Monday, May 27, 2013

Preparing for Post Roe America #1: Population Alarmism

With the continued closure of dedicated abortion facilities, there is a lot of talk in the prolife community about "the first abortion free state."
Getting the facilities closed is certainly an excellent step. It's been well documented for over half a century that time itself is a great healer of the early pregnancy panic that sends many women scrambling to the abortion mill. The time it takes to make travel arrangements can be the time it takes to allow the woman to bond with her baby and abandon an abortion plan.

The excellent work people have done setting up prolife resource centers for abortion-vulnerable women has been a triump as well.

There is even hope on the horizon for overturning Roe vs. Wade, in least in part, so that states can begin to restore protection to unborn children.

There's only one fly in the ointment: The abortion machine.

Long before the prolife movement really started coalescing in the 1970s, the abortion machine was well in place and firmly entrenched. The abortion machine consists of people, and through those people organizations, that put massive effort into ensuring that abortion continues to be practiced.

The problem is that we're not dealing with a homogenous group. People have a variety of motives for embracing abortion:

Let's start with the big money.

Population control fantatics want to drive the birth rate down, and abortion is one tool they'll never give up. They know that no matter how much contraception they push for, the human drive for reproduction is powerful and through human error and technological glitches the contraception will frequently fail. These pregnancies are, to the population zealots, excessive mouths to feed and they must be gotten rid of. 

There is also an element of racism to population alarmism. As P.J. O'Rourke put it, population control is a mindset of "Just enough of me, way too much of you."

Population control zealots are never deterred by such pesky little details as being consistently and spectaculary wrong.

Thomas Malthus was spectacularly wrong in his predictions of gloom and doom, but that did not shake population alarmists' faith. Paul "The Population Bomb" Ehrlich's predictions of a rapidly falling sky were likewise shown to be laughably wrong.

In short, population control fanatics are a doomsday cult. No matter how often, nor how thorougly, their catastropic predictions fail to come true, they will rationalize, adjust their predictions, and soldier on.

Unfortunately, they have massive power and clout. The United Nations even has established the well-entrenched United Nations Population Fund that -- interestingly enough -- is far more interested in keeping black and brown and yellow people from reproducing than it is in, say, reducing the population of predomentanty white and far more densely populated countries.

Part of dismanting the abortion juggernaut involves exposing population alarmism for the cult that it is and affirming every culture's right to move themselves out of poverty by achieving the population-density critical mass that allows people to thrive rather than merely survive.

Begin by educating yourself and by stamping out ignorance wherever you find it. Here is an great resource to get your started:

OverpopulationIsAMyth.com has excellent educational resources, including well-produced, clear and succinct videos. Familiarize yourself with this information and slowly we can get people to grasp that reduction of poverty brings reduction in child mortality which brings reduction in family size as people no longer need to have so many children to make sure that at least some survive into adulthood. Population will level off on its own simply by helping the poorest to thrive, not by spraying Ortho-Novum from airplanes (to steal an image).

P.J. O'Rourke also covered population alarmism thorougly and amusingly in the Overpopulation chapter in All the Trouble in the World.

So be ready. When Roe falls, we need to have the population doomsday cult exposed for what it is, so that it will have no more political clout than Heaven's Gate.

No comments: