I write this from Belgrade, in the middle of a heatwave, during my first pregnancy—my skin cracking, itching, stretching, sweating. I monitor its dryness, note every unusual texture, each change a marker of one of the most radical transformations my body has ever undergone.
In legal and policy circles, climate change is framed in terms of thresholds, transition plans, and green growth. Rarely do these frameworks acknowledge that the crisis they address—driven by unsustainable, extractive economic models—is not only environmental or economic, but also bodily. The effects of climate breakdown are deeply embodied: in our organs, our hormones, our reproductive systems, in the ecosystems we inhabit and depend upon. Yet policy treats the body only by proxy, as a matter of “public health.”
The causes and consequences of ecological breakdown bear heavily on the experience of mothering. They reshape the body and impose a cascade of health risks—from fertility struggles, to chronic conditions, to miscarriage.
While much remains unknown, there is growing scientific consensus on the dangers. Air pollution, which far exceeds safe levels in most European urban areas, disrupts hormonal balance and increases the risk of conditions such as endometriosis. Heatwaves place enormous stress on pregnant bodies, raising the risk of heat stroke and premature birth. Toxic chemicals—especially PFOS (perfluorooctane sulfonate), a so-called “forever chemical” found in food, water, and in everyday objects we use—have been linked to miscarriage, preeclampsia, diabetes, and stillbirth. Microplastics have even been detected in the placenta and in breast milk, rendering maternal bodies toxic by absorption. All this inevitably also has psychological impacts on parents, the children they are bringing into this world and their communities. No one is untouched.
And yet, despite overwhelming evidence, policy responses fail to prioritize risks to pregnancy and child health. The European Commission’s Green Deal includes pledges to reduce pollution, but issues relating to pregnancy and prenatal health remain marginal. Many independent bodies and civil society actors consider current measures insufficient. Still, stricter regulation remains elusive as it is resisted by industrial lobbies and national governments under the banners of competitiveness and geopolitical expediency.
Mothering has long existed under coercive structures—through forced pregnancies, the criminalization of abortion, and the dismantling of public care. Marginalized bodies—be they racialized, disabled, immigrant, working-class—have always suffered the heaviest burdens.
What changes under ecological collapse is that the harm is largely invisible and slow. Pregnant bodies become portable sites of invisible pollution themselves. They incorporate the incessant flow of non-human material mutating into something else. Racialized and low-income communities, and those living in EU’s peripheries (Central and Eastern Europe) are, and will be, disproportionately affected as these populations tend to be segregated and live and work in the vicinity of sites contaminated with heavy pollution and hazardous waste which increase the natal risks mentioned above.
Despite centuries of efforts to separate humans from nature, we are part of our ecosystems—and, as those deteriorate, we suffer the consequences of political delay and denial. It is not the first time female and feminized bodies have been made to internalize the costs of social and economic upheaval. From the witch hunts that persecuted women who refused to reproduce labor, to the rapes and forced pregnancies of enslaved people, to the sterilization campaigns driven by overpopulation fears, to the neoliberal dismantling of care infrastructures, history teaches us how capitalism externalizes its violence onto reproductive labor.
For those who parent, or are about to, bringing a child into a world that is actively destroying what sustains it—air, water, soil, ecosystems—while society remains in collective denial, creates a deep and destabilizing inner conflict. It fosters anxiety, guilt, and, at times, despair. And yet, amid uncertainty and fear, to have a child while facing such a reality is a radical act of hope and maybe even of a kind of resistance. It reflects not a naïve and ritualistic form of optimism which our societies are so often imbued with, but hope in the sense bell hooks describes: “essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall climate promotes disillusionment and despair.”
Ecological collapse is not a sudden catastrophe that couldn’t have been predicted—it is the direct consequence of neoliberal logics. But what has been built can also be dismantled. Through everyday struggle, collective care, and radically reimagined systems grounded in reciprocity and equity, we may begin to find ways to sustain ourselves, others, and the lives we are nurturing.
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Cover: View of the exhibition Nairy Baghramian, Privileged Points, 19.01 – 22.09.2019, Mudam Luxembourg © Photo- Rémi Villaggi | Mudam Luxembourg
