Anti-Natalist Fatalists

Planet earth is doomed. That is the clear message coming from the population control zealots. These anti-natalists are certain that if we do not immediately take radical steps to curb population growth we will all perish. Of course we have been hearing this gloom and doom ideology for decades now.

The most recent case of chicken little thinking comes from Melbourne University professor of reproductive biology Roger Short. He told an international healthcare conference in Sydney today that the world is overpopulating itself to a catastrophic future of terrorism and climatic disaster.

He says that human activity is outstripping the natural world’s ability to cope because of exploding and uncontrolled population growth. According to one press account, “He is calling for a vast increase in the availability and use of contraception to slow the birthrate worldwide, and says only one country – China, through its one-child policy – has shown the way to future stability and sustainable environmental and economic growth.”

His praise of the Chinese policy is ironic for many reasons, including the fact that the conference he is speaking at is the 25th "Foetus as a Patient" international congress, which focuses on the care of pregnant women and their babies.

Care of pregnant women and their babies is exactly what is not taking place in China. For three decades China’s notorious one-child policy has been all about coercion, brutality and eugenics. And it has resulted in millions of dead babies and brutalised mothers.

Steven Mosher, who has lived in China and witnessed first-hand the terrible practices of China’s population reduction programs argues that this is the last nation that should be held up as any sort of example – except perhaps as a bad example.

China has been coercing women into forced abortions and forced sterilizations in unprecedented numbers. Basic human rights are being systematically violated along the way. The horror stories coming out of China are as grievous as they are revolting. Yet Western intellectuals keep insisting that China is the model to emulate.

But as Mosher warns, “This message – that anything goes in the name of population control – is underscored each time the controllers extol China’s one-child policy.” It simply legitimises some very illegitimate and immoral practices.

Not to be outdone however, on the same day that professor Short was lifting up China and its coercive population controllers, another anti-natalist group was lobbying the Rudd government. Marie Stopes International Australia issued a press release today urging the Rudd government to change current AusAID Family Planning Guidelines, which prevent government monies going to abortion services overseas.

Both the former US Bush government and former Howard government in Australia banned such funding. But pro-abortion Obama has already reversed the policy in the US, and population controllers are pressuring the Rudd government to do the same. I have written about this elsewhere.

In that piece I not only discussed the foreign aid funding issue, but noted a leading eugenicist and population controller, Margaret Sanger (1879-1966). She was the founder of Planned Parenthood International.

Sanger had a counterpart in the UK, Marie Stopes (1880-1958). Both women had much in common, as did their respective organisations, MSI and PPI. Both advocated abortion, sterilisation, and eugenics, and both helped prepare some of the ideological ground for the rise of the Nazis.

Indeed. Stopes was quite infatuated with Hitler. Gerard Warner, writing late last year, picks up the story: "‘Dear Herr Hitler, Love is the greatest thing in the world: so will you accept from me these (poems) that you may allow the young people of your nation to have them?’ These gushing words from an ardent fan (she was lucky Unity Mitford did not scratch her eyes out) were written in August 1939, just a month before this country went to war with Nazi Germany, by Marie Stopes, the ‘woman of distinction’ who will ornament our 50p stamps from October.”

He continues, “Sending the Fuhrer a book of her sentimental poems was an appropriate gesture. This keen advocate of eugenics and subverter of family life had a long career of activity in the politics of human reproduction. In 1919 she urged the National Birth Rate Commission to support mandatory sterilisation of parents who were diseased, prone to drunkenness or of bad character. In 1920, in her book Radiant Motherhood, she demanded ‘the sterilisation of those totally unfit for parenthood be made an immediate possibility, indeed made compulsory’. Her 1921 slogan was: "’Joyful and Deliberate Motherhood, A Safe Light in our Racial Darkness’."

“In 1935 she was present at the International Congress for Population Science in Berlin, held under the auspices of the Third Reich. On her death she bequeathed her clinic and much of her fortune to the Eugenics Society. Today, Marie Stopes International has nearly 500 centres in 38 countries, performing more than half a million sterilisations a year, and is a major abortion provider.”

Warner concludes, “Considering the hysteria nowadays attaching to issues of race, at first sight it seems extraordinary that Stopes should have earned commemoration on a stamp. To the PC establishment, however, even racist peccadilloes can be ignored to honour a pioneer who helped promote the anti-life culture and relieve women of the intolerable trauma of giving birth to a child with a cleft palate. Eugenic abortion accounts for an increasing proportion of the 7 million ‘terminations’ in Britain since 1967. Poor old Josef Mengele was not eligible for a stamp, being a dead, white male. Perhaps in 2009… “

Sanger, Stopes, Short – birds of a feather flock together. Sure, Short would undoubtedly distance himself for eugenics and the Nazis. But given his praise for China’s coercive population control policies, perhaps he is not all that different from Sanger and Stopes after all.

Regardless of difference of opinion over means, all three share an anti-natalist fatalism. They are convinced that we are over-populated, and radial measures must be taken immediately to deal with the problem. The result is always the same: more death and depersonalisation, all in the name of humanity.