U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) asked on her Instagram page this weekend if it’s OK for people to have children in light of climate change around the world.
“There’s a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult,” Ocasio-Cortez told her Instagram followers. “And it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: is it OK to still have children?”
She said it’s a “basic moral question.”
Ocasio-Cortez has been pushing for a Green New Deal, a wish list program that asks the country to upgrade or replace U.S. buildings with state-of-the-art energy efficient features.” The deal would supposedly eliminate the nation’s carbon footprint in 10 years.
Ocasio-Cortez said in her Instagram live stream that it may not also financially be the best decision for people to have children because many end up with thousands of dollars in student loans.
“There’s also just this basic moral question, like, what do we do?
“And even if you don’t have kids, there are still children here in the world and we have a moral obligation to them to leave a better world to them.”
In response to her Instagram post, the CEO of the group Concerned Women for America, called Ocasio-Cortez’ comments “anti-children.”
“What's is old is new again. AOC questioning if it is still okay to have children because of climate change is the same apoplectic anti-child rhetoric we’ve heard before,” Penny Nance, CEO of Concerned Women for America, told Fox News.
“We heard about this in the late 1960s with zero population growth crowd who warned that we needed to limit our families or doomsday would come. Now, we worry about replacement rates.”
According to research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the birth rate in the U.S. has fallen in recent years. In 2017, the fertility rate dropped for the seventh straight year.
Photo courtesy: Getty Images/Lars Niki/Stringer
