Pope Francis’ Not-So-Divine Intervention
Pope Francis’ recent comments calling those who are choosing to forego procreation to be selfish fly in the face of our fight for social, reproductive, and ecological justice. Over the course of his papacy, he has demonstrated some refreshingly liberal views favoring social equity, ecological justice, and planetary stewardship over an unexamined adherence to traditional norms. That is why his statements are deeply concerning because they grossly minimize the very values that he is calling his followers to espouse.
After fighting for personal and reproductive liberation for centuries, many women around the world are increasingly able to break free from their prescribed biological and gender roles and authentically exercise their right to have no or fewer children. This is an achievement that must be celebrated. Pope Francis’ claim that “a denial of fatherhood and motherhood diminishes us” operates from a pronatalist worldview that reduces people’s identities to their reproductive choices. Pronatalism is a set of social, cultural, patriarchal, religious, political, and economic pressures placed on people to have children. These pervasive and often oppressive pressures inhibit liberated and responsible procreative decisions. There are harmful consequences to such rhetoric. Approximately 270 million women worldwide still experience major barriers to family planning education and contraceptive uptake. These barriers are often rooted in fear and misinformation about contraception as a result of pronatalist falsehoods. We must move beyond dichotomous narratives that pit one choice against another. Autonomous, authentic, and responsible choices, be it parenthood — biological or adoptive — or non-parenthood are equally valid, and a hallmark of a liberated society.
In addition, given that our planet is in grave peril, foregoing parenthood at the moment is an especially non-selfish choice both for the sake of the potential child who will likely inherit extremely unfavourable life circumstances, and for the sake of the planet. Pope Francis’ statement that “having a child is always a risk, but there is more risk in not having a child,” is ill-informed. Mountains of evidence show that due to the climate catastrophe, children born today and in the future will live “an unprecedented life”, facing “conditions which older generations have never experienced. According to the most recent report from UNICEF, almost half the world’s 2.2 billion children are already at “extremely high risk” from the impacts of the climate crisis and pollution. Furthermore, having one fewer child in industrialized countries like Canada is over 20 times more effective than other high-impact personal actions that one can take to reduce their carbon footprint, such as going car-free, flying less, or becoming vegan. Our global ecological footprint is at least 75% larger than the planet can support sustainably. Those of us living in high-income countries like the US and Canada are consuming several times our equitable share of the global biocapacity, compared to people in low income countries. That is why our procreative choices have an enormous impact on the planet and marginalised communities.
Pope Francis rightly challenged our predatory attitude towards the planet, yet he claims that having a relationship with animals instead of our potential children is “a loss of humanity”. The test of our humanity should lie not in our decisions to have children or not, but rather how we treat each other, nature, and non-human animals. Human population has doubled from four billion to about eight billion in the last 50 years, and we are growing at an alarming rate of 80 million people each year, which is about one million people every four days. The growth in our human enterprise, driven in large part by harmful pronatalism, has come at the cost of the rest of the planet. We represent just 0.01% of all living things, yet since the dawn of our civilization, we have caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of plants. Humans and the domesticated animals that we kill for food now comprise about 96% of all mammal biomass on Earth, while all other mammals represent just about 4%.
Pope Francis has demonstrated a deep capacity for care for social and ecological justice. Given the immense influence he has over people, however, his recent comments show a disregard for our current reality. They undid the great strides we have made in the arena of social, reproductive, and ecological justice and nullified his own calls to empower youth to be the “critical conscience of society”. Pope Francis has a responsibility to retract these damaging pronatalist statements. He must promote just and sustainable family planning practices by advocating for liberated, informed and responsible procreative decisions, so that our human footprint can be in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive.
