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When Emilia Kim returned to Tucson in August after studying abroad in China, her first ever summer spent away from her mom, her vision for her future had shifted. Kim, now a senior at Basis Oro Valley High School, could no longer picture herself becoming a mom.
It wasn’t so much that she had started dreaming bigger about a career, though she does plan to pursue a law or policy degree. After spending time in a country with fewer human rights and environmental regulations than her own — while reflecting on everything she saw her single mother struggle with to raise her — she viewed what was happening in Arizona through a new lens.
While Kim was away, her home state was caught in an especially heated battle over abortion access at the same time that its major city logged a record-breaking string of 113 days over 100 degrees. As her frustration over delayed action to address the causes of climate change mounted, motherhood seemed less and less manageable. The idea of being forced into it was overwhelming.
“I’ve always looked at my mom as both a role model and an inspiration,” Kim said in August. “But I’m in a very different position when it comes to becoming a parent. It scares me that I might bring a child into this world knowing all of these problems and experiencing them firsthand. And that’s a really sad aspect of growing up in 2024, because if you asked 7-year-old me, I would have loved to have kids.”
The Arizona Republic, in collaboration with The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom reporting on gender, politics and policy, connected with Kim and others throughout the spring and late summer to discuss their views on reproductive rights and climate change, two intersecting issues that have moved front and center for young Arizonans in this election cycle.
The state has become a pressure cooker for questions increasingly on the minds of young people everywhere: Is it ethical, responsible or safe to bring a child into a world with dangerous and costly weather events spiraling beyond society’s abilities to prepare or respond? And with the future of abortion access up in the air, how many unplanned children will be born to parents facing a new reality of worsening storms, drought, crop failures and heat?
Arizona’s Gen Z cares about these issues and how they overlap. In a May survey of 1,315 registered voters in the state between the ages of 20 and 30, a majority identified reproductive rights (72%) and climate change (62%) as “very” or “extremely” important to them, according to results published by an independent research group at Arizona State University. A proposition on the ballot in November to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution offers a chance to weigh in on the former. Any increase in voter turnout motivated by that measure could influence Arizona’s role in selecting the next president, who will decide on action to address the latter.
For Arizonans too young to be captured by this survey, these overlapping issues may be even more critical. Kim, 17, is the statewide policy director for the Arizona Youth Climate Coalition. The youth-led organization has found local traction on climate issues by helping Tucson craft its first climate action plan, outlining a path for the Tucson Unified School District to reduce its use of fossil fuels that warm the atmosphere and pushing utilities toward cleaner energy sources to help ensure a livable future for their generation and the next.
But this progress has been overtaken by accelerating warming. In every summer she can remember, Kim has watched her state crash through new records for drought, heat and heat-associated deaths, all while Arizona lawmakers do little to intervene. More than 600 people died of heat-related causes in central Arizona in 2023, a 52% increase over the previous year, which was a 25% jump compared to the year before that. The anxiety young people feel witnessing this human devastation has hit a fever pitch psychologists are starting to document.
Between April and August — which included, again, some of the hottest periods ever recorded in one of America’s hottest places — the teenager also saw Arizona move backward and then stall out on another issue affecting her health, safety and quality of life.
“Am I going to be able to make it out of state to get an abortion if that’s the life-saving medical care that I need? The answer, with the implementation of this new total ban, is no,” Kim said in April, reacting to a new restrictive state law. “I could be having a child that I cannot care for in a world that I don’t believe in, in a future that I don’t believe in. And so that has caused a lot of tension, a lot of anxiety, I think, in a lot of people my age.”
A state of legal, medical and climate chaos
Since June 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade and put states in charge of abortion restrictions, Arizona has been one of the most volatile battlegrounds for reproductive rights. Even before that ruling, in March 2022, Republican leaders made Arizona the first state to formalize a “contingency plan” that banned abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, including for victims of rape and incest, introducing confusion about which law prevailed.
That 15-week ban is now in place, with exceptions for cases where the pregnant person faces risks of death or “impairment.” That’s despite certain pregnancy complications being undetectable before 20 weeks.
But over the two and a half intervening years, access to abortion care in Arizona endured so many flip-flops and legal revisions that, at times, even abortion providers didn’t know exactly what was allowed.
Dr. DeShawn Taylor runs one of Arizona’s eight abortion clinics, the Desert Star Institute for Family Planning in Phoenix. She said she’s had patients make their way into her clinic at later stages in their pregnancies because they got bad information earlier from a whole range of sources, and it took them a while to realize they had options.
“The web of restrictions on the books create a situation where a huge number of Arizonans still don’t think abortion is legal here, and so are not getting the care they need,” Taylor said. “I had a medical student tell me that some OB-GYNs on her rotations didn’t even know abortion was legal in our state. So that’s extremely frustrating.”
The chaos over abortion access has been especially disruptive since April, when the Arizona Supreme Court ruled to uphold a near-total ban on abortion dating back to 1864 — before Arizona was a state — and to enact strict penalties against providers who violate it. Almost immediately, that rollback was delayed by a lawsuit and then repealed the next month by a bill signed into law by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs that reset legal abortion care back to a 15-week limit. But the back-and-forth cast providers and patients into a state of uncertainty.
