A TEACHER couple is leading a movement to stop the world from having any more children because they believe giving birth is "a crime against humanity" that's killing the planet.
Spencer Rocchi, 38, and Agnieszka Marszalek, 46, are members of The BirthStrike Movement, an activist group founded by Rocchi in April last year.
Seeking to spare future generations of children from a "dystopian existence", members of the group are refusing to have kids until humanity has resolved its own social, environmental, political, and economic issues.
Those issues include threats of war, addressing homelessness and poverty, rising crime rates, and flattening the curve on climate change.
"It just doesn't seem ethical to bring new life into this situation when we don't really have any plans to combat the vast issues we're currently facing," Spencer told The Sun.
"You wouldn't throw a party in a burning building, so why are we planning to have families on a burning planet. It just doesn't add up."
'CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY'
Spencer started The BirthStrike Movement last year after learning of a similar female-led group in the UK called BirthStrike.
A teacher in an impoverished area of greater Ontario, Canada, Spencer said he decided more than a decade ago that he had no desire to have children, but only in the last few years has he sought to mobilize others to follow his lead.
"It's not just wrong to have children, it's a crime against humanity," Spencer said.
"When I say that, I don't mean that everybody who had a kid is committing crimes against humanity but you have to know what you're doing first … They've committed a horrible act against their kid by bringing them into this world."
Spencer's controversial stance on procreation has cost him a number of once-close friendships, he says, because he "told them the truth" about how he felt when they told him they were expecting.
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Agnieszka, meanwhile, said she's become the "black sheep" of her family for berating her relatives back in Poland when they've announced their pregnancies to her.
The 46-year-old, who said she realized she didn't want to become a mother in her early 20s, said: "My sister gathered me and my family a few years ago and told us she had 'big news'.
"I said, 'Please don't tell me you're pregnant … that's not good.'"
Agnieszka said her sister was furious with her response, apparently telling her she "wanted to see if she was a good mom."
"I told her that was a stupid thing to do," she said. "You're risking someone's life, that new creature you're producing, to see if you're a good mother?"
FAMILY FUEDS
Two years later, Agnieszka's sister fell pregnant again, leaving her "lost for words … just so mad", she said.
Her familial tensions boiled over when one of her cousins also announced on Facebook that she, too, was expecting her first child.
Agnieszka commented on the post with a shocking message, outlining the statistical probability the child would likely be sexually assaulted in her lifetime.
In addition, she told her cousin she had to be "nuts" for choosing to bring up a child in Poland's current political climate, and in the face of an impending climate crisis.
"My mom wasn't in Poland at that time, and she asked me to keep my opinions to myself, but I said I’m speaking for the child – nobody speaks for the child.
"There' climate change to think about, world wars, fights over resources like water in years to come, rising political tensions in Poland and the right of abortion being taken away," she said.
"I asked, 'What have you done to make the situation better than it is right now? … Then how do you think the world is going to be a better place for this child once it gets here?' And I get no answer.
"It's really frustrating. It's like I feel many times I'm hitting my head against the wall. And they just want me to shut up and be quiet and not say anything because it's okay.
"But now I’m the black sheep [of my family]. Nobody wants to talk to me because I’m the party pooper."
KIDS 'HARM' ENVIRONMENT
The primary objective of The BirthStrike Movement is to refrain from reproducing to stem the effects of climate change.
As their logic goes, anytime you have a child you're bringing into the world another person who'll cause carbon emissions, in addition to their children, plus their grandchildren, and so forth.
The ideology is driven by studies claiming to show that having a child leads to a huge amount of carbon emissions – far greater than those generated by other lifestyle choices, like driving a car or eating meat.
According to one study by Science.org, by choosing to have one fewer child in their family, a person would trim their carbon footprint by a staggering 58.6 metric tons. By comparison, choosing to get rid of their car would reduce their emissions by just 2.4 metric tons.
"Having a child, especially in the developed world, is one of the most harmful things you can do, if not the most harmful thing you can do," Spencer said.
"The problem is what percentage how many people are living an industrialized lifestyle because that's the main thing. It's the sheer consumption that's killing – and not just the fossil fuel industry.
"This is not a national problem. This is not a country's problem. This is a societal problem," Spencer added. "Until we find a balance, and the Earth can start to heal, then we have to stop having children."
However, the issues go way beyond just climate change, Spencer and Agnieszka say.
"Even if you take climate change out of the picture, we're still going to have poverty and shortages of resources due to overpopulation," Spencer said.
"We're still going to have huge societal problems because we still have massive inequality.
"Climate change is just the proverbial icing on the cake that should be the nail in the coffin of the birth strike argument," he added.
A 'SHALLOW AND SELFISH' WORLD
Agnieszka said her desire to become a Birth Striker wasn't driven only by global warming, rather her disdain for the state of the world today in general.
"The world today is not good," she said. "I'm not trying to be a pessimist but it's very selfish and a lot of it is very shallow.
"Also a lot of it is for show. I don’t want to have a kid just to show off that my internal organs work well. There are so many kids in foster care and child services, let's help those."
What "sickens" Agnieszka, she says, is that everybody wants to "have the perfect family that comes only from their genes."
"We don't need to increase the population, it already exploded 100 years ago," she continued
Agnieszka said that people who choose to have children in the current state of the world are "delusional" and "devoid of any care about the child itself."
"Another reason I don't have kids is that what if someone hits them with a car? Or what if they get a terminal disease? There are no guarantees.
"I don’t feel bad for the parents at all [of children who have a terminal illness]. You deserve every single day of suffering. Because your child is suffering their whole entire life.
"You probably didn't have that much pain in your life up until you had your child, and you didn't think of that before having them.
"But I have no patience and no sympathy, because why did you still decide to have a kid?"
EYEING THE MAINSTREAM
Both Spencer and Agnieszka say they don't expect Birth Striking to break into the mainstream any time soon, but say they believe Gen Z will help to add momentum behind the movement in years to come.
"I think Birth Striking will continue to be a fringe movement for the next 10 to 15 years, until Gen Z and the generation after them start making the decision about whether or not to have kids," Spencer said.
"They're already the activists anyway. They were involved with the BLM movement and things like that, and they actively campaign for societal change.
"I'm 38, so I'll be a senior when climate change and all this other stuff gets really bad, so most of my life is behind me," Spencer said. "But they won't be, they'll be closer to the age I am now.
"And I think it's gonna happen because there's just no way around it. There has to be a decision made, or some kind of strategy, on how many people we want to have on the planet."
Spencer continued: "If we're not going to have that conversation, if we're not going to start having that conversation, then there's no solution.
"And then we're all screwed."
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