Posted on 11/23/2007 12:34:15 PM PST by wagglebee
SYDNEY, Australia, November 22, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A former advisor to the British government and past president of the Royal Society, Professor Lord Robert May, has called “encouraging” the fact human fertility has fallen below replacement level around the world.
Speaking to a meeting of the Lowy Institute in Sydney Australia on November 19, Lord May was quoted by The Australian saying that human populations must continue to fall for the sake of the environment. A priority, he said, was continued “education” of women to teach them methods to have fewer children through artificial contraception. May is a former chief scientific adviser to the British government and was made a companion of the Order of Australia in 1998.
May lashed out at the Catholic Church saying, “In my view, religious beliefs or other ideological prejudices prompt some major international organizations to oppose contraception, forbidding distribution of condoms or even advice about fertility control.”
Lord May will likely get his wish if the current situation continues. Global populations have been falling dramatically and few countries of the developed world have a fertility rate higher than bare replacement level. Recent statistics have shown that nearly 40 per cent of the world’s countries have fertility rates from 0 to 2.4 children born per woman, whereas the bare minimum replacement level is 2.1.
A United Nations report showed in August this year that 28 per cent of the world’s countries allow abortion on demand. 84 per cent of the wealthier countries allow abortion on eugenic grounds for “foetal impairment”; 78 per cent allow it on “economic or social” grounds and 84 per cent of wealthy countries allow abortion in cases of rape or incest.
But not everyone is as sanguine about humanity’s impending self-induced extinction. Mark Steyn wrote last year that the falling fertility levels in Europe and the formerly Christian west will spell the end of western civilization. “We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world,” Steyn wrote.
“Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries....Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone.”
But Lord May will probably get his wish as more people, at least in the wealthy post-Christian west, hear the message that more people is a bad thing. The UK’s Daily Mail reports today that British women have been so completely indoctrinated by the environmentalist anti-human docrtines that they are foregoing motherhood, including by aborting their children, “for the planet.”
In a bizarre interview with the Daily Mail’s Natasha Courtenay-Smith, 35 year-old Toni Vernelli, an environmentalist and vegetarian, said she had an abortion and had herself sterilized rather than bring a child into the world.
Toni assured readers that her colleagues at the environmental charity where she works share her extreme, socially suicidal anti-motherhood views. She stated, “I didn't like having a termination, but it would have been immoral to give birth to a child that I felt strongly would only be a burden to the world.”
She said. “I've never felt a twinge of guilt about what I did, and have honestly never wondered what might have been.”
Courtenay-Smith wrote that Toni relished her decision “with an almost religious zeal”. “Having children is selfish. It's all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet.”
The exceptionally negative environmentalist creed was summed up by Toni, “Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population.”
Her husband, she said, agreed with her conviction. “We both passionately wanted to save the planet - not produce a new life which would only add to the problem.”
Given the minority of the world's population produces the overwhelming majority of its wealth, I doubt this is true.
This is selfishness and Satanism dolled up to look like altruism. If they really had the courage of their convictions, they would have killed themselves long before now.
"Death is good for thee, not for me."
“Speaking to a meeting of the Lowy Institute in Sydney Australia on November 19, Lord May was quoted by The Australian saying that human populations must continue to fall for the sake of the environment. A priority, he said, was continued “education” of women to teach them methods to have fewer children through artificial contraception. May is a former chief scientific adviser to the British government and was made a companion of the Order of Australia in 1998.”
Exactly correct. The question for the Euros is will the emerging Muslim majority agree to continue socialist benefits to the aging native European population? Or will they find it easier to just exterminate the old infidels?
Yes, it is a bad thing. It leads to depression and economic collapse.
If managed properly, I think a decrease in population could be a net plus. But managing it would require an elimination of the ponzi-scheme welfare state as we know it.
Sexist pig!
Except for increasing worker productivity, a euphemism for machines and robots doing more of the work. We don't need to let in immigrants to keep the economy running, and if we didn't let in so many poor unskilled workers we'd probably be better off.
The western nations and japan will be the ones with the robots and few people. The rest will be the places with suffocating population levels.
I can't prove this, but I'm guessing that there's probably a number of people who agree with you, but who would rather do the subtraction at the post-retirement level than at the prenatal level.
Mankind. The World.
Right you are. See #16 ;o)
It probably would, but growth is not unchecked. Families more or less plan their family size in every society. Anyway, the set of problems with unchecked growth is more or less imaginary and is rarely associated with actual data.
I give this guy one point (and only one point): he at least understands and says that world population has peaked and is about to fall. Most leftists either haven’t got this information yet or else think they should lie about it.
I read my Asimov when I was younger. As I recall, the “Spacer” worlds (those with the Robots) were dying out while the ones without the robots went on the colonize the galaxy and form the Galactic Empire. Robots, as it turned out, were incompatible with humanity.
The way things are going, the Third World will continue to invade the West and turn it into the same.
Anyway, the set of problems with unchecked growth is more or less imaginary and is rarely associated with actual data.
I would complain about the neighbor kid with the loud four-wheeler now that he is old enough his daddy could buy him the toy. The residents of Carthage, Africa complained their city was so heavily populated everybody was crawling over everybody else and nobody could move. This was two centuries after Rome supposedly destroyed Carthage. There is nothing new here except you are living in a city.
“every square inch of land is being developed”
Fly from St. Louis to Portland. Look out the window. You’re premise is incorrect.
The problem is I look out MY window. I never said every square inch of the country was being developed—only places where people want to live and work. There are good reasons no one wants to like in places like Northern Maine, the Badlands, or the Mojave desert.
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