An acclaimed science writer and cultural critic confronts the question of what it means to have a child in the face of climate catastrophe in this urgent call to imagine radically transformed futures.

When Meehan Crist was eight months pregnant, a young woman asked her a difficult question—knowing what you know about the climate crisis, how does it feel to be pregnant?

As we face overlapping environmental crises, a profoundly uncertain future is reshaping how people think about having babies. Having a child is at once the most intimate thing a person can do and an unavoidably political act that raises some deeply troubling questions: What will life be like for someone born into this increasingly unstable world? Will adding another human to the global population be an unconscionable burden to place on the planet? Are these even the right questions to be asking?

In reality, Crist shows us, we’ve inherited a thorny debate about population that is resurfacing at a time when population is rising, fertility rates are falling, and environmental concerns are growing. This chaotic convergence threatens reproductive freedoms and snarls efforts to form a coherent vision for a stable ecological and political future. To help us make sense of all this, Crist sheds light on the way corporations and governments shift responsibility for climate crisis onto individuals, eugenicists mask racism in the guise of science, and why efforts to link fertility to environmental crisis arising across the political map—from far left to far right—should concern us all. Ultimately, Crist argues, sustainability must be built at the level of society itself: it is human systems, rather than human families, that need to be reimagined.

Is It OK to Have a Child? is for anyone who has asked this question—and a radical invitation to fight for the possibility of better futures for us all.