I&I Editorial

Who would imagine that the Democrats’ hurtling to the far left would actually lead to an attack on one of their sacred precepts: “a woman’s right to choose.”

The right to choose not to have a baby is fine, reducing as it does your carbon footprint, and thus saving the earth. But choosing to have too many babies (on top of being so bourgeois and unseemly) is like selfishly choosing to burn oil instead of harnessing your energy from the sun or wind.

Get it straight: carbon is immoral, whether the polluting carbon you’re expelling into the atmosphere is fossil fuels or children.

At CNN’s “Climate Crisis Town Hall” on Wednesday, working class champion Sen. Bernie Sanders was asked a population control question by a longtime elementary teacher at a Montessori school where the tuition ranges from $11,000 to $27,000, in 96% white, $66,500 median family income Litchfield County in rural western Connecticut, the state’s most sparsely populated county.

“The planet cannot sustain this growth” in population, she contended. “Empowering women and educating everyone on the need to curb population growth seems a reasonable campaign to enact. Would you be courageous enough to discuss this issue and make it a key feature of a plan to address climate catastrophe?” she asked. Sanders responded in the positive and expressed a willingness to give U.S. “aid to those organizations around the world that allow women to have abortions” and provide contraception.

Sanders added: “So I think, especially in poor countries around the world where women do not necessarily want to have large numbers of babies, and where they can have the opportunity through birth control to control the number of kids they have, is something I very, very strongly support.”

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, slammed back that “Bernie Sanders’ repugnant ‘solution’ to climate change — eliminating the children of poorer nations through abortion, paid for by American tax dollars — should be condemned across the political spectrum,” charging that his remark “takes Democratic abortion extremism to a new low.”

Dannenfelser urged that “Every Democratic candidate for president should immediately be asked where they stand on eugenic population control, especially frontrunner Joe Biden in light of his past comments condoning the Chinese government’s oppressive one-child policy.”

That was a reference to an incident that illustrates just how undisturbed even “moderate” Democrats often are with the idea of government management of family size. The gaffe-prone then-Vice President Biden visited China eight years ago and told a Chinese crowd: “your policy has been one which I fully understand — I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family.”

At the time the SBA List retorted: “Really, Mr. Vice President? You’re not second-guessing a policy that has resulted in untold numbers of forced abortions, forced sterilizations, outrageous fines or even jail time for families that dare to defy the law, and a gender imbalance crisis?”

In her Thursday statement, Dannenfelser charged, “Such paternalistic attitudes are behind coercive regimes like China’s, where child-limitation policies are ruthlessly backed by forced abortions.” Referring to Biden, Dannenfelser added, “An extremist like this has no business being president of the United States.”

Always The End of The World

How curious that this for so long self-styled “party of the people” so often reflexively resorts to authoritarianism. Sanders’ rival and fellow senator Elizabeth Warren (who has appropriated much of his platform) plans to have the government force electric utilities to end their use of oil, coal, and gas in a mere decade and a half.

As the candidates tried to outdo one another on who would bring the government to bear against the private sector the hardest, Sen. Kamala Harris got into some trouble apparently falsely claiming that as California attorney general she sued Exxon-Mobil.

Obama HUD Secretary Julián Castro promised to fight “environmental racism” because “too oftentimes it’s people that are poor, communities of color, who take the brunt of storms,” he said. (Are snow storms even more racist, in that they’re white?)

Beto O’Rourke would have the federal government relocate residents of flood-prone areas to higher ground.

Pick your 1970s Charlton Heston dystopian science fiction movie — the astronaut in “Planet of the Apes” discovering the wrecked Statue of Liberty and shouting, “you finally really did it! You maniacs! You blew it up!” Or the “last man on earth” eluding nocturnal vampires in “Omega Man.” Or the 2022 New York City detective who finds out the real ingredients of the always-in-short-supply “miracle food” in “Soylent Green.”

Indeed “I, Robot” author Isaac Asimov often prophesied a Malthusian Armageddon, disparaged the notion that technological advance could prevent it, and argued for what he once euphemistically called “a deliberate effort to lower the birthrate.”

Agitating about nuclear holocaust doesn’t work for politicians of the left now, because their anti-appeasement opponents turned out to be right and the “maniacs” didn’t blow us all up after all.

So it’s on to the next dystopian narrative requiring massive government intervention. If we let them have their way, taxpayer funding of forced population control won’t just be science fiction.

— Written by Thomas McArdle

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