Then there are the movements centered on women’s identities as mothers: Argentina’s Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the Vietnam-era Another Mother for Peace, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. More recently, the authors observe, the centrality of motherhood has given way to a focus on life, and women’s role in “giving, sustaining, and defending” it. The women-founded and -led #BlackLivesMatter movement, they note, “emphasizes creating the conditions for life, in the face of the state-led violence that threatens it.” All these movements are, at their heart, about bodily autonomy: about the right to make one’s own reproductive and sexual choices, and the ability to live free from violence, whether at the hands of the state or one’s fellow citizens.
Climate change, though, has already come for our bodies. Air pollution kills millions a year. People have perished by the hundreds and thousands in typhoons, hurricanes, and floods. Nor does climate change merely inflict death; it profoundly alters our capacity for creating life. Ferorelli and Kallman highlight an often overlooked aspect of the climate-change reproduction question, namely, the way that heat, toxins, and other damage we’ve visited on our surroundings now impair our reproductive health.
Yudith Nieto, a 34-year-old climate activist, artist, and translator, got involved with organizing to fight the Keystone XL Pipeline. Nieto’s family left their farmland in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, to work in the United States. Living in East End, one of Houston’s most polluted neighborhoods, Nieto saw how her family suffered from the carcinogens and chemicals she could smell in the air. Her cousins had asthma, she tells Kallman and Ferorelli, and her aunts had “issues in their reproductive organs, reproductive issues, their children being born early, and having children with mental health and development issues.” Nieto’s testimony makes clear that while, for some, climate change has made the choice to have children more psychologically fraught, for others, climate change, acting on the body, may be taking that choice away.
