Meehan: You're listening to the LRB Podcast. I'm Meehan Crist, and welcome to the last episode in a special four-part series exploring the intersection of climate chaos and reproductive justice. In our previous episode, I spoke with writer and historian Alison Bashford, and together we explored some hard questions about the history of population control and the enduring power of its critique. Today, feminist scholar Jade Sasser joins the podcast to explore the relationships among the climate crisis and women's reproductive freedoms, health and activism, and how these relationships are already evolving as we head into an increasingly uncertain future. She is Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at UC Riverside and her work focuses on gender, climate, justice and reproductive politics. She also works on questions around gendered access to household energy in the Global South, and how the climate crisis shapes our emotions about and the ways we create the future. Her book, On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women's Rights in the Era of Climate Change, analyses the shifting role of environmentalists in shaping activism and international policy advocacy focused on population and baby-making. She is currently working on a book that investigates the impacts of climate change, racial injustice and other existential threats on reproductive decisions. It's an honour and a pleasure to have her as our guest today. Jade, welcome to the LRB podcast.
Jade: Thank you so much for having me.
Meehan: I'm very much interested in your new research with young people around reproductive anxiety. But before we get into that, I'd be glad to talk a bit about your previous work on population and environmentalism.
Jade: Sure, that would be great.
Meehan: So in your book On Infertile Ground, you critique the ways population control narratives from the 20th century are being repurposed in the 21st century. In the field of international development, you show how wealthy private donors, NGOs, scientists, and youth activists have all helped to re-centre population in environmental debate. Could you talk a bit about your research for that book?
Jade: Yes. So that book was my dissertation research for my PhD. I became particularly interested in those issues when, as a Peace Corps volunteer, I noticed that the town that I was living in—it was a small town in rural Madagascar where a lot of the girls there had early pregnancies and would leave school to have children. I came in as a health worker, and I thought that the issue for these girls was simply that they didn't have enough access to contraception to make choices about their reproductive lives. But a couple of years later, when I was doing some work with a development organisation, I actually discovered that the way in which services—reproductive and sexual reproductive services—were distributed around the country, were actually largely shaped by the environmental development agenda. That country was Madagascar. Madagascar is a global environmental hotspot country for certain forms of biodiversity, certain species, and for the protection of parks and other protected areas. And so I discovered that the provision of sectional and reproductive health services was targeted toward providing contraception, near parks, wilderness areas, and protected zones in ways that had nothing whatsoever to do with actual reproductive needs and demands of local communities. And through that experience on the ground, I started becoming really interested in how environmental politics shape reproductive politics in international development. That was the impetus for that book. So coming back from that, I began my PhD, and started just sitting in and doing participant observation in training sessions that were designed to train college-age youth to be advocates simultaneously around population, family planning, contraceptive access, as well as advocates around environmental conservation. These programs were led by the Sierra Club and partners like Advocates for Youth and other reproductive health organisations. They would mobilize students who were already leaders on their campuses, either environmental leaders or leaders with organisations like Planned Parenthood, and then they would train them in joint messaging. I found that fascinating, and I was particularly interested because these were college students who were born in the 1980s and 1990s who had little to no context whatsoever for understanding the history of population control or population debates. These were college students who were very heavily steeped in the language of women's empowerment, and who felt very strongly that the work that they were doing was in support of that empowerment, but they had no sense of historical context. And it was that disconnect and how that disconnect actually really benefited some NGOs that had histories of doing population control work. That's what I was most interested in. That's why I wrote that book.
Meehan: And what did you find? What were the most interesting or worrisome connections that you uncovered?
Jade: What I found was that for people who have worked in population-related organisations, whether those organisations are NGOs or whether they are in donor organisations that have funded NGOs, for people who have worked in those organisations for a long period of time, they had really spent quite some time grappling with how to reframe this language away from the challenging, coercive, top-down population control language of the past—and that that language was very freely and openly used in the 1950s, ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. But there was a shift, a marked shift in the 1990s. In 1994, there was a landmark conference at Cairo, the International Conference on Population and Development. And that conference turned how you could talk about international development on population and family planning—turned it on its head. So now you could no longer talk about top-down demographic targets. You really could not talk about how your efforts were designed for population control or to artificially impose strategies that would slow or stop population growth. Now, the language became a bottom-up language of women's empowerment, sexual and reproductive health, and rights, empowering women in communities with the tools to make their own decisions about sexuality and reproduction. But still the assumption was that that empowerment would lead to the use of contraception and having fewer children. So the people in this set of organisations—and they are a network, they do a lot of things together—they had been thinking about these shifts, the linguistic shifts, the political shifts, for a very long time. And what I found most interesting was that one of the things that they had landed on as the most important thing that they could do was to kind of harness the power and energy of young people. So when I began doing the research for that book, it was 2009. Barack Obama had been elected the year before. There was this general prevailing sense that young people were a political force that had been overlooked for some period of time, and that that political force had been mobilised to elect Obama. And there was this sense of if we can harness this youth energy and use the right language, specifically social justice language, then this youth energy can be captured to help us revive the population movement in ways that are more feminist, more women-centred, through more of an empowering approach, and we can move away from the historical controversies around population.
