British Vogue is being lambasted after the magazine published an article asking if having a baby in 2021 is “pure environmental vandalism” due to the resources a child consumes.
“Before I got pregnant, I worried feverishly about the strain on the earth’s resources that another Western child would add,” writes Nell Frizzell, author of “The Panic Years.” “The food he ate, the nappies he wore, the electricity he would use; before he’d even started sitting up, my child would have already contributed far more to climate change than his counterpart in, say, Kerala or South Sudan.”
She adds: “I also worried about the sort of world that I would bring my child into – where we have perhaps just another 60 harvests left before our overworked soil gives out and we are running out of fresh water. Could I really have a baby, knowing that by the time he was my father’s age, he may be living on a dry and barren earth?”
“The View” co-host Meghan McCain tweeted a picture of the article’s headline with the message “NOT TODAY SATAN!”
Mary Vought, the executive director of the Senate Conservatives Fund, added: “Absolutely nutso. Children are a gift, not a burden.”
Fox News contributor Rachel Campos-Duffy, who previously lived in India, answered one question for the author, saying “you don’t want to raise your kid in Kerala, India.”
“The kid growing up in Kerala or Sudan would live the way we live if they could,” she said. “It’s only with wealth and prosperity that those things become more environmentally friendly.”
Campos-Duffy also called the article “hysterical,” and said that it’s dangerous to “romanticize” poverty-stricken countries, especially considering the environment “is way down on the priority list” in India.
“If you really care about the environment, drop the pointless, virtue signaling Western guilt and work toward holding the worst polluters in the world, China and India, accountable — not your beautiful, innocent baby!” she said.
In the article, Frizzell does note: “like millions of others, I did it anyway. I had a baby. I’d have another if my partner agreed. Is that because I am selfish, myopic or greedy? Did I simply learn to compartmentalize my thinking, choose to listen to the arguments that supported what I wanted to do anyway, or ignore what was right in front of my face?
“Perhaps. But I also believe that when it comes to the future health of the planet, the question is not one of whether or not we continue to have babies. People will always have babies. Here, there and everywhere. Instead, it is a question of how we raise those babies, of learning to live within our environmental means, of turning away from the fever of consumerism and overturning a political system that rewards a tiny rich minority at the expense of everyone else.”
She also hit back at some of her critics on Twitter, saying: “I’ve got a lot of people who have read just a headline and not my article flirting with me* on Twitter today and it is LOVELY. *insulting me.”
Source: Newmax
