The Tyranny of Childless Scolds
CHILDREN are our future. But maybe you shouldn’t have any.
That’s been the confusing drumbeat coming from liberals lately: Kids are our precious hope, but they are also bad for the environment, and we should make fewer or none of them.
In a conversation about the environment with anthropologist Jane Goodall, to be published in Vogue’s September issue, Britain’s Prince Harry answered “two, maximum!” when Goodall said she hoped he wouldn’t have “too many” children.
The royal added that he has “always had a connection and a love for nature,” and presumably that means he wants to have fewer children to enjoy that connection and love for nature. But wait: Wasn’t the whole point of preserving the environment to pass it on to future generations? If human birthrates flat-line and eventually decline, who would be left to enjoy nature?
Prince Harry is far from alone, or the most extreme, among those on the left following this inhuman logic. Last week, on the BuzzFeed Web site, writer Ash Sanders declared: “I believe having children is no longer just a personal decision, but a deci
sion with ethical implications for all of humanity and the planet we live on.”
Sanders added that “Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s provocative 1968 bestseller, ‘The Population Bomb,’ had urged the US to slash birthrates in order to protect the environment and avoid mass famines they warned would hit as soon as the ’70s.”
Never mind that the Ehrlichs’ doom-andgloom predictions never materialized. The bigger problem for Sanders is that, though she calls herself a “birth striker” and the title of her essay is “I Chose Not To Have Kids Because I’m Afraid For The Planet,” she actually does have a daughter.
That’s the thing about her, Prince Harry and many other zero-population folks. They are still having children. Even the scoldy Jane Goodall has a son. Perhaps these environmentalists are having fewer children because they . . . just want fewer children, and getting to lecture others about climate change is a virtuous side benefit.
It’s reminiscent of people who said they wouldn’t marry until gay people could get married and proceeded to stay unmarried even after gay marriage became a reality.
The same leftists somehow celebrate children as our moral leaders on the issue of climate change. Sixteen-year-old environmental activist Greta Thunberg is on the cover of that same Vogue issue. What if the push to have fewer children produces fewer Greta Thunbergs? Who then would solve the climate-change problem?
When the zero-population crowd turns its attention to the developing world, the rhetoric takes a more repellent turn. Discussing African development at a Gates Foundation summit last year, French President Emmanuel Macron linked fecundity with ignorance.
He said: “I always say: ‘Please present me the lady who decided, being perfectly educated, to have seven, eight, nine children.’ ” That prompted a deluge of social-media posts showing highly educated women the world over with their large families. African activists, meanwhile, bristled at the childless Macron all but insinuating that the world would be better off with fewer black children.
But the hypocrisy of this anti-natal movement is what’s most galling. In June, the UK Royal Household published its latest financial report, which includes carbon emissions. It found that the family’s carbon emissions from international business travel jumped to 3,344 tons, up from 1,687 tons in the previous reporting period.
As CNN reported, the figure didn’t even include all of the family’s international trips, like the one Prince Harry took to Australia and New Zealand, “as that was paid for by those nations’ governments.”
If the royals are concerned about the environment, limiting their airplane trips would be the first step, not discouraging the less fortunate from having children.
We’re reaching a hysterical apex on climate change, where faux environmentalists try to outdo each other with their climate purity with ever more inane prescriptions. It’s one thing to let the hypocrites lecture us to use paper straws and reusable bags as they fly around in their private jets. It’s another to have them dictate the size of our families. Don’t let them.