Author Emily Holleman wrote recently on New York magazine’s website The Cut that “the decision to have children has always struck me as an essentially selfish one: You choose, out of a desire for fulfillment or self-betterment or curiosity or boredom or baby-mania or peer pressure, to bring a new human into this world. And it has never seemed more selfish than today.”

Holleman is an author, so we should expect her to write in dramatic and evocative terms — her piece is about the “end times” and the “apocalypse.” And by the end of the piece, she finds herself inexplicably hopeful. So this isn’t a comment on Holleman’s piece, per se, but on the sentiment expressed in it: that having children is selfish and harms the planet.