A recent question submitted to Slate’s resident advice columnist, Mallory Ortberg, came from a black man whose white girlfriend is afraid to have children with him.

Though the couple has been “talking about marriage for a while,” his girlfriend has responded to the recent shootings of black men by saying she “couldn’t have a black baby in this world.” He goes on to ask Ortberg whether or not the divide between their skin colors is too great for them to stay together: “Does [breaking up] mean the bigots win?” he wonders.

Ortberg validates the girlfriend’s concerns, but the majority of her response is composed of questions posed back to the writer, mostly about his girlfriend’s support of him as a black man. She concludes by saying, “Only you can answer those questions.” It seems that “Prudence” never really gets around to giving an answer.

But in any event, this man’s girlfriend is far from the first person to fear bringing a child into the world, especially these days. A quick Google search reveals numerous blog posts and listicles presenting the myriad reasons not to have children in today’s world: bombings, international conflicts, political turmoil, food shortages, cancer, mental illness, inequality, overpopulation, climate change, and so on.

This apparently common fear of procreating makes you wonder: Wasn’t the world a much harder place to raise children just 50 years ago? Not to mention 50 years before that, or 50 years before that?

Imagine someone in 14th-century Europe, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the Black Plague on their doorstep. I bet they weren’t too thrilled by the idea of having a child.

For that matter, imagine a couple living in the early 20th century, facing diseases such as smallpox, measles, and diphtheria. In 1933 alone, close to 8 percent of U.S. residents under the age of five died. Even as recently as 1960, the global child mortality rate was as high as 18.2 percent. As of last year, this rate had fallen to 4.3 percent. The odds of a child living a long and healthy life have never been better than they are today.

Things are doubly better today for biracial couples hoping to have children, who historically had to contend with all of the aforementioned perils plus the often-violent bigotry of their neighbors and the thicket of laws designed to keep them separated. Until 1967, several U.S. states had laws that defined miscegenation as a felony. For most of the nation’s history before that, being born a black or biracial child guaranteed a life of unspeakable hardship.

So, no, this is not a dangerous time to have children; there has never in all of history been a safer time to do so. And yet our Slate questioner’s girlfriend is not atypical: She exemplifies a modern view of parenthood as the ultimate challenge, to be avoided until it can be undertaken with little to no risk. Her fear, while no doubt sincere, is misguided.

— Alexandra DeSanctis is a William F. Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism at the National Review Institute.