If you want to evoke a response, particularly an emotional response, in anyone, it’s easy – say something about their mother.
When I was a kid back in northeast Iowa, one of the most surefire ways to start a fight with another guy was to say something about his mom, because if you did that, you could expect to be dodging punches right away. We love our moms: they raised us, fed us, nurtured us, kissed our boo-boos, and most of them weren’t afraid to smack us if we had it coming. With some rare exceptions, moms are great!
Which, of course, is why climate scolds are now invoking moms to freak us out about the planet’s changes in temperature:
The increasing incidence of climate change-induced heat spikes, wildfires and life-threatening flash floods is engulfing pregnant and postpartum individuals in a wave of eco-anxiety and depression.
“The mom is kind of guiding the ship,” Jennifer Barkin, an expert on maternal mental health, told The Hill. “You’re already worried about — are your kids eating enough vegetables? Are kids getting school on time? How are their grades? And now you’ve got this additional worry.”
Barkin, a professor of community medicine and obstetrics and gynecology at the Mercer University School of Medicine in Georgia, characterized the influence of climate change on maternal mental health as “a global issue,” while noting that “it hits the disadvantaged in a more dramatic way — and quicker.”
The issue appears to be going largely unnoticed, however.
Unnoticed, eh? Gosh, I wonder why. Maybe it’s because people are having trouble paying for gas and groceries.
To make the argument, the Hill cites an article from the Journal of the American Psychiatric Nurses Associaton:
Although the concept of climate despair has attracted some media attention, there has been little coverage of the unique mental health impacts that occur during the perinatal period, Barkin and colleagues found in a December 2022 study. The perinatal period spans from pregnancy to a year following childbirth.
That stage in a mother’s life “is a time of increased vulnerability to negative mood symptoms due to various changes within the mother and her environment,” the authors noted in the study, published in the Journal of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association.
So, it would appear that this isn’t about whether the climate is changing or not, or to what extent – just that the moms perceive that it is. And only from conception to a year after birth? I’m having a hard time seeing how this is about climate change. So, let’s go look at the actual study.
Here are the key points, in the results and conclusions:
Results:
The perinatal period represents a potentially challenging timeframe for women for several reasons. Necessary role adjustments (reprioritization), changes in one’s ability to access pre-birth levels (and types) of social support, fluctuating hormones, changes in body shape, and possible complications during pregnancy, childbirth, or postpartum are just a few of the factors that can impact perinatal mental health. Trauma is also a risk factor for negative mood symptoms and can be experienced as the result of many different types of events, including exposure to extreme weather/natural disasters.
Conclusion:
While the concepts of “eco-anxiety,” “climate despair,” and “climate anxiety” have garnered attention in the mainstream media, there is little to no discussion of how the climate crisis impacts maternal mental health. This is an important omission as the mother’s mental health impacts the family unit as a whole.
There’s nothing in there about the veracity of the claims of a “climate crisis,” not a jot; this study presumes a climate crisis and evaluates the mental health of perinatal women (no, I will not say “birthing persons) based, it seems, on the non-stop drumbeat of panic-mongering from climate scolds.
You know what happens when we presume? You make a pre… wait, that doesn’t work. But presuming, nonetheless, is what this article does.
See Related: ABC ‘Climate Change’ Alarmists Pathetically Push ‘Eco Anxiety’ as Life-Threatening Mental Illness
Yet Another Tiresome Study Urging Us to Change Our Diets to Save the Planet
Here’s the problem: Climate and environmentally-related deaths, as a percentage of the population, are at historic lows. For example from the data set linked here, which includes deaths from droughts, floods, earthquakes, storms, extreme temperatures, volcanoes, wildfires, glacial lake outbursts, mass movements (dry), mass movements (wet), and fogs, in the decade of the 1920s – 100 years ago – deaths per all these causes was 26.50 per 100,000, globally. In the 1930s, it was 21.89 per 100,000; in the 1940s, 16.50 per 100,000.
In the first decade of this century? 1.19 per 100,000. In the second decade? 0.64 per 100,000. In the 2020s, so far, we’re looking at 0.48 per 100,000.
Worrying about dying from a climate-related, or indeed, any environmentally-related cause, in the 2020s makes about as much sense as worrying about being eaten by a shark. At least it’s more likely than death by a vending machine falling on you.
This isn’t science, and it isn’t science reporting. It’s panic-mongering. We would do much better to give people, moms especially, the facts and figures, so they can see that, the bleatings of people like the infamous Swedish Doom Pixie notwithstanding, they really don’t have anything to get upset about.