By now, we were the ones left with the decision. Initially, we shared it with our mailing list, and with the closed Facebook group. A few members supported the move. Someone admitted that they’d felt increasingly uneasy about the anti-natal comments and hadn’t wanted to engage more because of them. Others were outraged. ‘You cannot force us to give birth or have children,’ someone wrote to us in an email, which I, honestly, found hilarious. A few people announced that they would simply restart the group on their own, ‘someone else can just be admin,’ a member wrote, ‘DM me?’

‘But actually,’ I say, ‘if they don’t know any different, it would just be life for them, wouldn’t it? Do kids ever really regret being born?’

Recently, I spoke to a good friend of ours, a single mother with two children in their pre-teens, who’s also more clear-eyed about climate predictions and the likelihood of collapse than anyone else I know. I wanted to know if she would still do it. She loves her children, and wouldn’t go anywhere near the thought of wishing them un-born, but would she make the same decision if she were faced with it today?

I somehow expected the answer to be tied to the love for them — for you — for the child, once you’ve met it, to eradicate any doubt. Instead, she said she didn’t know, and that she understood that this is really, really hard.

I ask Blythe if she ever thinks that shutting down Birth Strike was the wrong thing to do. There’s something like shame lurking backstage on my part. Very early on, she says, after the first wave of media interest, people asked what was next for the ‘movement’. She found it a strange question, because Birth Strike was never a solution, or a strategy. ‘We never set out to recruit,’ she says. To both of us, that would always have been a horrible thing to do. Our group never suggested a tool for tackling the climate crisis, other than telling one of many necessary stories of what we are losing, what so many people have lost, and refusing to lose it quietly.

This also made the community extremely vulnerable. By focusing on the alarm, we failed to bring attention to the kind of action needed, and by doing so at a particular moment in time, when there was a wider public awakening to the climate crisis in the Global North, we opened ourselves to co-option. Stories are the beginning of arguments, and arguments in themselves. People grabbed on to this one and tugged in different directions; a mesh of hundreds of anxieties and needs, its own system of fired-up neurons. Some saw in it the possibility of openly rejecting parenthood in a society which assumes it as the ideal. Some were there because of their deep allegiance with non-human beings; for them, Birth Strike was a way of siding with other life forms. All of these people claimed the space as their own, but they were never in it on their own. I never intended to be part of this argument, but my, or anyone else’s, intention was only ever one part of it — one side of a meeting place. The mistake, really, Blythe thinks, was imagining we could control how a story is received, and it’s a humbling thing to learn. ‘It’s naive,’ she says, ‘to think that you can chuck your voice into a melting pot and expect it to be echoed back at you,’ to assume you can control other people’s responses.

Instead of offering a straightforward yes or no, our friend said to me that it’s my fear I’ll have to deal with — my non-negotiable worry for your wellbeing, my anxiety in trying to foresee and to reduce your pain. I know your life would be harder than mine has been. It may also be open, full of connection in ways I have never known. How you bring the world into being around you is beyond me. I don’t want it to be beyond us.

A while ago, Jade Sasser asked me where I am now with my decision about children. She’s someone else I came into contact with by sending an email, chucking out fishing lines to see who else was there. It was a response that, sometimes, made me less afraid, but this kind of response also opens you up to scrutiny and to having your mind changed. I make my personal, private decisions not in spite of, but because of others, everyone who’s knocked on my door, every hurt and good feeling. Every time I’ve been told ‘well done’ or ‘how could you?’, that I’m strange or normal, attractive or a creature of an entirely different sort, every argument I’ve had and how it’s torn me open. I am remade by these arguments. Jade’s thinking, through the book she wrote, which both Blythe and I read, influenced my basic assumptions about birth. I told her this. I also told her that, sometimes, it feels more possible to expand our family than it did a year ago. It feels less signed and sealed, less as if it’s already gone and done for, as my fertile years leak down the side of our bed, through the windows, and into the river that runs through Bath, as fear moves through us and a massive chunk of the Arctic moves south.

‘This couple came into the shop today. I’m not sure which different ethnicities they were, but their kid was this really interesting-looking mash-up of their features and colours, and it made me sad because I’ll never know what a mash-up of the two of us would look like.’

‘I want to know what you mixed with me would look like,’ I say.

‘We could just use face-merge software.’

Like I’ve said to your father at times: I could never have imagined you.

It’s not that I feel more optimistic. Rather, I’ve come to think that in trying to decide whether it was right or wrong to bring a child into this now, I was asking the less helpful questions, the ones less anchored in the now I’m living in. It would also be disingenuous to argue that my ambivalence about motherhood is separate from the kind of mother that society expects me to be, from a lifetime of becoming friends with one’s body. The way forward must never lie in whether or not to give birth, but in creating the circumstances in which it is safe to not only give birth, but to create all kinds of families, and for those families to look after each other. The urgency lies in fighting to bring down the structures that judge us for how we survive in our bodies — they are also the systems and attitudes which stand in the way of real transformation and collective survival. If there is no other now to choose from — how do I best respond to this one? Because there is still uncertainty, there is still this wanting.

‘The thing is,’ I say to my Person.

‘The thing is, I never wanted a child in theory. I want one with you.’

This is all a bit private. ‘We’re really kind of private people,’ Adam said at one point, by which he meant that we generally don’t talk about personal things except with close friends. I struggled with this — the worry of being seen as attention-seeking — and in that tug, the very chaotic, radical nature of birth once again shines through. It happens behind closed doors, but it involves all of humanity — it is legislated on and used as a tool of power and ideology, but it is ours, at our most vulnerable. Few things highlight the permeability between private and public as much as birth does. Very few, but this so-called ‘end of the world’ might be another.

Postscript

The name Birth Strike has been used by other groups and movements. It’s an evocative and visceral name, which also highlights the inherent labour in giving birth. It was recently brought to my and Blythe’s attention that a group of people have decided to restart Birth Strike in the UK as a form of climate activism. From what I have seen and am aware of, the people involved do not agree with our non-judgemental stance on birth, and the reason we closed down Birth Strike. We communicated our reasoning to them. The arguments continue.