Since new laws cannot take effect until 90 days after the legislative session ends, which is itself a fluctuating date, that uncertainty stretched out across Arizona’s sweltering summer. Hobbs and Arizona’s Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes vowed to not enforce the 1864 ban. But patients and providers in parts of the state where county attorneys vowed the opposite were left unsure of which rules to trust.
“I had a staff member say, ‘Go take your vacation,’ and I had to say, ‘I can’t take my vacation because I have to pay close attention to what’s happening with abortion in this state,’” Taylor said in May.
Though her clinic survived the summer and Taylor did eventually take her vacation, impacts to the state’s abortion care landscape will likely outlast Arizona’s season of extreme heat.
Taylor said in May that her clinic had “started hemorrhaging staff because of concerns about job security after the Dobbs decision.” By September, she had decided to transition her services to a nonprofit model so she can pursue grants and donations in hopes of keeping the clinic afloat.
“We are still continuing to try to find the road to sustainability,” she said.
At the same time, Arizona’s lack of a legal commitment to abortion access is causing new providers to avoid bringing their services to a state where they might not be able to practice across the full spectrum of reproductive health. Physicians already in place question whether they need to relocate to offer an ethical standard of care.
Dr. Vivian Huang, a physician and member of the group Arizona Healthcare Professionals for Climate Action, anticipates that all of this instability will shape the geographic distribution of the next generation of providers, adding another layer of inconsistency in local availability of care.
“States that have more restrictive abortion bans in place, (medical) residents are choosing not to go there,” Huang told The Republic in April. “We do know that most residents stay in the state where they get their training, so this will have future implications on equity and health care, and it’s going to create further divides where more rural states are really going to be suffering.”
Another strain on Arizona’s ability to attend to patient needs will come from ongoing out-of-bound weather extremes, said Dr. Brian Drummond, Huang’s colleague at AHPCA and a clinical professor at the University of Arizona.
“Climate change pushes an increased burden on the entire health care system, and by doing so it decreases the health care availability for everybody,” Drummond said. “So the more people we have to send to the ERs and hospitals, the routine stuff just gets pushed to the side. I think the women’s health issue is really the canary in the coal mine of all these climate issues that we’re going to see, whether it’s heat-related illness or wildfire smoke or everything.”
Spurred on by such system breakdowns, Arizona might also find itself ill-prepared for the rising and related phenomenon of climate anxiety. As extreme weather produces new threats to modern infrastructure and ways of life, therapists around the world have reported a matching uptick in clients seeking climate counseling. One survey published in April of more than 500 psychotherapists in Germany found that 72% reported a patient bringing up climate change in session, and 41% of those had a patient come to therapy specifically for that reason.
Community-based counseling options like “climate cafes” and support groups that have popped up in many major cities to address climate anxiety have been less available in Arizona. But with the state on the domestic frontlines of escalating impacts from heat waves and drought, local youth feel this stress acutely.
“Living in Arizona, hearing about all these issues, growing up as Gen Z seeing all of this on the news, it’s stressful,” Kim said. “Sometimes you just gotta take a break and cry a little bit.”
‘I don’t think you should have to have skin in the game to help find solutions’
Taylor Conley doesn’t tend to get bogged down by grief, though she’s as concerned as anyone about trajectories of climate change and reproductive freedoms in her home state.
The college freshman spent the break between her senior year of high school and her enrollment at the University of Arizona working as a camp counselor with kids ages 5 to 13. The experience tilted her future plans in the opposite direction from Kim.
Conley remains undecided about wanting her own kids, but between interviews in April and August, she warmed to the idea. As co-director of communications for the Arizona Youth Climate Coalition and the former high school representative on the Tempe Sustainability Commission, she recognizes how climate catastrophes make parenthood more challenging in modern times.
But she also views the conscious choice to have kids as a powerful investment in a brighter future. The teen gets frustrated when elderly Arizonans approach her at climate activist events and tell her they’re proud of the work she’s doing to help clean up their messes. She’d prefer if everyone was willing to pitch in.
“I don’t think you should have to have skin in the game to commit to the issue and help find solutions,” Conley said in April. “I think everyone is responsible. It shouldn’t fall on just one generation.”
As a queer person, Conley’s path to motherhood might look different than that of her straight peers. But though she’s less likely to find herself unexpectedly pregnant, she’s adamant about the need for both abortion access and climate action to secure the best possible future for society as a whole.
“People having their right to an abortion obstructed, that definitely still affects me, because I’m a person who does have a uterus and if something did happen, I could still face issues with that,” Conley said. “And even if it doesn’t affect me, it still affects so many people.”
Conley will turn 19 this month. But she’s already thinking decades into the future. The more unplanned children born into an unstable climate, to parents not prepared to protect them from worsening storms, drought and resource scarcity, she said, the more impossible-seeming problems her generation will be left to solve.
