It wasn’t that long ago when the fashionable gathering place for young couples was a meeting of the National Childbirth Trust. I remember, in the early months of 1995, sitting in our instructor’s front room as she passed around a plastic model of a female pelvis while she asked us: ‘So how do you think the baby gets out?’
Fast-forward three decades and there is a new way for middle-class would-be mothers to spend their evenings: attending sessions of a project entitled ‘Motherhood in a Climate Crisis’ put on by the University of Bristol’s Brigstow Institute. There is no better way to describe it than to quote the academics’ blurb. The project, they write, was designed to use ‘therapeutically informed participatory theatre techniques to collaboratively explore concerns around reproductive decision-making for women in an era of unfolding climate crisis’. There are photographs of women curled up on the floor, or standing arms outstretched as if in religious devotion.
A report of the project reveals that the sessions have led to many couples deciding not to have a child for the sake of the planet. ‘I have this deep grief and anger around not having a second child amid the climate crisis,’ declared one 37-year-old attendee, Rosanna, who added that she spent the sessions writing a letter entitled ‘To the second child I will never give birth to’. Ruby, 31, had made her mind up, saying: ‘I don’t want to bring new children into the world as it currently is. I wouldn’t feel OK making that choice.’
The sessions, which began in 2022, will not have helped Bristol’s collapsing birth rate.
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