The Bible is full of wonderful precepts condemning foolish men. For example, Proverbs 12:15 says, “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice.” Proverbs 18:2 states, “A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion.” Perhaps most colorful of all is Proverbs 26:11, which intones, “Like a dog that returns to his vomit is a fool who repeats his folly.”
All of these descriptors of a fool seem to fit Dr. Paul Ehrlich, an emeritus professor of human population studies at Stanford University, whose most notable claim to fame is his theory of global overpopulation. In 1968, Ehrlich published a book titled The Population Bomb, and he promoted it extensively throughout the 1970s. His theory was that Earth was in danger of an overpopulation crisis because there wouldn’t be enough food to go around. As a result of Ehrlich’s anti-human theory, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi forced male sterilizations, and China’s one-child policy led to the evisceration of female babies and a drop in the population, a problem from which it has yet to recover.
Here in the United States, Ehrlich’s ideas helped form some of the most diabolical population controls under the guise of left-wing causes. Ehrlich is seen as the father of modern environmentalism; the mindset maintained by today’s environmentalists is “planet before people.” Other progressive causes that adopted the idea of population control were feminism (babies and a husband aren’t empowerment), LGBTQ+ promotion (same-sex relations are sterile sex), Planned Parenthood and abortion more broadly (kill the unwanted or inconvenient babies), and euthanasia (kill the elderly or other burdens on society).
Unfortunately, Ehrlich hasn’t changed his tune even despite the incredible human toll of his ideas. In 2015, according to The New York Times, “Allowing women to have as many babies as they wanted, [Ehrlich] said, is akin to letting everyone ‘throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.’ … ‘My language would be even more apocalyptic today.’” Apparently, to Ehrlich, babies and garbage are equivalent.
Last year, Palo Alto Online reported: “‘There is not the slightest question that 8 billion [people in the world] is too many,’ asserts Ehrlich, suggesting that we should be ‘thinking about ways to humanely reduce that number’ to around two billion.”
A declining population is a bad thing. It impoverishes a country, leaving the elderly to struggle while the undersized youth population is unable to do all the work that needs doing.
Some environmentalists have changed their minds about Ehrlich’s thesis and denounce it as dangerous. Instead, environmentalists at the Sierra Club believe populating Earth is a good thing, and to say otherwise is racist — and anti-immigrant. The spin-doctor group wrote in 2020, “Xenophobic factions attempted to enact an anti-immigration agenda by trotting out the overpopulation bogeyman. Above all, we must understand that employing this type of rhetoric often leads to tragic consequences.” Those “tragic consequences” are the blocking of illegal immigrants from entering the country. They shift the narrative from Who’s going to pick the fruit? to Who’s going to have all the babies? How is that not just as racist as the eugenic practices of Planned Parenthood? Well, it’s not. The anti-human sentiment is still there, but now, it’s anti-white human.
Despite the changing rhetoric, the idea of overpopulation is affecting the birthrate here in the U.S. According to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey, 62% of respondents answered that the declining birthrate is a low priority for them. As National Review’s Jim Geraghty aptly put it, “It is extremely difficult to solve a problem if people refuse to recognize that something is a problem. God knows how many people in that ‘low priority’ category have a musky copy of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb sitting on some shelf.”
The survey also showed that the respondents’ higher priority would be the means of taking care of the babies already here in the form of government-paid childcare. This is especially saddening to see because we’ve already seen the disaster of public education. Moreover, if fewer babies are being born, that has a cascading effect on the jobs relating to children. There will be less need for teachers, childcare workers, etc. if there are fewer children.
Psalm 127 calls children “a heritage from the Lord,” “the fruit of the womb,” and “a reward.” It says, “Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them! He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.” Children have always been a blessing and an investment in the future. They are meant to be gifts. Killing that gift in the name of climate fearmongering, bodily autonomy, or free love is evil. Continuing to double down is perilously foolish.
