Woman says she got an abortion because of the ‘climate crisis’

The unnamed woman wrote to the Guardian’s advice columnist Annalisa Barbieri, asking: “I had an abortion due to climate anxiety. How can I come to terms with it?” The woman stated that she was “happily married and have two children” whom she loves dearly, but she “longed for a third” child.

“I’ve always cared about the climate crisis, and since after having kids, and knowing it will affect their lives more than mine, I became motivated to make changes,” she wrote. “We like a very ‘green’ life.” She and her husband successfully “tried” for a third child, and she became pregnant.

“Within a week I was wrought with an intense fear for the future and the impact of the climate crisis,” she continued. “I spoke to some friends, and at length to my husband, and had a termination [abortion]. Initially I felt relief, then devastation at what I had done. With the help of antidepressants and counselling I felt more on an even keel, but never at peace. After a year I still felt sadness and regret, so we decided to try again.”

“I became pregnant, and again, as if a switch had been turned, I felt intense anxiety and couldn’t see a positive future. Ultimately, I had a miscarriage. Since then I’ve worked hard at trying to find contentment with my lovely family of four. How can I make sense of what has happened and reach acceptance of what I did?”

The advice columnist urged the woman to examine her own personal history to determine why she did what she did and told her to give herself “space for grief,” including for the termination. But she affirmed the central reason for the abortion, noting that “on some level we should all have climate anxiety. Yet we walk around with disavowal, dissociation and denial to not see how terrifying it is.”

This awful story showcases so much about what is wrong with our society. Fear for the future driving a woman to kill her pre-born child, with the support of her friends and the child’s father—because the “climate crisis” has become our culture’s new eschatological doom narrative. This narrative is a secular replacement for the Final Judgement, in which God will judge all of humanity.

In the secular version, child sacrifice is committed to appease the weather gods.

But sin is very often its own judgment; the UK, like the rest of the West, faces a crisis of population collapse with consequences far more severe than any threat posed by the climate. In England and Wales in 2022, 247,703 abortions took place—nearly three in ten of every child conceived. Around 10 million pre-born children have been killed since the 1967 Abortion Act. Babies can be killed in the womb for any reason or for no reason at all—even “climate anxiety,” spurred each day by the same media that champions our abortion regimes.

To this mother’s obvious pain—her “devastation,” her guilt, her inability to come to terms with what she did—the culture has no answer. Go to therapy, the Guardian predictably advises her. Because after fueling fear for the future while championing feticide, our culture cannot point the broken people of our suicidal civilization to the only place where they can find truth and healing—and that is Christ.