If I have no hope for the planet, why am I so determined to have this baby?

Sitting, nauseous with morning sickness, on a park bench in the bright heat of an unusually hot spring day my partner and I watch children march past us, striking from school:

‘Thinking your child will be part of the solution, not the problem,
 is hubris. We are the collapse. Our children are the collapse.’

“What’s the point of an education if we have no future,” their signs say.

My heart relocates itself, sinking down somewhere around my ankles. They have 10 more years of habitable planet than the baby I am carrying.

In early summer of the same year, after a miscarriage, I find myself pregnant again in the week that megafires tear through the state. There are 70-metre flames producing their own weather systems, driving them further on across the countryside, through the bushland that relies on fire to stimulate new life, on to forests that have never before burnt.

The sky over our Canberra home is tinged orange, the air is thick and sticks in the back of your throat in such a way that no coughing seems to dislodge the sensation. The whole country is suffocating. We haven’t seen the sky in a month.

Read the story from The Guardian by Gemma Carey - “If I have no hope for the planet, why am I so determined to have this baby?”