The Supreme Court decision on Dobbs has also put contraception on the line for banning, causing anxiety for women and men who want to plan a family or never have children.
A study from Michigan State University has found that one in five Americans does not ever want children. The study focused on only the state of Michigan, but the authors argue that Michigan is representative of the demographics of the United States as a whole based on the findings in the 2021 census.
Kim Ward writes the presser for the university:
The study — published in Scientific Reports— used a set of three questions to identify childfree individuals separately from parents and other types of nonparents. The researchers used data from a representative sample of 1,500 adults who completed MSU’s State of the State Survey, conducted by the university’s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research. Because different types of nonparents are impossible to distinguish in official statistics, Neal explained that this study is one of the first to specifically count childfree adults.
“People — especially women — who say they don’t want children are often told they’ll change their mind, but the study found otherwise,” said Jennifer Watling Neal, associate professor in the psychology department at MSU and co-author of the study. “People are making the decision to be childfree early in life, most often in their teens and twenties. And, it’s not just young people claiming they don’t want children. Women who decided in their teens to be childfree are now, on average, nearly 40 and still do not have children.”
The study was conducted in Michigan, but according to the 2021 census, Michigan is demographically similar to the United States as a whole. Because of this, Neal said, if the pattern holds up nationally, it would mean 50 to 60 million Americans are childfree.
“Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, a large number of Americans are now at risk of being forced to have children despite not wanting them,” said Watling Neal. If further precedents are overturned and birth control becomes harder to access, many young women who have decided to be childfree may also have difficulty avoiding pregnancy.
Despite the protest from the Supreme Court that contraceptions are safe from the Dobbs ruling, you would be a fool to believe that they will not overrule Griswold, which established that married couples have the right to buy and use contraceptives.
In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that employers could opt out of providing contraception to America's women based on religious and moral grounds. The Trump administration had filed a case for the religious extremists of Trump's base. Clarence Thomas, one of the more odious Supreme Court Justices, wrote: "We hold today that the Departments had the statutory authority to craft that exemption, as well as the contemporaneously issued moral exemption. We further hold that the rules promulgating these exemptions are free from procedural defects,". The Federalist majority on the court had an agenda; women's reproductive freedom was the first. Crippling the fight against climate change was the last ruling they made for 2022. Next year our democracy is on the line; it is an apocalyptic thought that, through my tears, is difficult for me to process.
Many people do not wish to raise children on a dying planet. I want to nip in the bud any commentary that overpopulation is a significant fact global greenhouse emissions. It is not - The Union of Concerned Scientists writes that the crisis is primarily due to greenhouse gas emissions from wealthy nations. Overpopulation, in general, is devastating for the biosphere, with a sixth mass extinction underway. , however. It is an inconvenient truth that billions of those in the developing world will suffer excruciating pain and mass death due to our fossil fuel emissions as the climate emergency intensifies.
We frequently receive questions about population growth and its relationship to climate change. It’s an old idea with a troubling history. In the context of solving the climate crisis, it's distracting at best, and at worst, has the potential to do great harm to the climate and to people around the world.
Here are the facts: climate change is caused by the heat-trapping emissions produced when we burn coal, oil, and gas, and cut down forests. Data show that these emissions are most closely connected to carbon-intensive production and consumption patterns, predominantly the carbon-intensive lifestyles of the relatively wealthy, both here in the United States and around the world. Fossil fuel companies, utilities, and their trade groups also bear significant responsibility: they have used their power, money and deceptive tactics to lock in carbon-intensive infrastructure and constrain choices individuals can make about their energy supply.
A misplaced focus on population growth as a key driver of past, present, and future climate change conflates a rise in emissions with an increase in people, rather than the real source of those emissions: an increase in cars, power plants, airplanes, industries, buildings, and other parts of our fossil fuel-dependent economy and lifestyles. Implicit in this faulty framing is the notion that all people contribute significantly to heat-trapping emissions. In fact, data show (PDF) that the richest 10 percent of the world’s population contributes 50 percent of annual global warming emissions.
Despite having the lowest emissions, developing nations will suffer the most from climate breakdown. Famine is a significant threat to people alive today. Women, in particular, are paying the heaviest price in countries where apocalyptic climate impacts have arrived.
From Unicef:
“Climate impacts, especially extreme weather events, are affecting the roles of women and men around the world, particularly in rural areas,” said Fleur Newman, Gender Team Lead at UN Climate Change.
In some African countries, for example, many men are migrating from rural to urban areas to find employment, a trend driven by extreme weather events, leaving women behind in charge of land and the household but not necessarily with the respective legal rights or social authority to do so. The increase in gender-based violence following climate-induced disaster was mentioned across the submissions. According to the submission of the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance, gender-based violence is prevalent in areas of conflict that are also more at risk of experiencing extreme weather events. For example, women and girls in Colombia, Mali and Yemen are particularly at risk of experiencing gender-based violence owing to the combination of climate change impacts, environmental degradation and conflict.
Child marriage, which is considered an act of gender-based violence, has been observed in various communities as a means of coping in the event of disaster, according to the submissions. In Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Kenya, for example, child marriage is a way to secure funds or assets and recover losses experienced due to climate-related disasters, such as drought, repeated flooding and more intense storms.
All submissions noted that extreme weather events due to climate change disproportionately affect women and girls and their ability to perform their everyday tasks, which partly explains why some girls are forced to drop out of school. The tasks of collecting firewood and water in some countries, which traditionally fall to women and girls, are heavily affected by adverse climate change impacts, which force the women and girls to travel further from their homes to complete the tasks and provide for their families. In turn, the longer journeys increase their exposure to gender-based violence outside the home.