Childless.
I keep crying because none of the world’s children are safe.
I hate it here—and by “here,” I mean Earth.
Parents, prospective parents, people spending thousands of dollars and years of their lives trying to conceive: how do you make peace with bringing a child into this particular version of the world?
I am asking sincerely, even if I am asking angrily.
And please do not tell me that we need to have more children so there will be “more good people in the world.” Children should not be born with jobs. They should not arrive already responsible for repairing a civilization their ancestors knowingly broke. A baby is not a climate solution, a political strategy, a bloodline extension, a retirement plan, or proof that hope still exists.
A child is a person.
What is one reason to create that person—one that is about what the child will receive rather than what the parent wants to experience?
I am childfree by choice, so perhaps there is something about the desire for biological children that I simply cannot access. But as an adopted person, I am especially disturbed by the way our culture talks about children. We call every embryo sacred while allowing living children to be hungry, unhoused, bombed, abused, shot, trafficked, medically neglected, or lost inside an overwhelmed foster-care system.
We are allegedly “pro-life” until life develops needs.
Then it becomes a personal-responsibility problem.
Children Are Born Into a Climate Emergency
This is not abstract anxiety about a distant apocalypse. Children are already living with the consequences of climate collapse.
UNICEF reports that approximately half of the world’s children are exposed to at least three overlapping climate hazards, including extreme heat, drought, flooding, wildfires, and severe storms. In 2024 alone, extreme weather interrupted school for at least 242 million students across 85 countries.
Children contribute almost nothing to the forces destabilizing the climate, yet they will live with the consequences longer than any of us.
They will inherit hotter summers, increasingly destructive storms, worsening food and water insecurity, climate migration, collapsing ecosystems, and political systems that continue treating quarterly profits as more urgent than human survival.
Our air is contaminated. Our water carries lead, PFAS, microplastics, and industrial waste. Our food supply is shaped by chemicals, corporate consolidation, environmental degradation, and financial incentives that rarely prioritize children’s long-term health.
Maybe “everything is poison” is not scientifically precise. But it is emotionally difficult to distinguish from reality when contamination is so widespread that avoiding it has become a privilege.
We Are Resurrecting Preventable Diseases
Vaccines prevented diseases that once routinely killed or permanently disabled children. Instead of celebrating that achievement, we have allowed misinformation to drag some of those diseases back into circulation.
The United States recorded 2,289 confirmed measles cases and 48 outbreaks in 2025. Ninety percent of those cases were connected to outbreaks. Globally, vaccination coverage remains below the roughly 95 percent needed to prevent measles from spreading through communities.
Measles did not evolve past our medicine.
We simply stopped protecting one another consistently.
Infants who are too young to be vaccinated and immunocompromised children are left depending upon the decisions of everyone around them. We have transformed public health into an ideological debate and asked vulnerable children to absorb the consequences.
American Children Practice Dying at School
In the United States, firearm injuries became the leading cause of death among children and teenagers ages one through nineteen. That statistic includes homicide, suicide, and accidental shootings—not only school shootings—but it does not make the reality less horrifying.
Children rehearse hiding from gunmen before they fully understand death.
Teachers are expected to educate, provide emotional regulation, identify abuse, manage disabilities, buy classroom supplies with their own money, respond to behavioral crises, and potentially use their bodies as shields. Then we act shocked when they burn out or leave.
Something has gone terribly wrong in many classrooms, but I refuse to reduce it to “children are feral now.”
Children do not collectively fail society. They reveal where society has failed.
Many are being raised by exhausted adults without adequate childcare, healthcare, community, money, or time. They are entering schools with trauma, developmental delays, shortened attention spans, and few emotional-regulation skills. Teachers are being asked to compensate for every broken system simultaneously.
Technology companies have also been permitted to perform a mass experiment on children’s developing brains. The evidence does not support claiming that every screen is inherently evil, but it does justify serious concern about compulsive platform design, sleep disruption, cyberbullying, sexual exploitation, algorithmic radicalization, and the displacement of face-to-face relationships.
Machines did not simply steal childhood. Adults handed pieces of it over because the surrounding economy made sustained human care increasingly difficult—and because technology companies learned that children’s attention could be monetized.
Girls Are Being Born With Fewer Guarantees Than Their Mothers Had
In parts of the United States, a girl can be born into a state where, if she later becomes pregnant, the government may restrict decisions about her body—even when the pregnancy is dangerous, nonviable, or the result of rape.
We tell girls they can become anything while allowing lawmakers to decide whether they must remain pregnant.
We romanticize motherhood while failing to guarantee paid parental leave, affordable childcare, universal healthcare, safe housing, adequate nutrition, or protection from pregnancy discrimination. We praise women for sacrificing everything and then call them irresponsible when that sacrifice leaves them poor, sick, overwhelmed, or unable to work.
Pregnancy itself is not risk-free. Neither is childbirth. Neither is being a child in a country where healthcare can depend upon a parent’s employer, income, location, and insurance network.
What exactly are we asking women and children to risk so society can keep congratulating itself for continuing?
Some Children Are Treated as More Innocent Than Others
Children are supposedly pure innocence and joy. They deserve to live.
But whose children receive that presumption?
White children killed in a tragedy are granted names, photographs, personalities, grieving families, and futures that were stolen from them. Palestinian children are too often reduced to disputed numbers. Black children are described as threatening. Migrant children become “illegals.” Queer and trans children become political talking points. Disabled children become burdens in budget calculations.
We do not value children equally. We value their innocence conditionally.
In Gaza, children have been killed, maimed, orphaned, displaced, starved, and deprived of medical care on a staggering scale. We have watched parents hold pieces of the children they tucked into bed. We have watched children search rubble for their siblings. We have watched the world debate terminology while families disappear.
I believe this constitutes genocide, and United Nations experts and human-rights investigators have also used that term. Whatever language someone chooses, the devastation of Palestinian children is documented and undeniable.
This horror is the responsibility of the Israeli government, its military conduct, the governments supplying it with political and military support, and every institution treating Palestinian life as expendable. It is not the collective responsibility of Jewish people or Holocaust survivors. In fact, many Jewish people have been among the most persistent voices opposing these atrocities.
“Never again” means nothing if it only applies to people who resemble the previous victims.
How do any of us tuck a child into bed after watching another parent’s entire world become rubble?
How do we love our own children without allowing that love to expand into an obligation toward children beyond our borders?
And why are parents not setting the world on fire over this?
Declining Birth Rates Are Not a Mystery
We are not yet living in Children of Men. Falling birth rates do not mean that humanity has suddenly become infertile, nor are they primarily explained by miscarriages and stillbirths.
The real explanation may be even more damning.
According to the United Nations Population Fund, nearly one in five reproductive-age adults believes they will be unable to have the number of children they want. More than half of respondents in its international study identified economic barriers. People cited the cost of living, unaffordable housing, job insecurity, inadequate childcare, unequal caregiving, fear of the future, and lack of a suitable partner.
People are not simply refusing to create the next generation.
We have constructed societies in which many people cannot afford to give that generation a stable life.
Stillbirth also remains devastatingly common, with nearly two million occurring globally each year. Infertility and pregnancy loss are real sources of grief. But turning declining birth rates into a horror story about women failing to reproduce avoids the more important question:
Why should people provide society with children when society refuses to provide families with security?
Adoption Is Not a Simple Moral Escape Hatch
As an adopted person, I also need to complicate the inevitable response: “Why not adopt?”
Yes, children need safe and loving homes. More than 100,000 children in the American foster-care system are eligible for adoption. That matters.
But foster care is not a warehouse of unwanted babies waiting to complete an adult’s family. Its first goal is usually safe reunification. Children in care often have living relatives, cultural identities, trauma histories, and needs that love alone cannot erase. Adoption can provide permanency, but it can also contain grief, displacement, identity loss, coercion, and institutional failure.
Children in care should receive support because they are human beings—not because they can be used as rhetorical punishment against infertile people.
Still, I cannot understand a political movement that attempts to force more births while refusing to adequately fund the lives already here. If adoption is the great pro-life answer, where is the lifelong support for adoptees, birth parents, foster youth, reunified families, and adoptive families?
Where is all that sacred concern after delivery?
The Question I Cannot Answer
This is not intended as an attack on people who already have children or are currently expecting. Existing children are not mistakes. They deserve protection, joy, safety, education, healthcare, food, shelter, bodily autonomy, and a livable planet.
I am also not claiming that parents do not understand danger. Many understand it more intimately than I ever will. Loving a child can mean living with the knowledge that your own heart is walking around outside your body in a world you cannot control.
Perhaps that is why I cannot imagine choosing it.
Parents cannot guarantee that their children will never be assaulted, murdered, sick, exploited, radicalized, neglected, or caught inside a war, a shooting, a wildfire, or another preventable catastrophe. No generation has ever been promised safety.
But this generation is being born after we acquired overwhelming evidence of what is going wrong—and repeatedly chose not to fix it.
So I am asking:
If you had to persuade me to create a child right now, what would you say?
Not that you want to experience pregnancy.
Not that you want someone who resembles you.
Not that your family expects grandchildren.
Not that a baby will give your life meaning.
Not that humanity has always reproduced during terrible times.
Not that your child might become one of the good people who saves us.
What will the child receive?
What future are you reasonably able to offer them?
And what are you willing to change—not merely feel, post, purchase, or vote for occasionally—to make that future worthy of them?
Would you die for your child?
Would you live differently for every child?
Because I do not doubt that children are worth having.
I doubt that the world we have built is worthy of having them.
