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The New York Times Finally Throws in the Towel on the “Overpopulation” Myth
LifeNews ^ | 6/3/15 | Steven Mosher & Anne Roback Morse

Posted on 06/03/2015 7:46:54 AM PDT by wagglebee

My guess is that you, gentle reader, will be as astonished as we were by the top-of-the-website New York Times article discrediting the population alarmism of the past fifty years. In “The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion” the newspaper has finally (several decades too late) thrown population control on the ash heap of discredited ideas.

The article included a video interview with Paul Ehrlich, the author of The Population Bomb. He was the butterfly scientist from Stanford who scared tens of millions with the specter of overpopulation—and the population apocalypse that would supposedly result. He predicted that by the 1970’s the “population bomb” would explode—and hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in India and elsewhere. (India is still there, and doing quite well, thank you.)

But America’s “newspaper of record,” as it styles itself, failed to record the horrors themselves. It was woefully incomplete. There was no mention of the human costs when governments made population control a priority. No mention of the savage forced abortions and forced sterilizations that followed. No mention of the killing of baby girls through female infanticide and sex-selective abortion. No mention of the wasted money, the age and gender imbalances that continue to unfold and will take effect for years to come. No mention of how the overpopulation panic helped to fuel the rise of birth control use and abortion.

Instead, when citing reasons why birth rates have dropped world-wide, the article offered more benign explanations. First, improved health standards mean that couples no longer need to have 5 children in the hope that 3 survive. Second, large families are not necessary in post-agricultural society since they are not needed to work the land, and therefore only make a population dense city increasingly crowded. Third—and direct from New York City—comes the motherhood slam: “Women in many societies are ever more independent, socially and economically; they no longer accept that their fate is to be endlessly pregnant.”

In other words, the New York Times does not even begin to tell the whole story. The horrors of anti-human population control campaigns continue today.

Take India, for example. Over 60% of India’s women state they have been exposed to “family planning messaging” in the past few months; an impressive statistic considering only 64% of India’s women are literate. And the less educated are sterilized in much higher numbers. While 47% of Indian women with less than five years of education have been sterilized, only 20% of women with twelve or more years of education have accepted sterilization. Lack of consent, painful and pervasive injuries, and death from negligence disproportionately affect India’s most vulnerable. Indian women are not having fewer children because they are becoming “more independent,” but because they are being coerced into undergoing sterilization by abusive population control programs, with their saturation propaganda and sterilization camps.

“The core message of [Ehrlich’s book]—population growth outstripping food supply—resonated quite a bit with India’s elites-with the middle classes,” economist Gita Sen told the Times. “They much preferred to believe that the poor were poor because of too many children rather than being poor because of an unfair and unequal economic system.”

In China—which now has below-replacement fertility—the Planned Birth Policy allows the state to control childbearing. Anyone pregnant without a valid birth permit falls afoul of the Family Planning police, and abortion and sterilization usually follow.

Chinese human rights activist Chen Guangcheng states: “In ancient Chinese culture we had a saying that your home is your castle, and that even the king will not be allowed to come in without your permission. But now in today’s China under Communist rule, they even put their hand into your body and grab your babies out of your womb, and they kill your babies in your face.”

In Myanmar—another country where fertility levels have fallen below replacement—President Thein Sein just signed a “Population Control” bill into law. The law implicitly authorizes the use of coercion and discrimination, especially against the persecuted Rohingya minority—who are already subject to a two-child policy.

In dying Uzbekistan, the authoritarian government is coercing tens of thousands of women into sterilization.

The former president of Peru is currently on trial for crimes against humanity for a population control campaign in the 1990’s that sterilized over 300,000 indigenous women against their will.

The list goes on and on.

These are the true “unrealized horrors” of Ehrlich’s mad tale. The past half century has seen tens of millions of men and women sterilized without their consent and tens of millions of women forcibly aborted. These men and women are owed more than a one-off article from The New York Times saying, “Oh, oops. I guess we were all wrong.”

The New York Times conveniently fails to mention that it helped to fan the flames of the overpopulation panic. It advocated setting up population control programs, and editorialized on behalf of the billions of dollars in funding that continues to fuel the anti-people movement down to the present day. A mea culpa would be nice, but we aren’t holding our breath.

And lest we forget, the grim game of controlling human numbers continues, albeit under a different name. Today, efforts to disable women’s reproductive systems are called “reproductive health” programs. Orwellian, isn’t it?

LifeNews Note: Steven Mosher and Anne Morse write for the Population Research Institute.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: eugenics; moralabsolutes; populationcontrol; prolife
These are the true “unrealized horrors” of Ehrlich’s mad tale. The past half century has seen tens of millions of men and women sterilized without their consent and tens of millions of women forcibly aborted. These men and women are owed more than a one-off article from The New York Times saying, “Oh, oops. I guess we were all wrong.”

Darwinian eugenics has been the left's main tool for over a century now and they have no intention of letting up.

