When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked "Is it OK to still have children?," what did she mean and was she saying something new?

I'm watching this little video snippet:

"There’s a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult, and it does lead, I think, young people, to have a legitimate question: Is it OK to still have children?" Ocasio-Cortez said. "Not just financially because people are graduating with 20, 30, $100,000 worth of student loan debt, and so they can’t even afford to have kids and a house, but also just this basic moral question, like, ‘what do we do?’" she continued. "And even if you don’t have kids, there are still children here in the world and we have a moral obligation to leave a better world for them."

I'm seeing reactions around the web — mockery, contempt, even some stupid exultation (the kind that says: Ha ha great so the lefties won't have children!). But my questions are:

What did she mean? 

There are 2 completely different ideas. One is that the world is going to be so bad that a good person would not choose to cause a new individual to suffer the predicament of having to live in it, that it might be so bad that you should visualize your future child yelling I wish I had never been born and really meaning it. The other idea is that human beings are the cause of climate change, so it's wrong to add to the mass of humanity that is wrecking the world.

I don't think she's clear. She's just throwing her thoughts out there, disorganized, and maybe it's up to the listener to complete the logic. But which way are we supposed to complete AOC's thoughts? She talks about morality but — unless there's more to this video — she doesn't face the difficulty of thinking about whether what she means is that it's bad that there are so many people on this earth or whether life isn't worth living.

There's also a third idea mixed in there, and it's not a moral choice for the would-be parent. It's just personal economics. It's expensive to have children, and a lot of young people, including perhaps herself, realize that the most effective way to economize is not to have children. That could be seen as a moral choice for the country as a whole: It's morally wrong to maintain a system that tends to make young people feel that they can't afford to have children, that it's a big economic sacrifice. It's morally wrong not to welcome and support those who are willing to do the hard work of bearing and rearing children.

Was she saying something new? 

Some people are acting as though AOC blurted out some weird new notion, but in fact it's an idea I have heard my whole life. In my head, it plays as a Bob Dylan lyric:

You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain’t worth the blood
That runs in your veins

That's from the early 60s. Dylan isn't inventing the idea. He's citing it as if we're all familiar with it. The great fear at the time was nuclear war, and I remember growing up with that fear and being taught it at school to the point where it caused me, a child, to fear the sound of ordinary planes flying overhead because they could be the bomber and this could be the last minute of life. As a college student, I remember expressing the idea myself. Asked about whether I pictured myself having children some day, I came out with what I knew was a cliché: Maybe it's not right to bring children into this world.

ADDED: There's a fantastic version of Dylan's song — "Masters of War" — by The Staples Singers (in 1964), and it should be familiar to many younger people these days because it was used in this Sony video game commercial in 2010: