It didn’t make sense to bring a new child into the world when Earth only had thirty, forty years left. Naomi had gone to her high school friend Lynn’s baby shower the previous year. She couldn’t help but ask Lynn why she’d gotten IVF. Lynn had shrugged a shoulder, her stomach already distended—she was having twins. She’d have to pay the additional child tax on one of them, which wasn’t cheap. The IVF would have been a pretty penny, too. “Earth has been thirty years from dying for twenty years,” Lynn had said. “It’s going to stay thirty years off forever, just to scare us into recycling.”
