The Left dreams of a child free America
Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2013 8:05 pm
Despite doom and gloom predictions that never came to pass, overpopulation alarmists continue to make their case that society must restrict the procreation of human beings. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s book Population Bomb said that hundreds of millions of people would perish as a result of an overpopulated earth.
The Weekly Standard’s Jonathan V. Last’s new book What to Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster discusses the overpopulation alarmists’ false predictions, their true intentions, and the consequences all of us will pay for the unnecessary panic.
Last points out that when Ehrlich wrote his book in ’68, the U.S. government and various interest groups were quick to respond:
Groups such as the Ford Foundation and the International Planned Parenthood Federation pushed to introduce birth control and abortion in developing countries. When Lyndon Johnson signed the Food for Peace Act he required USAID officers to “exert the maximum leverage and influence” on the countries we were helping so that they’d cut down on their baby-making.[i] In 1972, the Club of Rome published a tract, The Limits to Growth, echoing Ehrlich’s forecast. (Among other things, the Club of Rome predicted that the planet’s oil reserves would be exhausted by 1992.) The movement was in such a lather that in 1967, Disney produced a movie for the Population Council, titled Family Planning. The movie, translated into 24 different languages and featuring Donald Duck, lectured viewers that if families didn’t drastically cut back the number of kids they had, “the children will be sickly and unhappy, with little hope for the future.”[ii]
Interestingly, Ehrlich refused to admit he was wrong years after his initial predictions never happened. Last explains:
Undeterred by having his life’s work completely discredited, the octogenarian professor is mad about the perils of overpopulation, even to this day. In 1990, long after his initial thesis was disproved, he doubled down and published The Population Explosion, in which he claimed that overpopulation was more. Dangerous. THAN. EVER! “It’s insane to consider low birthrate as a crisis,” he said recently. “Basically every person I know in my section of the National Academy of Sciences thinks it’s wonderful that rich countries are starting to shrink their populations to sustainable levels. We have to do that because we’re wrecking our life-support system.”[iii] (Explaining the lack of mass starvation in the 1970s, Ehrlich says, “Repeatedly in my career it has turned out things I never would have imagined were huge factors.”[iv] No kidding.)
Although the United Nations has done considerable research on the downward spiral of falling fertility rates through its Population Division, it still sponsors a “World Population Day” to raise awareness about overpopulation.
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What to Expect When No One's Expecting': Book Reveals Left's Dream of Child-Free America
