Meet the Londoners staying childless to save the planet

But there are those who feel that more drastic action is needed. They are the ‘Birth Strikers’, and they believe that having even one child is too many. Last year, US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked her 4.2 million Instagram followers: ‘Is it okay to still have children?’ Miley Cyrus says that she ‘refuses’ to have a baby with the world in its current state. ‘We’re getting handed a piece-of-s*** planet, and I refuse to hand that down to my child,’ she told Elle magazine. ‘Until I feel like my kid would live on an earth with fish in the water, I’m not bringing in another person to deal with that.’ Last month a YouGov poll found that one in seven adults aged under 35 who don’t want children believes the world has too many people already, with one in 10 saying children would add to climate change pressures.

For couples like Radhika Sivarajan and Ajeesh T Vijayan, software engineers based in Hammersmith, the decision not to have children for environmental reasons feels logical. They’ve reached the conclusion that they don’t want to add to the population by bringing a child into an uncertain future. ‘We’ve been married eight years and it’s something we’ve always been on the same page about,’ says Vijayan, 37. ‘It was a BBC documentary about climate change that we watched a few years ago that crystallised the decision for us. The more we read about the science, the more it seems the right thing to do. If we change our minds in the future, we’ll adopt.’

The couple are originally from Kerala, India, and say that the social pressure to have children is even more intense back home than it is in the UK. ‘My family is outraged at our decision,’ says Vijayan. ‘Everyone is shocked by it. Even my rational, scientific friends in the UK are very surprised and think that the purpose of life is to have kids. I recently left a WhatsApp group because I was getting so many questions about it.’ Sivarajan, 29, says it’s even worse for women. ‘I call it child-free bingo, ticking off the things people always say to me, like: “You’re not a real woman until you’ve become a mother” or “Do you need the number for a fertility doctor?”.’

Anna Hughes, 37, from Camberwell, came to the decision not to have children after spending years learning about the man-made effects of climate change. ‘I always assumed I’d have kids, but as a teenager I started to realise there are too many people and not enough resources to go around, and at university I started to learn more about environmental issues,’ she says. ‘People would say to me: “You’ll change your mind,” but if anything I’ve become even more convinced. I work for an environmental organisation and I do everything I can to reduce my carbon footprint, from not flying to being vegan to using low-energy light bulbs. Choosing not to have a child has far more impact than any of those.’

But it’s a choice that has come with big sacrifices. ‘I had a relationship in my mid-20s and I was totally in love,’ says Hughes. ‘Although [my boyfriend] knew I didn’t want kids, he thought that he could change my mind. He left me after three years to find the mother of his children. I was heartbroken. I’m in a relationship at the moment, but if the maternal urge does kick in I’m convinced that I will still believe we have to put the planet first. I’ve been to see my GP about being sterilised, but it’s pretty invasive, so for now we use contraception.’

The argument for limiting the number of children we have is a deeply contentious issue, not least because it calls to mind troubling attempts at population control in the 20th century including China’s one-child policy, introduced in 1980, and India’s forced sterilisation camps between 1975 and 1977. The debate can often risk straying into eugenics and racism — by blaming some poorer countries where families have typically had more children, but whose carbon emissions are much lower than in developed countries.

A study by Oregon State University found that a child born in the US would add 9,441 tonnes to the parent’s carbon emissions compared with 1,384 tonnes in China and 56 tonnes in Bangladesh. Others argue that raising environmentally conscious children and changing your family’s habits to be more environmentally friendly is a better way to make change. After all, as every eco-minded couple who want to procreate no doubt tell themselves, there’s always the chance that your baby might become the next Greta Thunberg.

‘I’d hate young women who would like to have children to feel that they can’t because they’ve got to save the planet,’ says Oxford University’s Professor Sarah Harper, director of the Collen Programme on Fertility, Education and the Environment. ‘There are so many other things you can do. If you have a child, make it a low-consumption child. If you feel concerned about overpopulation, donate to, or volunteer for, an NGO which is helping to empower women around the world to be able to choose how many children they’d like to have.’

Furthermore, limiting the number of mini-mes we pop out might not actually help that much. A 2014 study from the University of Adelaide concluded that reducing the human population is ‘not a quick fix for environmental problems’. Using models, it found that even a worldwide one-child policy would result in a global population of around 7 billion by the end of the century — much the same as today’s. The study concluded that although reducing population ‘might benefit our great-great-great-great grandchildren’, it is not a short-term solution. Instead, society should focus on reducing the carbon footprint we already have, and limiting per-capita consumption.

For some, not having children is an act of political protest. Blythe Pepino, 33, a musician from south London, started the movement BirthStrike in 2019 after attending a lecture by Extinction Rebellion. It now has more than 1,000 members who have pledged ‘not to bear children due to the severity of the ecological crisis and the current inaction of governing forces in the face of this existential threat’.

‘Having children is a personal and emotional decision; I would need to feel like the severe changes being predicted by the scientific world will be averted to change my mind,’ says Pepino. ‘We need big changes to agriculture systems, no fossil fuel expansion... But until I see the action, I am not going to have children. A lot of people are having these conversations, but in hushed tones. They feel it is too sad to say out loud.’

Pepino is at pains to differentiate BirthStrike from the antinatalist movement (which believes that it’s cruel to bring sentient lives, doomed to suffering and to causing suffering, into the world) and populationism (which advocates for methods of population reduction). ‘BirthStrike is purely for those who feel too terrified by climate breakdown to have kids,’ she says. ‘We are “striking” to take a stand in asking the Government to act faster and more deftly in the face of the crisis.’

The organisation Population Matters campaigns against population growth; its recent Facebook graphic ‘Why Millennials Don’t Want Kids’, which listed reasons such as, ‘Why would anyone want to raise a child in this broken world?’ had more than four million views. ‘Population used to be the one thing no one wanted to talk about, but I’ve noticed a real shift in the zeitgeist recently,’ says Robin Maynard, director of Population Matters. ‘We’re overcoming the stigma — those two words uttered by Prince Harry meant I was doing two days of non-stop interviews. I think it’s entirely reasonable for these intelligent, informed young people to say: “Do I really want to bring a child into this world?”’

That’s the view of Kate Millett, 28, a musician from Southfields, who has been with her boyfriend for seven years. ‘I’ve always respected nature, I travel a lot and I’ve seen first-hand how the environment has been affected by overpopulation,’ she says. ‘I do understand when my friends say they can’t wait to be parents — there’s an inbuilt primal need in us to reproduce — but I also think that if we’re aware of what’s happening in the world, and the crisis that’s upon us, it is surprising that people are willing to bring a child into that world.’

‘I don’t judge other people who want to have children, but I think we need to be more aware of the impact of our choices,’ agrees Hughes. ‘I have two nieces and three nephews — and I’m terrified. The fact is, they have a very difficult life ahead of them.’