Conceivable Future
Conceivable Future is an environmentalist advocacy organization that uses the alleged threat of environmental collapse as a pretext for supporting population control. It argues that abortion and abstaining from reproduction should be pursued because future generations would otherwise inherit an uninhabitable environment. 1
Contents
Conceivable Future campaigns to encourage individuals to post videos and written testimonies in which they share their thoughts on why people should not have children due to environmental concerns. 2
Advocacy
Conceivable Future’s advocacy is based on the idea that environmental issues compound social issues, and it uses the left-of-center concept of intersectionality to suggest issues pertaining to multiple minority groups are of greater importance. 3 Conceivable Future organizes house parties where participants encourage questioning if having children is irresponsible while these issues exist. Then, it encourages members to post videos and written testimony to campaign in support of their answer to the question and Conceivable Future’s environmental advocacy. 4
Participants of Conceivable Future’s “house parties” have used their discussions to promote messaging such as “BirthStrike” and “#NoFutureNoChildren.” 5
Conceivable Future’s FAQ webpage as of 2025 argued that ethnic-minority women have been subjected to “authoritarian population control efforts,” but in the United States, it argues ethnic minority women are also “repressed” by the government and society from making their own choices regarding reproduction. It argues, “Population corresponds to climate harm only to the degree that individuals consume resources and emit carbon.” It blames “low-income groups” and the middle class in western countries for being responsible for the majority of carbon emissions, and it suggests population control measures to address environmental and social issues. 3
Opposition to Immigration Enforcement
In June 2025, then-House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green (R-TN) and Subcommittee Chairman Josh Brecheen (R-OK) sent letters to 215 nonprofit organizations accusing them of helping “fuel the worst border crisis in our nation’s history” by providing housing, transportation, and other services to migrants that entered the United States illegally. The letters informed recipients that the House Homeland Security Committee would be investigating if the nonprofits had used federal grants to engage in “human trafficking and smuggling” or to advise illegal aliens on “how to avoid and impede law enforcement officials.” 6
In response to the Congressional investigation of nonprofit organizations using federal grants for potentially engaging in human trafficking and aiding illegal immigration, Conceivable Future co-signed a letter alongside 600 other nonprofit organizations denouncing the investigations. The letter also accused Reps. Green and Brecheen of “weaponizing” their Congressional authority to advance a “political agenda.” 7
Leadership
Rhode Island state Senator Meghan Kallman (D-Pawtucket) is a co-founder and as of 2025 was a co-director of Conceivable Future. 1 Kallman is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston’s School for Global Inclusion and Social Development. She previously served two terms on the Pawtucket City Council and as a fellow at the Women’s Policy Institute. 8
Writer Josephine Ferorelli is a co-founder and as of 2025 was a co-director of Conceivable Future. 1 In May 2016, Ferorelli organized a Break Free from Fossil Fuels protest at a BP refinery in Whiting, Indiana, calling for an end to conventional energy use, where protestors promoted the idea that there were five years left until irreversible damage to the environment would happen. 9
Book
In 2024, Conceivable Future founders Meghan Kallman and Josephine Ferorelli published the book The Conceivable Future: Planning Families and Taking Action in the Age of Climate Change. The book discusses events in history where women threatened to abstain from sex to support political motives, such as ending wars, and it provides arguments for why environmental issues pose a threat to the health of pregnant mothers and children. It also argues how women threatening abstinence could conflate their identity with sexual reproduction, which it opposes, and that it complicates Conceivable Future’s advocacy. However, it argues that reducing carbon emissions created by individuals “has become a classic dead-end dilemma” that serves as a distraction to the idea that overpopulation is the “real” problem. 5