Meehan: Right, and in a lot of ways we're still living in the time of that narrative, right? There are more and less nuanced versions of this position, but basically the idea among advocates of slowing population growth today is that the climate crisis is linked to women's fertility, and that one solution to environmental degradation is increasing access for women and girls to both education and contraception, and it's presented as a win-win. Why do you think that this is a fundamentally flawed narrative?
Jade: Oh, for so many reasons. ‘Win-win’ is always a slight of hand, which, you know, large-scale international development kinds of interventions can never be an easy sort of win-win for everyone on the ground because they're developed at such a remove culturally, linguistically, and physically, geographically. So I think first and foremost, the main challenge with that approach, the main flaw with that approach, is it stems from a basic, logical fallacy. What causes climate change—what causes the greenhouse gas emissions that lead to climate change—are the extraction and development of fossil fuels, as well as the removal of carbon sinks like forests as well as the release of rapid-warming kinds of gases like methane. Those things are not caused by a growth of human numbers. They are caused by the intense activities of private corporations, governments, and militaries. And focusing on the growth of human numbers, focusing on population, reproduction, the use of contraceptives, how many children people have, lets those actors off the hook. When we're talking about population, when we're talking about sex and reproduction and whether there are too many people or not, we are not talking about the fossil fuel corporations. We are not talking about military extraction of fossil fuels and petroleum. We're not talking about the ways that governments pollute and extract resources. We're not talking about the ways that forests are being razed to the ground, and removing carbon sinks. We're not talking about how this is a profit-driven capitalist endeavour to develop fossil fuels in ways that really harm the earth. We're not talking about any of those things, and those are actually the main drivers of climate crisis. So focusing on population is a smoke screen. I also would like to add that when the narrative is one of relentless population growth, we're not actually looking at the numbers. So we have been in a period of fertility decline for the last 80 years in the United States, and what that means is that people are having fewer children today than they have had in this period of the last 80 years, and so the rates of population growth are lower than they have been at any other point during this period of time, and they're not going to reverse. What I find really interesting is when environmentalists who are concerned with population don't talk to demographers. And demography is population science. It's the science of assessing, tracking, and monitoring population trends. And when you don't have a strong grasp on what's actually happening demographically, then it becomes easy to hold onto an old narrative, even if that old narrative is not actually borne out by the numbers today.
Meehan: So there's a few things I'm hearing here. One is that focusing on population sort of takes energy and attention away from things that are much larger contributors to actual global warming and the climate crisis. I think it also—and this is something you've written about—it also perpetuates these myths about the sexuality and the lack of virtue or intelligence of people who are poor, and particularly women of colour in the Global South. And that feels dangerous as well. And I do think that there may have been recently a shift, at least in some of these kind of population advocate circles—again, there's a lot of variability among these different groups and actors—but one thing I've seen is acknowledging that demographic shift and acknowledging fertility decline. And now it's not so much an issue of overall numbers as it is of the speed that we can slow population growth, right? The faster we can slow it down, the better. Right? There's this acknowledgement that global population will peak sometime in the 21st century, but if it happened 40 years earlier, that would be better than 40 years later. Is that something that you've seen or that feels new to you in the narrative?
Jade: Yes and no. Yes, I have seen it. Does it feel new in the narrative? No, because the narrative is still about slowing the number of human beings on the planet without paying any attention to, or bringing into the conversation, the actual drivers that are intensifying greenhouse gas emissions. So again, whenever you talk about human numbers and don't talk about corporate government and military based extraction of resources, then you're actually missing the main driver of the problem. But to get back to something that you mentioned a couple of moments ago, efforts toward slowing population growth, whether it's through population control or whether it's through language of empowerment and reproductive rights, always focuses on the poor. These narratives always tend to focus on communities of colour, black and brown communities in particular, marginalised communities who are silenced in so many ways. And it becomes very, very clear that this is also a question of social, political, and economic power, and we cannot think about and talk about questions of population and refer to them as issues of empowerment when the decision around who should have fewer children and how they should do it comes from very, very powerful actors who are often not acting in the interests of those who they're talking about.
