Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Taking Pro-Life To The Extreme

McIlheran, apparently so enamored with his bizarre column, decided to blog on it as well.

Not only does he have a position of wanting to forbid women of the right to choose what happens to their bodies, he wants to tell them that they should have children, whether they want to or not:
It's one of those moments in which humans' interests are seemingly at odds with those of the environment. It doesn't have to be this way; humans, of course, have an interest in the environment in which we live, and we have every motive to use the resource well.

Still, it's a resource. Most people grasp that, but not always. Amy at Modern Commentaries helpfully noted a couple of Journal Sentinel letter writers who apparently didn't. A couple of chaps said -- and I'm quoting the money lines -- "All we have to do is make fewer babies," and "I rarely hear a discussion about how we have too many people!"

Actually, in much of the world, people are making fewer babies. Most of Europe, Japan, China, so on are already lining up for population plunges as fertility rates have fallen far below the replacement rate. Even the United Nations has been predicting a declining world population after 2050. This, by the by, isn't particularly good. Hard to have human societies without humans.

In other words, in McIlheran's mind, those among us who cannot or choose not to have children have doomed all of mankind. No wonder he considers those of us that love freedom as elitists. We're just so selfish to want to decide on how to live our lives.

I'm sure it won't be long before he proposes an auxiliary to the amendment banning gay marriage by demanding that people procreate or face prosecution.

4 comments:

  1. Is he serious? So because birth rates are declining in developed nations, that means the world is doomed. Huh. Because apparently 6 billion + people in the world isn't too much for sustainability.

    He mentions 2050 as the predicted falling off point, but what he fails to mention is that the population peak at that point is projected at 9 billion. Nine billion people. How on Earth does he propose we support those kinds of numbers? This is a huge problem.

    Personally, I'd rather the population evened out to a far more manageable level through lower birth rates than through massive epidemics or other catastrophes...which is what we're headed for, if we're not careful.

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  2. We don't have water for them.

    We can't afford to feed them.

    We are sticking our food in our cars because we don'nt have or won''t produce our own oil because of conservation concerns but ignore those same concerns worldwide by consuming ever more oil.

    Malaria is still killing millions throughout the world.

    And the quality of life in some third world countires and our inner cities barely constitutes sustatinable life.

    Yeah let's increase the population of the world another 50%.

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  3. You miss the point ... Paddy could care less about the rest of the world, he just wants the evangelical nutcases to procreate out-of-control.

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  4. Paddy Mac must be a big "Soylent Green" fan. The movie did star Charlton Heston.

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