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I spoke with filmmaker Therese Schecter, whose new film, My So-Called Selfish Life, centers on the question of whether the choice to remain childfree is, well, selfish. Take a listen to our 36-minute interview while you’re out for a walk or commuting. In it, we discuss how something that seems like an individual issue—the choice whether or not to have children—has become elevated to a societal one. We’re not just talking about abortion politics here, we’re talking about reproducing “for the good of society.”
This is an essential issue to explore as alarm bells are ringing in low-fertility societies across the world. Two out of every three people on the planet lives somewhere with below-replacement fertility, meaning the number needed to just replace who’s already born. Some are labeling this low fertility phenomenon the “global birth strike.” Over the course of multiple newsletters we’ll look into the evidence behind this concept and problematize the framing. This week includes the interview with Therese and evidence from a new research article about the role of environmental concern in shaping the number of children young people prefer. I hope you enjoy.
You can click on the full video above but here’s a sample of what’s in my interview with Therese:
Therese’s film focuses on the childfree community of women. I wondered how the issue might play out similarly or differently among men. A common theme in the “global birth strike” discourse is that women take the blame for society having too many/too few children and the men are generally absent from those conversations. I ask her: Do we learn anything new when men are included or does including them take away from what you're saying? BTW, I just learned of the book Ejaculate Responsibly and you better believe I’ll be reading and reporting on that.
Therese’s film makes the important distinction between being childfree and childless. I ask her how fluid that distinction is and what the unique challenges of going from one to the other are. We of course also discuss where reproductive health politics fits in to the discussion. How does she view Dobbs/overturning Roe through her lens?
Therese and I also acknowledge that there are a lot of cats in her film. She leans into the stereotype and explains why.
As an environmental studies professor, the number of students who expressed to me a desire to have fewer or no children for the health of the planet rose in recent years. I have often wondered: would their intentions hold as they became adults, or would “the greater planetary good” be replaced in importance by other life priorities? While new research from Heather M. Rackin, Allison Gemmill, and Caroline Sten Hartnett can’t answer that (because its subjects are still too young), it does quantify my general impression by showing that environmentally-conscious young people prefer smaller families over larger ones (defined as 4 or more children). Importantly, it doesn’t show that they have a decreased desire for 3 or fewer children. In their article, “Environmental attitudes and fertility desires among US adolescents from 2005-2019,” the authors showed that at times political and religious identity were just as strong of influences as environmental attitudes on fertility preferences, but not recently—between 2017 and 2019 the gaps between those who disagreed and agreed on environmental problems were larger. The authors note that it’s hard to disentangle environmental attitudes from political and religious ideology in the US, and particularly so in their study, which used a question about whether the government should act on the environment as the measure of environmental attitudes. I think it’s important work because it chips away at one of the often-cited reasons why fertility is so low these days in many high-income countries, but my main takeaway is the same as the authors’: we need more data and more research so don’t draw too many conclusions yet.
If you don't have kids, are you failing society?