Population control myths won’t die
SIR –Mary Kenny says that 38-year-old Bavarian schoolteacher Verena Braunschweiger “has vowed never to have children”, claiming “each child adds 58 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year” – that childbirth is “a patriarchal imperative towards women”, although as Kenny observes, “many women will go to the ends of the earth to become mothers” (Comment, March 22). Leaving aside the strange phenomenon of teachers hoping to do themselves out of a job, it is even stranger that such ideas should emerge in the West just as communist China, having belatedly realised that state population control has resulted in an ageing population, is showing signs of relaxing its programme, at least at the margins. And China has gone on cheerfully polluting the planet even after the West appears to have entered a suicidal phase of closing down its industry in a vain attempt to halt “climate change”. Equally strange is the spectacle of Western celebrities jetting around the world, lecturing the less fortunate on their carbon footprint. The environmental movement has always been marked by anti-humanism, and over the past 50 years we have heard dire warnings about world resources running out, mass starvation, desertification, a new ice age and a hole in the ozone layer; more lately we have witnessed campaigns against plastic pollution and meat-eating, but although population control has acquired a bad name, the most successful campaign so far has been the one about wildlife “dying out”. With the human birth rate dangerously low, the idea that we are “running out of babies” would be met with a snort of derision. And yet however lovely they might be to look at – from a distance – whales, wolves and tigers will not pay our pensions, hence the (of course) entirely separate campaign for “the right to die”. No wonder the Catholic Church, which believes it a human duty to safeguard the planet, but also sees human life as sacred, is regarded as the last obstacle to a green heaven. People can pollute, but they also protect the environment, because they have to live in it. However, it is perhaps no coincidence that those most zealous in warning against “killing the planet” are also the most forceful advocates of killing the unborn. Yet they are also killing the future of the planet. Ann Farmer Woodford Green, Essex
