Posted on 07/15/2008 4:23:59 PM PDT by wagglebee
LONDON, July 15, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The solution to global warming, says a UK charity, is to implement laws that would result in people having fewer children. Governments should put slow pressure on people to limit their offspring to one or two children to save social and environmental resources.
"There is no unlimited right to have children," said the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), the group known to be one of the most militantly anti-life organisations in the world. There is a limit, the Trust said, "on the number of children to which people are 'entitled'."
"A voluntary population policy should be incorporated into law," the group said.
Governments, indicated the organization, should implement a "society-wide process of agreement, internalisation and normalisation" to the idea of small families and use a series of "gentle nudges" rather than "hard shoves," to get people to conform to the new childless paradigm.
All of this, they said, is to ensure that everyone has equal access to wilderness areas. "Our moral and legal rights to access wilderness and natural biological diversity (including other species), enjoy its benefits, and perhaps even see it restored, are at odds with, and arguably outweigh, the private right to have an unlimited number of children."
The Trust said that "human rights theory, legal precedent and national and international practice do not" support the UN's reassertion of its 1968 declaration that individuals "have a basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and timing of their children."
This year, the slogan by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), one of the world's largest promoters of abortion for World Population Day, July 11, was "Family Planning: It's a right. Let's make it real!"
But the OPT responded saying that there is really only a "far more limited right to 'found a family'."
The group quotes a paper by a US academic and animal rights activist, Carter Dillard, who called the notion that people have a natural right to have as many children as they want, "self-contradictory and illogical."
"Only the decision not to have children is a genuinely private act," Dillard wrote, whereas the decision to procreate affects the lives of others and limits the freedom of descendants who must then compete for resources. True freedom, the paper says, is the freedom not to be bothered by the existence of other people. "As numbers increase, life becomes more complex," Dillard wrote, and "the scope of law expands and regulation brings a contraction of rights."
To support his assertion, Dillard cites the example of China, where the state has "traditionally... perceived women's reproductive function as a legitimate matter of state control."
But such open calls for the state to coerce citizens to have fewer children is gaining critics.
Dominic Lawson, writing today for the Independent, said, "The population control freaks have also been skilful in adopting the fashionable political concerns of the day to their cause." He called the OPT's use of environmentalist slogans on "carbon footprints," "yet another illustration of the way these people mould their agenda to whatever is the most fashionable political concern of the day."
Brendan O'Neill went even further in the Guardian, saying that the new environmentalist movement is a threat to human freedom and democracy.
"It seems to me," O'Neill wrote, "that green thinking - with its shrill intolerance of dissenting views, its deep distaste for free movement and free choice, and its view of individuals, not as history-makers, but as filthy polluters - poses a more profound threat to liberty even than the government's paranoid anti-terrorist agenda."
In 2003, the OPT drew the ire even of the far left British media establishment after its conference at Oxford, at which the group suggested that the solution to Britain's environmental problems is to reduce the population to 30 million, half of the country's current number.
Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Government Must Institute Two-Child Policy says Leading UK Population Control Group
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/jul/07071201.html
Environmentalist Extremists Call Humanity "Virus", a "Cancer", Large Families Guilty of "Eco-Crime"
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/may/07050812.html
We have the “What to Expect When Expecting” and the book on the first year being shipped to us from Amazon (and a book for myself!).
So far, it has been pretty hard on my wife. She has bad morning sickness, but she is off from teaching right now so it is as good as it can be. She spends the day on the couch with the dog (a little Cairn Terrier) sleeping.
LOL! From my best friend and the husband of my bride’s cousin “No sleep.” They have three (maybe working on 4), and have said we need all need to keep going till we can field the next generation of Nebraska football!
Various animals welfare groups have called themselves “Humane Society’s but they have nothing at all to do with this group.
This group just trades on the name “Humane Society”. They know the public will associate them with an organization that has done good works just as you did in your post. This group was founded in the 50’s and has always been an animal rights group. Therefore this position (human hating) is very much in line with their original goals.
They are brothers-and0sisters-in-spirit to Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot.
And what they call for flows naturally from their twisted and obscene world-view.
Not since the IRS and their ‘voluntary’ taxation.
I’m no shrink but the term ‘antisocial personality disorder’ fits them perfectly.
Aren’t they the little fascists?
Just lovely families.
Repectively, they are the Duggars from Arkansas, who have had several TV specials on TLC and the Dicovery Heath channel, and the Arndt's (St. Louis area) and the Heppner's (Minnesota) both featured on TLC's Kids By the Dozen. Yes, the Arndt's really have 13 boys and one girl...
Well....it’s past midnight and I’m still up, engaged in a battle of wills with my seven month old son. He thinks that he can only sleep if I hold him. I am ready to sleep for longer than an hour for the first time in about 10 months. But he’ll probably win......tears just don’t belong on chubby cheeks.
You thus guarantee yourself many sleepless nights to come.
Children learn what works.
No, tears don’t belong on chubby cheeks.
My most favorite memories are of rocking my wee ones in the night. I loved to bury my nose in their hair and smell their sweet baby smell. I had a favorite kissy spot, that little dimpled area on the back of their necks.
My youngest will be a senior in college next month. My oldest has babies of her own. Times does fly. Enjoy them while you have them. They grow up too quickly.
You sound like my husband :)
To me it just further proof for the need of both parents in the home. Mommy’s the softy, Daddy’s the heavy and we balance each other out. (well, Daddy’s the softy when it comes to his girls, me, not so much)
Oh....and he’s asleep now, baby that is. Score one for mommy.
Wow! I don't think I've ever heard you use language like that! :-)
I’d like to just claim that I was really tired last night (which I was) however, I’m just really sick of people like this. I’m having all these kids because I want them to give me tons of grandbabies!! Grrrr!!!
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