Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is again making headlines with her ridiculous disaster-peddling. Last weekend, on Instagram Live, the representative questioned the morality of having children in a world she claims will suffer horribly from climate change.
“Our planet is going to face disaster if we don’t turn this ship around,” the representative said. “The lives of children are going to be very difficult and it does lead, I think young people, to have a legitimate question. Ya know, should – is it okay to have children?” Ocasio-Cortez went on to elaborate that this concern involved more than the financial aspect of having a child, but that it was “just this basic moral question, like, what do we do?”
Luckily, Ocasio-Cortez had no say in whether it was acceptable for my husband and me to start a family of our own.
I will admit that I had concerns before deciding to have children. In the summer of 2016, leading up to presidential elections, I had seen a new incivility in my country that did not increase my enthusiasm about the future. (Thank goodness I did not know that the summer of 2016 was only the tip of the iceberg.) I worried about finances, particularly because I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom in an age of two-income parenting households. What kept me up at night, though, were thoughts about the much-lamented future of the planet my offspring would inherit.
Eventually, I realized that my anxiety about having a child was nothing new. Humans seem to have a knack for believing disaster is imminent. But as a student of history, I know the species has endured the most terrible and hopeless of times.
When my husband and I decided to have a child, I considered it the ultimate demonstration of our hope in the future.
Leading up to our daughter’s birth, my husband and I took a hard look at the world as it was, and thought about the world we wanted for our child. We made numerous difficult decisions so that we could provide her with the best possible future. Some of those choices were based solely on monetary concerns, like when we shuffled around our finances and gave up extras to sock away funds for her future education. Others, though they had a monetary component, were also made out of respect for the planet, like forgoing disposables in favor of cloth pocket diapers. On advice from fellow conservative mothers, I also bought many of my daughter’s toys, and all but half a dozen of her outfits, at second-hand stores. When she began eating solids, I made her food from scratch, in bulk, to eliminate unnecessary plastic waste.
The government did not force me to make these choices. I did these things, and continue to do them, because my husband and I decided they were right for our family, for our child, and for the environment.
Several of those options require many hours of extra work each week. I welcome them. My parents did not teach me the value of hard work by talking about it, but though their repeated actions. It is with their example in mind that I daily demonstrate perseverance to my daughter, for whom the skill will be invaluable, no matter the state of the world she inherits.
I also try to model other skills that will help my daughter navigate a future rife with uncertainty. I demonstrate self-sufficiency whenever I can, and teach her problem-solving so that she is equipped with the confidence and capability to make changes that positively affect the world when she becomes an adult.
Ocasio-Cortez believes that, with her liberty-stomping Green New Deal, she is the only person thinking about the future of our planet. “I’m the boss,” she claims, until someone else comes up with another way forward. Now, in addition to her plan, which will cost up to $600,000 per household, to attempt to eliminate farting cows and air travel, and force Americans to retrofit every building with whatever the government deems to be the most energy-efficient technology, Ocasio-Cortez is discussing whether it is morally irresponsible to have children. I wonder, is an American “one-child-policy” hidden in some previously unreleased draft of the Green New Deal?
I have news for the media darling: Our country still values freedom and liberty, and that means no matter how many headlines Ocasio-Cortez grabs, I am my own boss. My core conservative principles motivate me to take on extra work, and teach her the right lessons, so my daughter sees how she can improve the world. I do not need Chicken Little, screaming that the sky is falling, to lead me on a crazy trek ending in the fox’s den of big-government policies.
Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance writer from the Detroit area.