Meehan: So you have said in the past that even after a semester of laying out the flaws in this premise, in courses that you teach, many of your students will basically shrug and say something like, ‘well, yeah, but fewer people on earth would still be better.’ You know, this idea—that fewer people, less environmental impact—just kind of sticks. Why do you think so many young people default to this position?
Jade: I think they default to this position because as I wrote about in the book, it is presented as common sense. This position is actually deeply, deeply embedded in the environmental and ecological sciences. Students learn these ideas about population, population growth being bad and destructive for environmental resources. They learn those messages and narratives from the time that they're in elementary school. These ideas are embedded in our science classes. So if we are hearing the message consistently from the time that we were children through our pre-teen teenage years and into young adulthood, by the time we get to being young adults in college classrooms, and we are faced for the first time with a perspective that challenges our established, received wisdom, we're going to resist that new challenging narrative because it seems like it does not accord with everything that we have learned to be fact prior to learning this new knowledge. With that said, I am not saying that my students completely disregard the arguments that I make. Most of my students I teach in Southern California at a public university. Most of my students come from low-income, immigrant backgrounds. Their families, their communities are those communities that have in the past, in one way or another, been targeted for population control. Many of my students can relate to the fact that in the late ‘60s through the mid-‘70s, just 60 miles away from our campus, LA County USC Medical Center was responsible for the egregious coercive sterilisations of hundreds of Mexican and Chicana women. And when I teach about that kind of abusive coercive experience, my students can very much relate to that. They can relate to social marginalisation of immigrant communities, of low-income communities, communities of colour. Where they have a hard time is connecting that lived experience, that familiar experience, to this knowledge around population. Because again, the knowledge, the received wisdom about population has been so embedded in science curricula they have a hard time really being able to challenge it.
Meehan: Yeah, this seems like maybe a good moment to shift over into your current research because your current research project is an intersectional feminist analysis of how the climate crisis is impacting young people's reproductive plans as well as their emotions and mental health. Could you talk a bit about the impetus for your current research?
Jade: Well, it's interesting. I had no intention of writing this book. After the first book, I said I'm done with population. I don't want to talk to anyone about sex and reproduction anymore. Certainly not in relationship to climate change. Now I want to talk about household fuels. So I actually spent a couple of years traveling to Madagascar and to Vietnam and observing how women were cooking every day in their households, whether they were using gas, firewood, or other kinds of biomass. And my intention was to write a book about that. And then Covid happened and the ability to do international fieldwork completely ground to a halt. So I had to pivot, and as I was pivoting, I kept thinking about something that I saw coming up in media and in conversations and in classroom conversations with my students over and over and over again, which was not this set of questions around population or population growth with respect to climate change, but rather this very personal, individual, embodied sense of ongoing reflection—but also sort of deep, moral and ethical quandary really—that a lot of young people were feeling about whether it makes sense to have children in the midst of climate change. Whether that's a moral and ethical decision that they could defend, knowing the kinds of changes that our planet is going through and will continue to go through in the future. When I found myself in these conversations with my students in the classroom—and again, I teach mostly students of colour, many of them from immigrant backgrounds—they were not making arguments about population control. This wasn't an issue of what other people were doing out there. It was a question of, I am experiencing so much anxiety because of these climate effects that we are seeing now and those that we know are coming in the future. I don't see how I could bring a child into that. That was where that discussion was. And I found that fascinating. And at first I didn't know whether there was a book in it or not. I thought maybe there will be an article or two. Let's see what happens. And very quickly it became clear that there was certainly a book in it.
Meehan: This all sounds very familiar. Could you tell us a little bit about your approach, what sort of research you've been conducting?
