Women who don’t want kids are my heroes

A pregnant feminist’s take on birth-strikers and the voluntarily child-free.

Abbey | The Open Bookshelf
4 min readFeb 12, 2022
The author a little over two years ago, shortly after vomiting.

Birth-strikers are those who decide against having children for the sake of the environment. Predominantly women, these climate activists face down societal judgement, increased work pressure and problems with personal relationships — all because they’ve decided to put the fate of the planet above their own wants and needs.

The logic behind birth-striking is that human consumption is fuelled by the sheer number of consumers that are pushed kicking and screaming into the world each year. By choosing to push one or two less consumers into the world, birth-strikers seek to mitigate their personal impact on the environment.

The environmental impact of pregnancy

Pregnancy was terrible for my carbon footprint, and that’s before I even let this little bundle of future consumerism loose on the world’s limited resources.

For two solid months I was throwing up every hour, six hours a day. It is estimated that flushing a modern toilet uses up to 14 litres of water; a water-saving toilet uses around 4 litres. For normal, non-gestating humans, toilet-flushing accounts for a third of our domestic water usage. For a pregnant woman on puking…

--

--

Abbey | The Open Bookshelf

Specialist in modern authoritarianism, feminist, political scientist in progress (PhD). Everyday academia, low-brow, no jargon/acronyms/obscure Latin.