In her first few months of college, Conley joined the UAZ Divest movement that has pushed the university to cut financial ties with oil and gas interests to protect the futures students study hard to secure. She declared a major in environmental engineering, but is also eyeing a career in environmental law.
This will be the first election in which Conley is eligible to vote, and she plans to make her voice heard by voting “yes” on a new constitutional ballot provision that, if accepted by voters, would enshrine a right to abortion in Arizona up to 24 weeks gestation, and beyond in cases where the life or health of the pregnant person is at risk. She also plans to go to the polls armed with information about which candidates support further action on climate change.
“Most Arizonans do support abortion access, but most legislators have been totally ignoring that or focusing on their political priorities rather than actually what their constituents think are the larger problems,” Conley said. “It’s like how they ignore a lot of climate issues and it’s just a stalemate, so it feels like we’re not able to achieve progress.”
‘These are issues that are for adults’
Emilia Kim won’t be old enough to vote in the upcoming election. But that hasn’t stopped her from advocating for the rights she believes her generation should have — to a livable climate and reproductive choice about whether and when to bring more humans into it.
“These are issues that are for adults,” Kim said in April. “But kids are taking on this responsibility, speaking up because we are so concerned for our futures.”
While young Arizonans bear much of this burden, some adults are stepping into the legal arena to help.
In September 2023, a year after a conservative judge reinstated the state’s 1864 total abortion ban, reproductive rights activists organized under the name Arizona for Abortion Access to file the proposed constitutional amendment that Conley is excited to vote for and Kim is happy to support. This July, the group submitted over 820,000 signatures of support, more than double the number required to get on the ballot. This major effort represents about 20% of the state’s voters and “the most signatures ever submitted by a citizens’ initiative in Arizona history,” according to Dawn Penich, a spokesperson for the campaign.
As summer temperatures stretched further into September than ever before, the measure faced legal challenges to its wording and the validity of those signatures. Having only recently survived this opposition, political pollsters wonder what impact Proposition 139 might have on voter turnout in this swing state and on the outcome of local to federal races.
If it passes, abortion seekers in Arizona will have another nine weeks, up to 24 weeks of gestation, to decide whether bringing another child into this world aligns with their moral, personal and financial positions.
That still won’t be enough for Dr. Taylor. While trying to keep her Phoenix clinic doors open, the physician has also spent the last two years working with the Arizona Proactive Reproductive Justice Alliance to consider next steps regardless of whether Prop 139 passes.
A basic constitutional right to abortion hardly guarantees access given the litany of blockades Republican state lawmakers have put in place since 2009, when Arizona’s Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano resigned to join the Obama administration and her conservative replacements launched an all-out assault on reproductive health, Taylor said.
“We found over 50 abortion restrictions on the books in Arizona,” the provider said. “Having the right to abortion in our state constitution does not automatically repeal them. Our coalition has been planning for that next phase of work.”
Taylor also sees immigration issues intersecting with climate and abortion pressures as Arizona approaches election day. Her clinic is located in a “socioeconomically depressed, medically underserved and ethnically diverse zip code of Phoenix.” The same young patients who worry about how border policy changes could affect their families are also the demographic research shows will be most vulnerable to climate change and, she said, statistically least able to manage difficult or unplanned pregnancies — which can be complicated by related hazards like air pollution and heat waves.
Taylor, who is 49, acknowledged that “it was someone in their 20s who really raised the flag for me that climate justice is reproductive justice as well.”
“This is a very different generation than our older ones in terms of how they’re seeing the world and in terms of the world they’ve been given,” she said. “And that’s going to have wide ranging impacts on a lot of things.”
Kim, who experienced backlash against Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic, came home from her summer in China with an enthusiasm for how the democratic process can keep regressive policies like those spelled out in Project 2025, the conservative agenda for a second Trump administration, at bay. Though she won’t be allowed to vote, she thinks the trifecta of climate, abortion and immigration issues in Arizona could help drive people to the polls who may then opt to protect reproductive choice while they’re there.
“We don’t see a lot of men in this (reproductive rights) space,” Kim said. “Immigration and climate change, those are issues that encompass both (genders) so it’s easier to get support.”
Speaking during a recent break between her environmental classes at the UA, Conley, ever the optimist, reflected on her own blend of trepidation and excitement ahead of the election, and on how climate solutions and conscious parenting could still redirect Arizona’s future.
“We have to make the world a safer place for children,” she said.
This article was co-published with The 19th as part of The 19th News Network’s Abortion on the Ballot series.
Joan Meiners is the climate news and storytelling reporter at The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Her work has also appeared in Discover Magazine, National Geographic, ProPublica and the Washington Post Magazine. Before becoming a journalist, she completed a doctorate in ecology. Follow Joan on Twitter at@beecycles or email her at [email protected].
Sign up for AZ Climate, The Republic’s weekly climate and environment newsletter. Read more of the team’s coverage at environment.azcentral.com. Support climate coverage and local journalism by subscribing to azcentral.com.
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Publish date : 2024-10-16 09:23:00
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