By Georgi Boorman
https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/18/sports-writer-jeff-pearlman-compares-two-kids-tossing-garbage-ocean/
April 18, 2019
Photo credit: Erik Isakson/Getty Images
Sports author and podcaster Jeff Pearlman casually floated the idea of population control on Twitter on Monday: “Just saw a Tweet from a guy I know, announcing how excited he and his wife are to be having child No. 6. Does there come a point when, in the name of earth’s survival and limited resources, we’re allowed to say, ‘Hmm. I dunno, man …'”
No, let’s not share in the joy of acquaintances who are blessing the world with another child. Let’s leverage our indubitable wisdom on climatology and public policy to proclaim “earth’s survival and limited resources” are at stake and question whether they are doing the responsible thing.
Oh, but he didn’t stop there. When a Twitter user named Lisa clapped back with, “As a mom of 6 kids, I’m gonna say no,” our erudite intellectual thoughtfully responded, “Serious Q, Lisa–why? Earth truly can’t sustain this. Not hypothetical, factual.” He then went on to say the estimable Jeff Pearlman-approved number of children to have is, “I dunno. 2?”
Lisa objected, leaning on demographers’ projections that the world population will peak before the end of the 21st century. “I think it’s a slippery slope to start telling people how many kids they can or can’t have. My body, my choice.”
But Chairman Pearlman of the People’s Republic of Know-It-Alls would not be swayed. “It bothers me when people tell me not to throw my garbage in the ocean. My garbage, my choice.”
Population Control Leads to Horrible Policies
The fecundophobia of some members of the American elite has blossomed into full-blown hatred. Around this time last year, comedian Nikki Glaser tweeted “Don Jr. and his wife have FIVE kids. No one should be having five kids. Why are people still allowed to have 5 kids?”
In general, many people in the mainstream feel comfortable dehumanizing and devaluing babies and children, which is why tweets like Pearlman’s (which oddly equates people having as many kids as they want with people throwing garbage in the ocean whenever they want) and Glaser’s must be roundly refuted.
If calling out dangerous, immoral opinions on Twitter were ever cheap sport for pundits with time on their hands, it isn’t anymore. The fact that children born alive after abortions can literally, legally be treated as garbage in the state of New York now should not be lost on you. The fact that 232 Democrats in the House of Representatives have refused to even vote on ensuring all children born alive are treated as children, not garbage, should not be lost on you, either.
If there are a few voices at the back croaking weakly in protest, we can’t hear them over the fascist chants for government to regulate anything and everything in the name of the climate “crisis,” up to and including our own bodies (ironic, for the “my body my choice” crowd).
I wonder if aspiring Population Czar Pearlman realizes how many people have been violated and killed based on exactly the policy he’s referring to in the name of “sustainability.” Would you like to know how many people in India were forcibly sterilized out of fear of a population “bomb” that never existed? Around 8 million men and women.
Would you like to know how many people are missing from the Chinese population due to their one-child policy (now a two-child policy)? An estimated 300 million. More than 20 million Chinese people were sterilized in 1983 alone. Families pregnant with an unauthorized child have been threatened with exorbitant fines they couldn’t possibly afford, thus forcing them to seek abortions or literally pay the price.
In 1990, when a small town protested after the Chinese government violently ripped 250 children from the wombs of their mothers, officials sent an army to occupy the territory. The villagers’ armed resistance triggered what is known as the Barren Massacre—the indiscriminate slaughter of hundreds by the People’s Liberation Army (another bitter pill of irony). We know that forced abortions and sterilizations are still occurring on 1 million mostly Uyghur captives held in internment camps in China, according to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
Autonomy Onslaught, Here We Come
The radical environmentalists who ceaselessly lobby government for a turn at the levers of power have never been interested in preserving your autonomy. Every natural human right, including the right to procreation and the right to life itself, must bow down to Nature as god.
There has never been such a thing as effective mass population control without violating the rights of the individual, and there never will be. Solutions range from heavy taxation to biological warfare. Celebrated playwright George Bernard Shaw pleaded for a “humane gas” that would kill “instantly and painlessly” to cleanse the population of those who “cannot pull [their] own weight.” But even something as relatively anodyne as per-child taxation is a strike at the knees of all who would not submit to the desanctification of individual human life.
It’s no wonder we’re having to refute ignorant Twitterati who compare children to garbage when people as supposedly enlightened as bioethicists have claimed that “the life of a newborn baby is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee.” I wonder if Pearlman and Peter Singer ever slouch in overstuffed armchairs, puffing cigar smoke and egotism into each other’s faces as they wax poetic about the golden days of eugenics and the blatant attempts to keep the poor and the “unfit” from breeding. You know, that heyday of the early 20th century when 60,000 Americans were sterilized? Sports, social hygiene—interchangeable disciplines, really.
That’s where we’re really heading, aren’t we? Why would we indiscriminately limit children from every family when we could doso much good for the planet if we uprooted the “weeds” from the garden of society and kept them from breeding. Wait a minute, that sounds familiar.
Ah yes, we’ve heard that from population-control fanatic Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood. In the born-alive debate, the left is already leaning almost exclusively on the false notion that all late-term abortions not directly related to maternal health are of fetuses “incompatible with life.” Unfit, you might say.“Lebensunwertes Leben.” It’s almost like some of them haven’t left that awful genetic supremacist ideology behind or something.
The World Isn’t Ending, and Neither Should Families
All this death and oppression building like a violent storm on the horizon is supposedly justified by science, but it’s mostly echo chamber dogma put forth by people whose predictions pretty much always fail to come true. As David Harsanyi has pointed out, sea levels did not rise 20 feet in the 14 years since “An Inconvenient Truth” (nor did they even rise one foot), a billion people did not die of starvation due to overpopulation, and farming hasn’t collapsed due to increased temperatures. Instead, we are more prosperous than ever. Extreme poverty has been cut in half in the last two decades.
The real kicker is, American fertility is already below replacement rate and, in fact, sits at a 30-year low. If this trend continues, we won’t be able to sustain this nation’s massive welfare state because we won’t have enough workers to generate payouts to the old.
If we’re going to keep our sacrosanct entitlement system intact, then whose lives are authorized for neglect now? Whose lives will be devalued for the “greater good”? All those vulnerable senior citizens tucked away in long-term care facilities, who are already getting the message they’re better off dead.
You see, whether the fertility rate goes up or down, whether the overall temperature ticks up or down, the problem isn’t the flawed science so much as the perverted morality that promotes the abuse and murder of individuals in the name of some greater collective goal, for which the science seems all too often just a means to that end.
You don’t get to a point of suggesting population control and comparing babies to garbage just by believing the earth has a fever. You get there by denying that humans are made in the image of God and that their rights derive from Him, not the government.
That’s why refuting bad methodology and cautioning against tenuous conclusions, as important as they are, is not enough to stop the onslaught against the sanctity of human life. There will always be another excuse, another crisis. A crisis doesn’t determine our morality, our morality determines how we deal with a crisis. Maybe Pearlman should take a seat on the bench until he gets his head around this basic rule of civilized society.
Georgi is a Senior Contributor at The Federalist, host of The 180 Cast, and coauthor of "Clocking Out Early: The Ultimate Guide to Early Retirement." Follow her on Twitter.
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