A member of Britain’s government says couples should be limited to two children to save the Earth from global warming. It’s discouraging that such muddle-headed people are in positions of power.
Jonathon Porritt, chairman of the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, doesn’t have the power to set a two-child limit on British couples — at least not yet.
But he’s nevertheless “unapologetic about asking people to connect up their own responsibility for their total environmental footprint and how they decide to procreate and how many children they think are appropriate.”
“I think we will work our way toward a position that says that having more than two children is irresponsible,” said Porritt, who favors contraception and abortion as means to curb population growth, but probably wouldn’t be adverse to a totalitarian law that caps the number of babies a couple can have.
It’s hard to know if Porritt’s comments were planned or his inner thoughts simply slipped out the way that environmentalists admit from time to time that their top priority is not a cleaner world, but rather a radical reordering of economies and societal structure to suit their egalitarian urges.
Either way, as a practical matter, Porritt didn’t need to say anything. The fertility rate among the English has been less than two children per woman since the early 1970s.
There has been a small increase in recent years, but it’s hardly cause to celebrate for those who would like to see the healthy survival of English civilization. In a nation that has so richly contributed to human advancement, “foreign-born women,” the government reported last year, “are making up an increasing share of the childbearing population in England and Wales.”
Last year, the government issued a news release that noted: “The proportion of live births to mothers born outside the United Kingdom continued to rise. In 2007, 23% (160,358) of live births were to mothers born outside the United Kingdom compared with 22% (146,956) in 2006.”
Some Britons don’t seem to be at all concerned about the bleak future of the English way. There are, though, a few who understand what is occurring around them. Irish-born British reporter Ruth Dudley Edwards worried in the Daily Mail nearly two years ago that “we have a large Muslim population with a high birth rate.”
“Indeed,” she wrote, “Muslims are outbreeding non-Muslims throughout Europe.”
Before writing off her recitation of the facts as an ugly example of Western hegemony or racism, consider that in 2007 a Norwegian imam gloatingly noted that in Europe “the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children. Our way of thinking will prove more powerful than yours.”
There’s nothing inherently wrong with Muslims reproducing in Europe. This is more about the decline of a once-great culture that now would rather demonstrate its commitment to tolerance and diversity, and to pursue trendy causes, such as the “fight” against global warming, than to retain the characteristics that once made it exceptional and to believe in itself enough to replenish for the future.
The Euro way of thinking that the good imam referred to is too often like that of Green Party Porritt. This is a man who sees children, and therefore humanity, as a blight on the Earth, and, we expect, is so given over to political correctness that he won’t be asking the U.K.’s Muslims to limit childbearing to two babies per couple.
Similar vacuous thinking can easily be found on this side of the Atlantic. It has even poisoned the mind of the political leadership. A little more than a week ago it was Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi who defended federal contraceptive initiatives to “reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.”
For the Porritts and the Pelosis of the world, the campaign against babies is not so much a way to overcome climate change or to provide fiscal relief for governments as it is a means to control people, to remake the world to suit the zealots’ conceited images of what it should look like and how it works. The human behaviors they don’t like, they try to socially engineer out of existence. Those they approve of, they subsidize with other people’s money.
Some still cling to the archaic notion that children are a blessing. The more radical reckon that human capital is the only real capital we have and firmly believe the more we have, the better off the world is.
Nothing in history suggests that a declining population benefits humanity. Everything we have experienced,though, indicates that humans move forward as their numbers grow.