Jade: Yes. So I have two main approaches, the first being in-depth interviews, which I have conducted almost entirely online throughout Covid. And those interviews are with young people of reproductive age. The term young is quite loose because I include people as young as 20 and as—let's say—less young as 38. All of whom, in one way or another, express particular kinds of emotions around climate change. They connect those emotions to their mental health state right now and what they anticipate it will be in the future. And they connect both of those things through a deep and pervasive sense of reproductive anxiety. So those in-depth interviews were complemented by a national survey that I conducted in September of 2021. I surveyed 2,500 people, ages 22 to 35, across the United States. People from all regions of the US responded—roughly equal numbers of men and women, and a small number of people who identified as gender nonconforming. People of all different social classes, religious backgrounds, etc. What I found—actually, let me start by saying the only criterion required to participate in the study was that they met the age criterion. They had to have at least a high school education because I wanted to know that at some point they had had some kind of educational likelihood of hearing about climate change. And then the only other requirement was that they believed that climate change was real. From there, what I found in that survey is that climate emotions ranging from anxiety, fear, worry, concern, to even more seemingly benign emotions like confusion or uncertainty, were ubiquitous, but there were some racial differences in how those emotions were expressed. Those who identified themselves as white men were most likely to respond that their emotions were numb, checked-out, or no feelings at all. Those who identified themselves as black women were most likely to identify their emotions as motivated or optimistic. Across the board, everyone who was not a white man identified that they felt some strong level of anxiety or fear in response to climate change. And then I also asked how those emotions also shaped reproductive plans, and the single most kind of stark result that came from that part of the survey was in those people who were actively planning to have at least one fewer child than what they actually want. And the single most important variable determining who was actually planning to do that was race. Regardless of income, regardless of education level, regardless of religion, regardless of where they lived in the country, it was race. Women of colour were most likely in that survey to actively plan to have at least one less child than what they actually want because of their feelings about climate change.
Meehan: So that’s the national polling. How did that compare with your own interviews that were you were doing among women of colour—and I believe all of those women had a college degree?
Jade: So the people who I interviewed, they weren't all women. Most of them were, but not all of them. They all did have college degrees. Some of them had graduate level degrees too, and the majority of them were very recent college graduates. I would say—you know the big difference, of course, is that a survey is quantitative. You're not asking for the nuanced reasons why people answer the way that they do, but an in-depth interview can get at all of the nuance. And I interviewed people of every racial background—black, white, Native American, or Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, Asian American. There were a lot of differences in how people felt about this set of issues, but the strongest commonality was really a sense of deep ambivalence. It was not common for the people I interviewed to say that they had fully and completely made up their minds. Again, most of them were in their early twenties. Most of them were not planning on having children or making decisions about having children right now today. This was something that they were thinking about for the future. However, what was notable for them is that how they were raised, the values that they grew up with in their families, lent them toward wanting to have children. But as they had grown up, gotten older, become young adults, become aware of climate change, felt feelings about climate change, they were shifting their values and their plans around having families. And this was even the case among those I spoke to who came from large families, who value large families, who deeply emotionally want large families and who, because of climate change and really because of their emotions and their mental health status, feel like those large families are simply not available to them. And what I mean when I say emotions and mental health status—almost every young person I interviewed talked about their own mental health. They talked about struggling with depression and anxiety. They talked about feeling a sense of trauma as they think about climate, not just climate change, but climate crisis as they think about what the future will bring with an intensifying set of disasters. Generally speaking, the people I interviewed felt that they don't have—I don't know quite how to phrase this properly—but that they don't have the personal resources to manage their emotions and to feel strong in their mental health capacity to take care of both themselves and a child or children in the context of a growing crisis. And that, for me, was the biggest takeaway.
Meehan: And it seems also as if race plays a significant role in young people's responses. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Jade: Race played a tremendous role. I mostly interviewed young people of colour, but I also did some comparative interviews with young people who identify as white. I think the significance of race was that for those people of colour who I interviewed, they talked about growing up with racial microaggressions, small everyday interactions in which people, in words or in actions, made them feel lesser than—told them that they were lesser than, told them that they would have fewer opportunities or that they were less equipped or less prepared to compete or to have successful futures. And they themselves indicated that they had gotten this messaging in small and large ways throughout their lives and did not want to subject anyone else to that. Specifically, did not want to subject children to that. They also talked about how they felt about these large scale cases of racial violence and racial abuse. Again, I started these interviews in 2021, so this is after more than half a year of racial uprising after the murder of George Floyd, and you know, kind of this large-scale national racial reckoning in which a lot of people were finally standing up and saying ‘no more—this is completely unacceptable and we need a radical shift in this country so that people of colour don't have to worry about police brutality and racial violence and feeling unsafe in this country.’ And so coming out of that, a lot of the young people I interviewed were really reckoning with those kinds of challenges and questions and saying, ‘I know that this country is full of racist abuse. Is it moral? Is it a good moral and ethical decision to bring a child into that when they didn't choose to be here? And I knew that it was already like that.’ The people who I interviewed who identified as white were completely different in that for them, this set of questions around whether to have children in the midst of climate crisis—for them, they were surprised that this set of issues came up. This was for them their first time really grappling with existential crisis or existential threat, and they also, in many instances, felt like this was their first time grappling with the idea that your government, your leaders, the people who you've been raised to believe are looking out for you, are actually not acting in your best interest. So it's a very, very different response.
