One Small Snip for Man, One Giant Snip for Mankind
by Anne Roback Morse
For most of the world, today is Friday, a
happy day that leads into the weekend. For Paul Ehrlich
and Dr. Doug Stein, however, today is
World Vasectomy Day!
Their video on the website
WorldVasectomyDay.org does not pretend that
vasectomies are for men’s health or for healthy
relationships. Instead, with cheery colors, the video
highlights “population” as the problem behind “global
warming, war, and poverty,” and prescribes vasectomies
as the cure.
“It all comes down to human beings,” they
claim, “For too long, people have stopped talking about
the population of the planet!...Are you willing to put
your balls on the line for Mother Earth?”
As a woman, that appeal really doesn’t
work for me. Besides,
the earth isn’t overpopulated.
But there are points of convergence
between the vasectomists and Population Research
Institute. We agree that “we need to take better care of
the people already on the planet,” for example. We just
disagree on how that should be accomplished.
While the vasectomists advocate
eliminating people to get rid of poor people, we at PRI
think this approach is analogous to, well … throwing the
baby out with the bathwater.
We believe we can adequately take care of
our existing population and our future generations by
exercising our ingenuity and responsibly drawing
upon the cornucopia of natural resources with which the
world is blessed.
The anti-people ideology of World
Vasectomy Day is not a joking matter; it causes real
harm.
WorldVasectomyDay.org
features an extreme case: a man who had 26 children
before he got a vasectomy. How many people do you know
who have had 26 children? Vasectomies provide band-aid
solutions to real problems.
Not only do such ideologies distract from
real problems, like poverty and war, they also fuel the
dangerous ideology of overpopulation that has been at
the root of every sterilization camp and forced abortion
in this century. As PRI’s President, Steven Mosher,
wrote of China’s attempt to reduce their population
growth: “The history of the People’s Republic of China
has been marred by a long series of violent political
campaigns, but none has been more violent, none has
claimed more victims, and none lasted a fraction as long
as the one-child policy.”
World Vasectomy Day is actively promoting
the ideology that leads to such abuses. World Vasectomy
Day is hosting Paul Ehrlich to lecture today. Paul
Ehrlich authored the 1968 book, The Population Bomb,
which predicted that the world would see massive famines
as a result of overpopulation. They never happened. As
Yale historian Paul Sabin writes of Ehrlich, “His
instinct to blame sheer numbers of people, rather than
their state of culture or government, represented a
shift in emphasis underway in Western thinking.”[1]
Yes, Ehrlich marks a change in our culture away from
food aid and towards forced sterilizations. Ehrlich’s
lecture today is entitled, “Is it naïve to think we can
cap the population?”
At its best, the ideology of World
Vasectomy Day sells fake solutions for real problems. At
worst, it fuels coercive sterilization campaigns such as
those which regularly take place in
India and
China.
On the first World Vasectomy Day, let’s
not forget that one-fifth of the world suffers under
China’s draconian one-child policy, undertaken in the
name of curbing a mythical “overpopulation.”
[1]
Paul Sabin is an associate professor at Yale University
and author of the recent book The Bet: Paul Ehrlich,
Julian Simon,and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future.
|
|
Population Control Extremists: Get Rid of People Causing Global
Warming
by Nathan Oppman | Washington, DC |
LifeNews.com | 10/20/13 3:07 PM
The tired old argument
has returned. People are going to end the planet. The oceans
will rise, the land will burn, and aliens will invade. Ok, there are
no predictions of an alien invasion … yet.
Last, however, if we can’t control consumption,
we can control the number of consumers. This is technology we
already have, and it’s cheap. Every woman, everywhere, could have
contraception.
Most of us would find coercive government limits
on child bearing abhorrent. But giving women access to contraception
and to education makes draconian edicts unnecessary. An educated
woman has an interesting and useful contribution to make to her
family and her society. Since she can’t easily do that with seven
children hanging on her skirts, most women who get through secondary
school want two children or fewer. Providing access to contraception
and educating women may be the fastest path to giving our planet a
break.
Population management can’t do it all; we need a
full-court press on all fronts. But if we want a secure future, we
need to start with the fastest, most affordable way we know to limit
carbon emissions: by bringing fewer emitters into the world.
So what is the solution to these problems? Get
rid of those pesky people. After all if there were no people, then
they would not be destroying earth by releasing carbon dioxide into
the atmosphere. Of course, limiting the population of earth through
encouraging women to have fewer kids would be devastating to
economic
growth and development. People have been making predictions
about the end of the world for a long time. There is one factor
common to all of them— they have failed to happen.
Instead of encouraging anti-human, anti-family
policies, we should encourage healthy families where God is honored
and lifelong marriage is the norm. While we are unlikely to be
affected by global warming, we are already being affected by family
breakdown. On almost every social measure the breakdown of committed
marriages has devastating consequences. We should be focused on the
real man-made problem of family destruction. If we don’t fix the
family the future will indeed be bleak.
And one more thing, I did a quick internet search
while writing this article; an alien invasion could be a result of
global warming
according to some!
|
Save the Planet Kill Yourself! Environmentalists Want Humans to
Live Shorter Lives
by Wesley J. Smith | Washington, DC |
LifeNews.com | 10/12/13 3:04 AM
Humans are the enemy! A new study published in Ecology and
Society claims that longer life expectancy for us is bad news
for the planet. From
the study by Aaron Lotz and Craig R. Allen:
We found a positive relationship between life expectancy and the
percentage of endangered and invasive species in a country…The
overall trend in high-income countries with improvements to the
Human Development Index, which includes human life expectancy as one
of its variables, is toward a disproportionately larger negative
impact on a country’s ecological footprint. However, some
lower-income countries have a high level of development without a
high impact on ecosystem services (Moran et al. 2008).
Increased life expectancy means that people live longer and
affect the planet longer; each year is another year of carbon
footprint, ecological footprint, use of natural resources, etc. The
magnitude of this impact is increased as more people live longer.
Bad humans! Bad, bad humans.
The answer is supposedly–it’s becoming a cliché–that we see
ourselves as just part of nature:
Fischer et al. (2012) propose a “transformation strategy” that
assumes that direct links between people and nature are better than
indirect links. This paradigm shift would recouple the
social-ecological system.
Wrong. We are the exceptional species. The environment benefits
most when we see that it is our duty to manage the environment
responsibly because we are human. If we redefine ourselves
as just another animal in the forest, that’s just how we will act.
The authors don’t say whether we should try and live shorter
lives. But that certainly seems an implication.
LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith, J.D., is a special
consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture and a bioethics
attorney who blogs at Human
Exeptionalism.
|
