Pregnancy intentions of young women in Canada in the era of climate change: a qualitative auto-photography study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Climate change poses a global health risk through consequences such as sea level rise, wildfires, and increased air pollution. Children born today and in the future may be disproportionately affected by climate change. As a result, many young adults are rethinking having children. The impacts of the climate crisis on the decision-making of parents is an understudied area of research. This study aims to be one of the first to explore how climate change impacts the pregnancy intentions of young women in Canada and their perspectives towards childbearing. METHODS: We conducted auto-photography and qualitative interviews. Participants were recruited using social media, and were aged 18-25, nulliparous, assigned female at birth, and were either current or previous residents of British Columbia, Canada. We asked participants to take photos that responded to the question, "Show us how climate change impacts your decision to have a family," then complete a virtual, one-on-one interview during which photo-elicitation was employed to guide conversation about participants' decision-making related to childbearing and climate change. We subjected all transcribed interviews to qualitative thematic analysis. RESULTS: We conducted in-depth interviews with seven participants who discussed a total of 33 photographs. Analysis of participants' interviews and photographs identified themes of eco-anxiety, hesitancy towards having children, sense of loss, and a desire for systemic change. Participants experienced anxiety, grief, and loss when faced with thoughts of change associated with their environments. Climate change impacted all but two participants' childbearing decision making, which was found to be interrelated with social-environmental factors, such as cost of living. CONCLUSION: We aimed to identify the ways in which climate change may impact youth decisions to have a family. Further research on this topic is needed to understand the prevalence of this phenomenon, and to build such considerations into climate action policy and family planning tools used among young people.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".