The New York Times Style Magazine, T, recently posed this question: “Given the State of the World, Is It Irresponsible to Have Kids?” Could it have framed the query, which goes to the heart of family planning, differently? Given the power of framing, how we first think about a question is crucial to the answers at which we will arrive. We could frame the question more comprehensively and ask: “How Did Our Family Planning Policies and Culture Create the State of the World Today?”

That approach would allow us to avoid making the same mistakes that lead us to now worry about having kids, and also avoid the cognitive dissonance of seeing the decision to have children as disconnected from the future the act of having kids collectively creates.

Given the impact family planning has on climate change, child welfare, equity and other things that define the state of the world and the future, we should force ourselves to expand our thinking and frame important issues broadly enough to capture what matters. TAKE ACTION: URGE THE NYT EXEC. EDITOR TO CONSIDER THEIR APPROACH MORE CLOSELY: @deanbaquet