1 posted on 06/03/2015 7:46:54 AM PDT by wagglebee
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To: Coleus; narses; Salvation
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2 posted on 06/03/2015 7:47:53 AM PDT by wagglebee ("A political party cannot be all things to all people." -- Ronald Reagan, 3/1/75)
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Moral Absolutes Ping!

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3 posted on 06/03/2015 7:48:17 AM PDT by wagglebee ("A political party cannot be all things to all people." -- Ronald Reagan, 3/1/75)
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To: wagglebee
In dying Uzbekistan, the authoritarian government is coercing tens of thousands of women into sterilization.

A country that is 90% Muslim is putting up with that?
4 posted on 06/03/2015 7:53:35 AM PDT by Dr. Sivana (There is no salvation in politics)
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To: wagglebee

All because they now want unchecked immigration. Hard to push for population control when you are also pushing for millions of people to flood over our boarders.


5 posted on 06/03/2015 7:53:47 AM PDT by Codeflier (Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama - 4 democrat presidents in a row and counting...)
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To: wagglebee

I guess now that muslims are procreating at much higher rates than Christians, the NYT has no problem with population growth...


6 posted on 06/03/2015 7:54:26 AM PDT by WayneS (Yeah, it's probably sarcasm...)
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To: wagglebee
Statistician, speaker and youtube maker Hans Rosling has some interesting well-done vids on the topic of world population - and how all signs lead to it reaching a modern equilibrium, or leveling off, at 11 Billion by 2100.
7 posted on 06/03/2015 8:03:10 AM PDT by C210N (When people fear government there is tyranny; when government fears people there is liberty)
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To: wagglebee

53 million dead in the US alone, oh well.


8 posted on 06/03/2015 8:15:42 AM PDT by a fool in paradise (Funny how Hollywood's 'No Nukes' crowd has been silent during Obama's Iranian nuclear negotiations.)
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To: a fool in paradise
This is what the eugenics-based mindset has given us in the last century:

Rachel Carson (author of "Silent Spring" which resulted in the DDT ban): 50-80 MILLION deaths and rising every year.

Margaret Sanger: 46 MILLION deaths worldwide EVERY YEAR (1.4+ BILLION worldwide since 1900, over 1.3 BILLION since 1980).

Stalin: 13 MILLION+ deaths.

Hitler: 12 MILLION+ deaths.

Mao: 50-80 MILLION deaths.

Now, this is well over 1.6 BILLION deaths caused by just a few people in the past century. And the deaths attributed to Mao, Stalin and Hitler ONLY include direct acts of genocide, not their wars.

9 posted on 06/03/2015 8:26:07 AM PDT by wagglebee ("A political party cannot be all things to all people." -- Ronald Reagan, 3/1/75)
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To: Codeflier
All because they now want unchecked immigration. Hard to push for population control when you are also pushing for millions of people to flood over our boarders.

And the unchecked immigrants (Hispanics and Muslims) are prolific offspring producers.

10 posted on 06/03/2015 8:34:16 AM PDT by immadashell (The inmates are running the asylum.)
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To: Codeflier

Re: “All because they now want unchecked immigration. Hard to push for population control when you are also pushing for millions of people to flood over our boarders.”

Completely agree.

Individuals on the American Left have begun to quietly grumble about the environmental impact of America’s relentlessly increasing population.

Some of the Census Bureau predictions for 2150 and 2200 are downright shocking if our current immigration rate continues.


11 posted on 06/03/2015 8:50:19 AM PDT by zeestephen
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To: wagglebee
Paul Ehrlich, the author of The Population Bomb

Ehrlich was a famous evolutionist. And a scientific fraud.

There is a considerable body of literature on the reasoning power of chimpanzees. On certain types of tests designed primarily to evaluate human reasoning power, some "chimps" score higher than many human adults. Indeed, as Harlow succinctly puts it, if man is defined as the possessor of mental abilities that occur in other animals only in the most rudimentary forms, if at all, we "must of necessity disenfranchise many millions . . . from the society of Homo sapiens." Chimpanzees may lack culture not because of any great lack of reasoning power but because of some other factor that inhibited the development of speech or the regular utilization of tools, or the reduction of inter-male aggressiveness. "

Paul Erhlich and Richard Holm, The Process of Evolution, pg. 286--287


12 posted on 06/03/2015 9:03:53 AM PDT by Ethan Clive Osgoode (<<== Click here to learn about Evolution!)
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To: wagglebee
In Myanmar—another country where fertility levels have fallen below replacement—President Thein Sein just signed a “Population Control” bill into law. The law implicitly authorizes the use of coercion and discrimination, especially against the persecuted Rohingya minority—who are already subject to a two-child policy.

Wouldn't you know it. Rohingya is the code word for muslims. Apparently Myanmar doesn't have a death wish by allowing muslims to breed like maggots.

13 posted on 06/03/2015 9:45:31 AM PDT by AlaskaErik (I served and protected my country for 31 years. Progressives spent that time trying to destroy it.)
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