ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Exaggerated claims and fearmongering to push a political narrative isn’t a new tactic, which explains how the thoughtful, former House Speaker Paul Ryan became a caricature in a campaign ad pushing an elderly women over a cliff or how President Lyndon Johnson blew up a virtual 3-year-old girl in the famous Daisy ad, insinuating his opponent wanted nuclear war.

But the hyperbole of the climate change movement puts such efforts to shame as they preach both that their worldview is correct and undebatable and that all who oppose them are “evil” — deserving, one assumes, whatever they get because in about 10 years it’s all over.

While the environment is not the kind of issue I usually address, a new trend forces me to confront an agitated and organized movement. Convinced that people are the problem, in all our forms, abortion is now emerging as a “solution” to climate change, pushed forward in at atmosphere of fear.

The anti-child movement being developed, named things like #NoFutureNoChildren, equates population control with climate control, making the answer to the world’s problems a reduction in the number of people. As I travel across the country speaking to college and university student groups as head of Students for Life of America, I hear this often as earnest and fearful students say that they are not going to have children, while others fret about children enduring a “post-apocalyptic Mad Max hell scape.”

Celebrities add to this tension. Prince Harry recently said he and his celebrity wife would only have two children because of climate concerns. Speaking to Elle magazine, Miley Cyrus said, “We’re getting handed a piece-of-shit planet, and I refuse to hand that down to my child. Until I feel like my kid would live on an earth with fish in the water, I’m not bringing in another person to deal with that.”

British musician Blythe Pepino founded “BirthStrike” because of her fears for the environment, even though she told CNN, “I really want a kid … I am in a position to be an activist. It’s a stronger calling than motherhood, even though I still mourn the idea.”

And when the elite get together at the highest levels, using government to control outcomes comes next. Case in point, Sen. Bernie Sanders, who turns a jaundiced eye toward his fellow humans.

At a CNN event, Mr. Sanders praised the abortion lobby in the U.S. that allows the procedure through all nine months of pregnancy, for any reason at all, and sometimes with taxpayer funding. But worldwide abortion is the thing we really need to change the temperature, he indicated, “especially in poor countries around the world.”

Following that thinking, will an income test become law before people can attempt a child? It seems a one-percenter kind of arrogance to assume that money means someone is better suited to parenthood.

Disrespect for human life also leads to all kinds of Hollywood-esque policy conclusions.

Stockholm School of Economics professor and researcher Magnus Soderlund has suggested that eating “human meat” (better known as cannibalism) is a way to reduce gases and create food “sustainability” despite the known health risks when eating human flesh.

Late-night movie buffs might remember Oscar-winning Charlton Heston in “Soylent Green,” an apocalyptic horror flick that aired the same year that Roe v. Wade became law, in which food shortages and global unrest were to be soothed with “Soylent Green,” a sustainable protein source that was supposed to be algae.

Except it turned out that, as the great actor screamed at the end, “Soylent Green is people. Soylent Green is People!”

As a mother of four, also upsetting is how adults are using childrens’ stress over the environment to score political points.

Sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg’s anxiety over the environment reflects, as the Federalist’s David Harsanyi notes, a child’s “narrow, age-appropriate, grasp of the world.” Of course she is scared and upset as schools parrot information on an issue in which all the solutions are draconian, life-ending events. Yet, rather than helping her process her fears, she is brought out to argue for dramatic government takeover of all international business and government, with a chilling line that seems borrowed from Sting, “We will be watching you.”

Like most people, I care about the environment because I want a safe world for my children and future generations. But killing the preborn, eating the dead and turning control of all human life over to the government isn’t a solution, but rather another set of problems.

Fear of climate change is being used to justify a radical social agenda, including abortion. I wonder if a child in the womb identified as a tree, would that be enough to justify saving that life? This debate is getting out of control.

• Kristan Hawkins is president of Students for Life of America. Follow her @KristanHawkins or subscribe to her podcast, Explicitly Pro-Life.

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