NEW YORK (AP) — At 24, El Johnson has made up her mind that she won’t bear children, though she and her girlfriend haven’t ruled out adoption.
The graduate student who works in legal services in Austin, Texas, has a list of reasons for not wanting to give birth: the climate crisis and a genetic health condition among them.
“I don’t think it’s responsible to bring children into this world,” Johnson said. “There are already kids who need homes. I don’t know what kind of world it’s going to be in 20, 30, 40 years.”
She’s so sure, in fact, that she’ll soon have her tubes removed. It’s a precautionary decision sealed by the fall of Roe v. Wade and by tight restrictions on abortion services in her state and around the country.
Other women interviewed also cited climate change, along with overwhelming student debt coupled with inflation, as reasons they’ll never be parents. Some younger men, too, are opting out and more are seeking vasectomies.
Whatever the motivation, they play a role in dramatically low birth rates in the U.S.
The U.S. birth rate fell 4% in 2020, the largest single-year decrease in nearly 50 years, according to a government report. The government noted a 1% uptick in U.S. births last year, but the number of babies born was still lower than before the coronavirus pandemic: about 86,000 fewer than in 2019.
Walter and Kyah King live in suburban Las Vegas. Walter, 29, a sports data scientist, and Kyah, 28, a college career counselor, have been together nearly 10 years, the last four as a married couple. The realization that they didn’t want to have kids came on slowly for both of them.
“It was in our early 20s when the switch sort of flipped,” Kyah said. “We had moved to California and we were really just starting our adult lives. I think we talked about having three kids at one point. But just with the economy and the state of the world and just thinking about the logistics of bringing children into the world. That’s really when we started to have our doubts.”
Finances are top of mind. Before taxes, the two earn about $160,000 combined, with about $120,000 in student loan debt for Kyah and about $5,000 left for Walter. The couple said they wouldn’t be able to buy a house and shoulder the costs of even one child without major sacrifices they’re not willing to make.
But for Kyah, the decision goes well beyond money.
“I think we would be great parents, but the thought of going into our health system to give birth is really scary. Black women, black mothers, are not valued in the same way that white mothers are,” said Kyah, who is Black.
When Kyah’s IUD expires, Walter said he’ll consider a vasectomy, a procedure that went on the rise among men under 30 during the pandemic.
Jordan Davidson interviewed more than 300 people for a book out in December titled, “So When are You Having Kids?” The pandemic, she said, led many to delay childbirth among those contemplating children at all.
“These timelines that people created for themselves of, I want to accomplish X by three years from now, changed. People weren’t necessarily willing to move the goalposts and say, OK, I’m going to forgo these accomplishments and do this differently,” she said. “People still want to travel. They still want to go to graduate school. They still want to meet certain financial benchmarks.”
Fears about climate change have cemented the idea of living without children for many, Davidson said.
