Is having a child still an act of hope?
It is an age-old question, one I don’t think I’m the first to lose sleep over, but I find myself circling it more insistently these past few weeks: the residue of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, the news that has not let up, the Vice President on trial again, three teenagers shot dead inside their own classroom in Tacloban last month, in a country that used to say this doesn’t happen here.
Or maybe it’s smaller and more personal than that: I am a woman in her 30s with a good marriage, a job I love, and a body that is, medically speaking, still capable. The question is no longer abstract. It has a deadline, whether I like it or not.
Should I have a child in a world that feels, more days than not, like it is coming apart at the seams?
My own childhood was not extravagant. We didn’t have much, but we had enough, and enough was simple: a game of patintero on the street, a shared bag of snacks, the kind of boredom that let a child’s imagination stretch out and take up space. I don’t remember feeling deprived. I remember feeling free, in a way I’m not sure childhood affords anymore, when even 10-year-olds now carry phones that show them the weight of the world before they’ve learned how to carry their own.
My life now is, by most measures, not lacking. My job is my passion, which makes me one of the fortunate few. I have a partner who shows up, consistently and without performance, and a community that pushes me to keep growing. If I am being honest, I am not asking whether I can afford a child. I am asking whether it is fair to have one.
And here is where the question stops being philosophical and starts being gendered. My partner and I are equally uncertain, but the clock, the commentary, and the quiet judgment of relatives all seem to land on me first. As a woman, it is my body that will change, my career trajectory that will be interrupted first, my name attached to the word “selfish” if the answer is no. Men get to sit with the question. Women are expected to resolve it.
I love children. I mean this without qualification. But loving children is not the same as being ready to raise one, and I am still trying to raise myself in a world I don’t fully understand. How do I teach a child to feel safe walking into a classroom when a classroom can, without warning, be a crime scene? How do I explain daily political upheavals? How do I explain that the tobacco industry has simply changed its packaging and flavors, marketing nicotine to teenagers through vapes and nicotine pouches, while insisting it left the business of addiction behind?
Zoom out further: wars that do not end, a planet measurably warmer than it was when I was a child, genocide unfolding in real time on the same phones our children will one day hold, a resurgence of racism and nationalism I thought my generation had already buried. Is it responsible, is it even kind, to hand a person a life inside all of that, without their consent?
I am not alone in asking. The Philippines’ total fertility rate has fallen to a record low of 1.7 children per woman in 2025, down from 4.1 in 1993, well below the 2.1 replacement level demographers consider necessary to keep a population steady. In Metro Manila, the rate drops to 1.4, and 57.3 percent of married women nationwide say they want no more children. We are not an anomaly. We are a pattern.
So is procreation still ethical, in a world this loud with its own unraveling? I don’t think there’s a clean answer, and I distrust anyone who offers one, whether dressed as pronatalist policy or as an internet stranger’s certainty that bringing a child into a burning planet is cruelty itself. Maybe the point was never whether the world deserves a child. The world does not deserve anything; it simply is, and it will keep being long after any of us have made our choices about it. Maybe the real question is smaller: am I willing to raise someone who might make this place slightly less unbearable than I found it?
I still don’t know what I will choose, and I’ve made a kind of peace with saying that out loud, in print. Some days the answer feels like a quiet, defiant yes, because choosing to bring a person into a burning world and teaching them to build something anyway might be the last truly rebellious act left to us. Other days it feels like a firm no, because the kindest thing I can do for a child is to not require them to exist inside my uncertainty. What I know is that the question deserves to be asked slowly and honestly, without the shame women my age are so often handed along with it. We are allowed to still be figuring it out.
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Val Bugnot is a communications consultant and an advocate for the environment, and a tobacco and nicotine-free future.
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