Meehan: And it’s also true that communities of colour are hardest hit by not just racialised violence, but also by the effects of climate change. And so I imagine when those young people are thinking about bringing a child into a world, there's this kind of double threat that they feel like they're facing.
Jade: Right. So the threat is not symbolic for communities of colour. It's real. It's material. It's lived, and it has to be planned for. It's not a thought experiment.
Meehan: So how does your new research change what you think about where we're headed in the future?
Jade: Hmm. I'm not entirely sure. And the thing about it is I always want to be an optimist, even though it may not seem that way from my writing. I could say I would describe myself as a very critical optimist, but for me, critique is a form of hopeful optimism. It's a way of saying, ‘this world can be better, this society can be better.’ And my way of engaging with that impetus toward better is relentless critique. I think I have been sort of brought up short by some of the young people I've interviewed who are really worried in a very literal sense about whether we have a future on the planet, given some of the changes that are being wrought by climate change, and also given the ways in which many government leaders are absolutely reluctant to do everything that's needed to aggressively address climate change, to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, to invest in alternative energy, to retreat from fossil fuel development, etc. And what it leads to for a lot of them is what's called a sense of moral injury. So there was a publication that came out in 2021. It studied 10,000 young people around the world led by a group of mental health experts. And what they found is that young people around the world, when they see their government leaders and respected adults in their communities knowing what's coming when it comes to climate change, and yet not doing everything that they can aggressively to respond—it creates a sense of outrage and injury. You know that this is happening, you know that this is harmful. You know that there are things you can do differently. If you're a regular everyday adult citizen, you know that you can vote differently. You know that you can invest your resources and consume resources differently. And if you're an elected official, you know that you can support and create policies differently—and you are not doing it. And it feels like a sense of real moral injury for a lot of young people. That sense of deep, deep betrayal by older people who are not doing absolutely everything that we possibly can to act like climate change is the immediate emergency that it actually is. It feels like we are selling young people down the river and just leaving them to their own devices. What it also feels like for a lot of young people is that us older people are saying, ‘Well, young people will solve this problem. And we are excited about all of their energy and passion and their activism. We trust them. We know that the future is in good hands with this group of young people in the future.’ That also is quite—I'm searching for the right word, because I've heard many used to describe how young people feel about that attitude. But let's just say a lot of the young people that I've spoken to are not enthusiastic about the job of saving the planet falling to them.
Meehan: And one of the future-looking suggestions it sounds like you're interested in exploring, is how we can integrate mental health services into climate response. Because all of these young people who are feeling these intense pressures, and particularly people in communities of colour, are experiencing all of these really intense pressures that are only going to get worse in the future and that are being sort of ignored currently. Could you talk about that? Like how does one integrate mental health services into a climate response?
