By Alexandra DeSanctis
Thursday, July 13, 2017
The Left has long been infected by a dangerous desire to
tell you how many children you’re allowed to have. Today, that urge takes shape
in the tendency of progressives to blame “extra children” for all of our woes.
They particularly like to pin the supposedly devastating
effects of climate change on families that dare to have more than a
“reasonable” number of offspring. This charming argument cropped up again early
yesterday morning in a tweet from progressive commentator Jill Filipovic:
Having children is one of the worst
things you can do for the planet. Have one less and conserve resources. https://t.co/8oP2SlL8Gj
— Jill Filipovic (@JillFilipovic)
July 12, 2017
Never mind that Filipovic just published a book arguing
that women can be fulfilled only if societal structures protect their ability
to do whatever will bring them the most pleasure at any given moment.
Apparently, that fundamental freedom to order your life exactly as you please —
aided by extensive government programs, of course — applies only if you stick
to the Left’s proscribed number of children — or, if you kill them
post-conception.
This is just the latest example of Filipovic’s insisting
that she knows how to live your life better than you do, and it was prompted by
a new study finding that the “best” way to reduce one’s carbon emissions is to
have at least one fewer child. Such daft suggestions prompt the inevitable
question: which child?
Who among us has the right to decide when a child is
“extra” and how many is too many? Or
maybe we should get down to business right away and begin by eliminating all of
the “extra” people currently milling about the globe, taxing the earth’s
precious resources with their costly carbon dioxide emissions. Any volunteers?
Jill?
Of course, there’s a big difference between offing a
child standing next to you and saying that people ought to choose not to have
that child in the first place. But both presume that human life is valuable
only if — and should be brought into the world only if — a certain subset of
powerful and wise elites give the okay. Filipovic’s solution doesn’t even meet
her own standard of public policy designed for those already alive — she ignores
the fact that having children brings joy to parents, one-child policies have
disastrous consequences, and lowering birthrates would render her beloved
social programs inoperable. (With fewer workers, who would pay for all the
benefits?)
If the Left’s view becomes widely accepted as a desirable
or necessary course of action, there is no limiting principle to prevent it
from becoming a government-enforced mandate against over-reproduction. And if
enough people become convinced that overpopulation is quickly killing the earth
— which, by the way, it’s
not, despite the endless paeans to the thoroughly discredited Thomas
Malthus — a regime of legally limited reproduction could even be considered a
routine part of the government’s duty to protect its citizens.
It’s happened before. In the 1920s, many medical experts,
lawmakers, and supposed reformers advocated forced sterilization as a method of
reducing unwanted populations and thus limiting growth. Margaret Sanger, for
example, founder of today’s Planned Parenthood, started her group with the
intention of providing birth control to minority communities in order to limit
their numbers.
This grotesque mindset contributed to the widespread use
of government-sanctioned, forced sterilizations to reduce “unfit” populations.
In 32 states, federally funded programs targeted the disabled, the mentally
ill, immigrants, minority women, and poor people for sterilization, often
without their knowledge and always without their consent. From the 1920s to the
1970s, 65,000 Americans with mental illnesses or development disabilities alone
were forcibly sterilized.
In 1927, the Supreme Court held in Buck v. Bell that forced sterilizations carried out on the
“feebleminded” or otherwise unfit populations were constitutional. In the
majority opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote of the defendant, who had
been sterilized at birth, that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
That appalling decision still stands.
In the late 1960s, though, reformers and activists turned
from eliminating “unfit” populations to lamenting the consistent growth of the
overall population. Fueled largely by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich’s
manifesto The Population Bomb, large
swathes of society came to fervently believe that the world’s implosion was
imminent and could be staved off only by limiting human reproduction.
“There’s too many people. And we’d like to see people
have fewer children and better ones,” said Ehrlich’s student Stewart Brand in
1969. “It’s about pain in the world. Maybe anybody who’s thinking of having a
third child ought to go hungry a week.”
Like Brand, most adherents to Ehrlich’s group Zero
Population Growth — with 600 chapters and 60,000 members — ascribed to the
biologist’s extreme beliefs, including that childbearing ought to be forbidden.
Ehrlich even argued that compulsion would be acceptable if citizens didn’t
cooperate.
Ehrlich wanted to create a blacklist of people and
organizations that impeded population control, award “responsibility prizes” to
couples with childless marriages, and impose a tax on children and a luxury tax
on supplies such as diapers and cribs.
Needless to say, Ehrlich’s dramatic predictions never
came close to being realized, and not because we stopped reproducing. “I was
recently criticized because I had said many years ago that I would bet that
England wouldn’t exist in the year 2000,” he said in a 2014 interview. “Well,
England did exist in the year 2000, but that was only 14 years ago.”
Ehrlich and Brand’s rhetoric sounds more than vaguely
familiar. Today’s Left might not openly espouse such misanthropic theories, but
the insistence that overpopulation will destroy the earth is very much with us.
Blatant forms of racism and eugenics have faded into the background, but the
underlying principles that motivated reformers in the 20th century still
resonate.
At this week’s G-20 summit, for example, French president
Emmanuel Macron suggested that Africa’s high population rate is a primary cause
of the continent’s lack of growth. “When countries still have seven to eight
children per woman, you can decide to spend billions of euros, but you will not
stabilize anything,” he said.
This mindset helps explain why global nonprofits have a
laser-like focus on distributing copious amounts of contraception in Africa,
under the guise of human rights. And it’s not just overseas. In the U.S.,
nearly 80 percent of all Planned Parenthood clinics are located within walking
distance of black and Hispanic neighborhoods. In New York City, more black
babies are aborted each year than are born alive.
Planned Parenthood supporters will be the first to tell
you that their clinics provide contraception and abortion on demand to give
minority women equal access to opportunity. But in reality, strains of Sanger’s
original mission echo, just as Ehrlich’s refrain on limiting reproduction
echoes in the comments of Filipovic and Macron.
If progressives continue to indulge this latest
disturbing version of population-control rhetoric, they ought to confront the
question: Who among us is less worthy of being alive?
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