Meet the enemy

In the last couple of decades, there have been concerted and coordinated attacks on women’s rights to control their own reproductive processes. While this is an unconscionable incursion into their personal freedom, there is a much more global and devastating aspect to this movement.

Our planet’s population is virtually exploding. While it is not as evident in more developed nations, it is painfully obvious in those that are less modernized. This strains Earth’s ability to support the increasing numbers of human beings living here. Adequate food and water to maintain our planet’s current population is no longer available, and distribution is woefully uneven.

Factor in global climate change, which is rendering arable land less and less productive. Also, rising sea levels will drive our species from dense clusters in coastal areas to inland locations. Much of the land they will occupy will not be the increasing desert environments, but mainly existing farmland, thus further reducing our capacity to produce the food that will be more desperately needed.

Couple this with United States policies that forbid the dissemination of information to women worldwide — including, recently, here in America — about managing reproduction. Nothing will be done to stem the resulting tsunami of population growth worldwide.

Add a burgeoning population to decreasing supplies of food and water, and we will have die-offs of Homo sapiens that could rival the mass extinctions of previous geological eras. In the words of the comic strip Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”