Jade: Well, first and foremost, one does the research. And again, I never anticipated writing this book, but I also never anticipated that this book would, in some ways, be about emotions and mental health. So when I did start writing the book, I thought I was just writing about young people's reproductive decision-making and all that goes into it. But as I went down that rabbit hole, I kept coming back to the point that what is really shaping these ideas, these decisions, these desires, these plans was a deep and pervasive sense of eco-anxiety, which is an emotional response to knowledge about what's happening today, to lived experience today—and also it's a response to anticipation of what's to come in the future. Eco-anxiety is not the only emotional response that young people have or that communities of colour have. PTSD is actually a common response to disaster, and the more disasters that occur as a result of climate change, PTSD will likely continue to be a growing concern in directly impacted communities. There's also grief, ecological grief. A lot of sense of pre-loss and sadness about what will not be here in the future that is here today. So there is research on these emotional responses and how they connect to mental health, but the research has not focused on race until very, very recently. And when I was collecting background information to inform my study, I kept saying, where's the research on race? Where is the research on communities of colour? What about communities of colour that have been that have been directly impacted by climate disasters and doubly impacted because they've been disenfranchised in recovery and resilience efforts? And I was looking for that data and it just really wasn't there, other than some studies on the mental health impacts of Hurricane Katrina. And that information was really helpful to have, but I wanted and needed more and I couldn't find it. And particularly in the context of reproductive anxiety, there was nothing about race. There is a very small handful of studies about reproductive anxiety in the face of climate change. It's very, very small. And the number of these studies is growing, but in every single survey, every single study prior to mine, somewhere around 80 to 90% of participants in these studies are white. And you cannot understand the context of race, racism, and racial difference if you're not including appropriate numbers of people of colour in your study. You just can't. And the fact that race wasn't even a consideration for people creating these studies was shocking to me. And so I said, ‘okay, I guess I have to do this research because it's not being done elsewhere.’ So as I have continued to go down that road, I have found more and more and more need for this research to be done. But one of the conclusions that I've come to from my own research is that, we can't understand the impacts of climate change on communities of colour if we think of mental health as being something different from physical health and other kinds of impacts. So if we are willing and able to look at impacts on, let's say, respiratory health or cardiovascular health, why aren't we also deeply interested in mental health? Why aren’t we picking up the little bit of research that has been done, for example, in the wake of Katrina, and expanding it, funding additional mental health research? Probably because of two things. First and foremost, we are in a national mental health crisis. When it comes to young people in particular, young people are really, really suffering. And yet there's a lot of blatant disregard and not taking it seriously. It needs to be taken very, very seriously. The other thing is that communities of colour suffer disproportionately little access to mental health support and resources. And there's not enough research, but the research that is available clearly demonstrates that communities of colour don't have the emotional support, don't have the mental health support, don't have psychiatric and psychological services at the levels that we actually need. And so, for me, this is very clearly a justice issue, and as we continue to think about climate justice in more holistic ways, we have to integrate mental health services into that framing.
Meehan: So this whole podcast series has been sort of exploring the intersections between reproductive justice and the climate crisis. And so I guess I would end with this question. So, reproductive justice includes three fundamental rights as you know: the right to have a child, the right not to have a child, and the right to parent a child in a healthy environment. And in terms of the climate crisis, it seems like young people today are feeling really intense pressures bearing down on the first and third of those rights, the right to have a child and the right to parent a child in a healthy environment. And I think some people are starting to wonder if there is some sort of fundamental tension between the ideals and the goals of reproductive justice and ecological limits on a planet of finite resources. And I wonder how you see that—it seems to be a question maybe that ties together your previous work with your current work.
Jade: Well, I think—you know, in one sense there are problems with the framing of natural finite limits and how we run up against those limits because again, that does go back to the first book in terms of who the egregious actors are that have really been pushing those limits for a very long period of time. When it comes to reproductive justice, what I would argue about that is, as you said, people have been talking more and more about the right to have wanted children, the right to parent and raise children with all the safe and sustainable resources to do so. But right now in the United States, we're also really grappling with the right to not have unwanted children, particularly in the wake of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v Wade. And I can say that with respect to that, if you have growing numbers of young people who are deeply, deeply reproductively anxious, and wanting to not have children, or at least planning or reframing their plans around not having children, having a national law that will favour forced pregnancy does not help in any capacity. I think a lot of people forget that population control isn't just about forcing people to not have the children that they want. Population control is about removing people's agency and autonomy around doing what they want with their bodies in the context of their families and communities. So forced birth is a form of population control, just as forced or coerced sterilisation is. And we are living in a country where the national law is a law of population control at this point. Any efforts toward population control are efforts that will increase young people's reproductive anxiety. That's a given. Just as any efforts that continue to destroy the environment and exacerbate climate change will also increase and exacerbate those reproductive anxieties. For me, the question around limits on natural ecological limits—it's a complicated question that's too difficult to answer in this short timeframe, but I would say this. Reproductive justice is a framework that resists population control in all fashions because it argues and recognises that coercive policies that remove agency and autonomy are bad for all communities and don't do anything good for the planet either.
Meehan: I think that’s a great place to end. Thank you so much for being with us today.
Jade: Thank you, I enjoyed it.
Meehan: This is the final episode in a special four-part series exploring the intersection of climate chaos and reproductive justice. The other guests in this series have been Loretta Ross, Banu Subramaniam and Alison Bashford. This series arose out of my own research for a non-fiction book based on a piece I wrote for the LRB titled ‘Is it OK to have a child?’, which you can read on the LRB website. You can find the link in the description. In a sense, this series is both a collection of interviews with four brilliant women and a peek into the book reporting process. The book, which has been generously supported by grants from the Sloan Foundation and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, will be published by Random House in the US and Chatto and Windus in the UK in 2024.
