What gets left behind for future generations? Reproduction and the environment in Spey Bay, Scotland

Abstract

Based on fieldwork with people involved in the environmental movement in Scotland, this article describes the connections they made between the future of reproduction and the future of the environment. While we are used to thinking of Euro‐American kinship in terms of the passing on of biogenetic substances, in this case an ecological ethic of reproduction, which places the emphasis on considering the kinds of environments into which children will be born, is more salient. An ecological ethic of reproduction urges (potential) parents to consider whether it is responsible to bring future generations into a world with stretched and unequally distributed resources and in which the accumulated consequences of human actions may be altering not only the natural world, but also the ability to reproduce at all.

Anticipatory Regimes in Pregnancy: Cross-Fertilising Reproduction and Parenting Culture Studies

“…Anticipatory regimes have important implications for reproductive justice since anticipating future children's rights during pregnancy tends to translate into the restriction of pregnant people's autonomy to choose whether and how to carry their pregnancies to full term, and how to raise their children. However, anticipation and ideas about the future transcend the question of reproductive surveillance and control; these are core components of reproductive imaginaries (Dow, 2016;Franklin, 2013). As such, anticipation provides a unique lens across reproductive events that could foster transversal rather than compartmentalised understandings of the reproductive process, answering Almeling's (2015) and Faircloth and Gürtin's (2018) calls for more comprehensive approaches to reproduction.…”

Unsettling maternal futures in climate crisis: towards cohabitability?

“…Emma, in her twenties, similarly explains that the decision she and her partner have made not to reproduce is born of love for their imagined children: 'Because we love our unborn children, we are not having them.' These imaginings reflect an 'ecological ethic of reproduction' which informs reluctance to bring children into a climatically and environmentally changed world (Dow, 2016b). However, these considerations are also inflected with emotions, notably sadness.…”

“…Nor can such work attend to the intermingling of rational and emotional responses to climate change: the 'socially responsible' decision of having fewer children may be inflected by climate-change-induced grief and imagining children's futures can be 'undeniably a burdensome cognitive endeavour' (Gaziulusoy, 2020: 1). There is some work on reproductive choices becoming part of environmentalists' political action (Schneider-Mayerson, 2022) and how environmentally informed reproductive choices can be understood as ethical decision making when potential parents consider the implications of bringing children into future environments (Dow, 2016a;2016b), but these analyses do not examine the importance of emotions in making those choices. In short, there is limited research that centres on the emotional complexities of reproductive decision making in the context of unsettling times and unsettled futures.…”

Nobody likes to sleep alone: aspiring to kinship futures in post‐Soviet Cuba

“…This temporal orientation shows how imagining the future often plays a crucial role in people's reproductive considerations, thereby conditioning the future through present actions (cf. Dow 2016).…”