Adoption, climate crisis and making kin: Australian young people discuss their reproductive futures

For many people in the Global North, climate crisis renders reproduction a fraught issue, prompting questions about whether it is right to bring more people into a rapidly deteriorating world. Feminist theorists have written variously about this issue, with many arguing for multiplying forms of kinship that are not based on biogenetic connection. Adoption is often offered as an example of such alternative kinning practices. This article reports on interviews with Australians who are not parents, aged 24–35, about the connections between climate crisis and reproduction, and their thoughts and feelings about having children in the future. Many participants mentioned the idea that instead of conceiving and birthing children, they might adopt or foster and/or argued that others should do so rather than have ‘their own’ children. The article critically explores the figures of adoption as an ethical solution to the problem of overpopulation in our participants’ accounts of reproduction and in feminist academic literature. We argue that both propagate unrealistic and potentially harmful tropes in the wish for solutions to serious personal and political dilemmas.