In her piece, writer Nell Frizzell shares some of the concerning thoughts that ran through her mind before she decided to have a child.
“Before I got pregnant, I worried feverishly about the strain on the earth’s resources that another Western child would add,” she wrote. “The food he ate, the nappies he wore, the electricity he would use; before he’d even started sitting up, my child would have already contributed far more to climate change than his counterpart in, say, Kerala or South Sudan.”
Fox News contributor Campos-Duffy, who lived in India in her 20s, called the article “hysterical” and said it’s dangerous for people like Frizzell to “romanticize” impoverished nations. The environment “is way down on the priority list” in India, she said.
“You don’t want to raise your kid in Kerala, India,” Campos-Duffy told Fox News. “It’s a wonderful place, but this idea of romanticizing these places is very interesting.”
“The kid growing up in Kerala or Sudan would live the way we live if they could,” she added. “It’s only with wealth and prosperity that those things become more environmentally friendly.”
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Human Progress, a Cato Institute offshoot, responded to Frizzell’s piece with a Simon Project study that concluded children come with an “increase in resource abundance.”
Campos-Duffy agreed the problems with the environment “are going to be solved by people.” Instead of ripping the wealthy West, Campos-Duffy argued people like Frizzell should be taking countries like China and India to task.
“If you really care about the environment, drop the pointless, virtue signaling Western guilt and work toward holding the worst polluters in the world, China and India, accountable — not your beautiful, innocent baby!” she said.
It’s because of arguments like Frizzell’s that Campos-Duffy says she feels “really bad for young women today.” It’s “a big enough deal already” to have a child, she says, without adding “paranoia about the environment.”
Social media users likewise criticized Frizzell’s take.
“These people are completely insane,” columnist Josh Barro wrote.
The conservative Young America’s Foundation responded to Frizzell with a one-word answer.
This isn’t the first Vogue piece to question whether having children would be environmentally destructive. In March, Vogue’s Emma Harding published the piece, “Fear Over the Climate Crisis Has Made Me Reconsider Having Children,” which asked many of the same questions about a newborn’s carbon footprint.
Frizzell responded to the backlash to her piece on Twitter on Tuesday, writing she wished people would read her Vogue article before criticizing her. One social media user responded to Frizzell’s tweet by posting a picture of his newborn baby, to which Frizzell replied, “Congratulations!”
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