A climate of excuses for not having children

Published October 24, 2025 4:00am ET



“Children, in a kind of cold way of looking at it, are an externality,” argues professor Travis Rieder of Johns Hopkins University in an NPR article headlined “Should We Be Having Kids In The Age Of Climate Change?”

Millennial Miley Cyrus made a similar argument more pointedly: “We’re getting handed a piece-­of-s*** planet, and I refuse to hand that down to my child. 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. … We don’t want to reproduce because we know that the earth can’t handle it.”

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