Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) wondered whether it was okay to have children given concerns about climate change, during an Instagram video for her supporters Sunday.
“There’s scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult,” she claimed. “And it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question, you know, is it okay to still have children?”
Ocasio-Cortez’s musings on the morality of having children come at a time when the U.S. birth-rate is at a 30-year-low and below population replacement level.
She also claimed there was a “basic moral question” people had of how they can respond to climate change.
“I mean not just financially because people are graduating with 20, 30, $100,000 worth of student loan debt,” she said, “and so they can’t even afford to have kids and a house, but also just this basic moral question, like ‘what do we do?'”
“There’s scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult. And it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: is it okay to still have children?”
— Jerry Dunleavy (@JerryDunleavy) February 25, 2019
—@AOC
Reminds me of the Green New Deal FAQ:
??https://t.co/3RtWZeVbJZpic.twitter.com/TWTYJvbb0P
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“And even if you don’t have kids, there are still children here in the world and we have a moral obligation to them and to leave a better world for them,” she added.
Ocasio-Cortez insisted that people “need a universal sense of urgency” on the issue and criticized the way a fellow Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (CA), had responded after being confronted by children in her office about her lack of support for the Green New Deal.
“You know ‘I’ve been working on this for x amount of years,’ it’s like not good enough,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an apparent reference to Feinstein telling the children that she'd worked on the issue for 30 years.
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