Pro-life movement threatened by the climate scare

It is not just that environmental groups are supporting abortion to supposedly help achieve their climate goals. Pro-abortion organizations are using the climate scare to promote their agenda as well. The Virginia-based Population Research Institutesums up the latter situation well in their important video, "Climate Change is an Excuse for Abortion." Here are some excerpts (see herefor the complete video):

Climate crisis advocates blame human activity as the leading cause for climate change. So why not push for global access to abortion and contraception under the guise of climate activism to address the source of all climate change - humanity?

This is precisely what the abortion industry has attempted to do. … Groups in the abortion industry have slowly been distancing themselves from the eugenics and population control movement, and re-branding themselves in a different type of campaign that promotes woman's 'rights.'

With this rebranding, they fall under a broader movement that provides them more flexibility and sway to push their ultimate goal-international abortion laws under the guise of woman's rights and woman's health. This new rights category has made it possible for abortion advocates to use woman's autonomy as a guise in order to rebrand the movement as a champion of a movement now at the forefront of agendas across the world: Climate Change.

…They [sexual and reproductive health and rights groups] claim that an inevitable and necessary step to combat climate change is with family planning…The international Planned Parenthood Federation insists that contraception and abortion are basic human rights that women, especially in impoverished countries, lack. Clearly, the abortion lobbies association with the climate crisis has not changed its population control agenda. Rather, it has empowered them to make their population control agenda more relevant by means of embedding fear through climate crisis theory and claiming their movement as the solution.

And, of course, some academics have been promoting de-population for decades. Dr. Paul Ehrlich, formerly a butterfly biologist at Stanford University, successfully scared the world with his 1968 book The Population Bomb. In it, he attempted to convince readers that the English economist, Thomas Malthus, was right in predicting the end of the world back in 1798. As a result of his highly inaccurate publication, Ehrlich was awarded a MacArthur Genius Award. This gave him prominent platforms from which to give annual predictions of doom and gloom, 100% of which proved false. Now 90, Ehrlich maintains he has been right all along, just off in the timing.

More recently, in "The climate mitigation gap: education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions," published in 2017 in Environmental Research Letters, Seth Wynes and Kimberly A Nicholas lamented the fact that high school textbooks and government documents did not focus on high impact actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In particular, they explained that having one fewer child would, on average, save 58.6 tonnes CO₂-equivalent (tCO₂e) in emissions per year for developed countries (see graph below from their video presentation):

And then, of course, there is the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement who are trying to convince us to not have any children at all. They maintain:

Phasing out the human species by voluntarily ceasing to breed will allow Earth's biosphere to return to good health.

Besides being a dangerous and depressing worldview that encourages suicide, abortion, euthanasia and sterilization, all of this is wrong, of course. We are not overpopulated and, as Christians would remind us, the Bible says:

Children are a gift from the Lord. They are a reward from him. (Psalm 127:3).

Even Dr. Carl Sagan, a humanist and a supporter of naturalistic religious beliefs that finds religious meaning in the natural world but did not believe in God said:

The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.

And even people who have no religious faith whatsoever can and indeed should view humanity as wonderful. Every baby born is a marvelous gift to the universe with unlimited potential for undreamed of inventions, philosophies, art, music, science, and philanthropy. Everything from Mozart to our expansion into space shows that we are not merely another part of nature, but, indeed, are the very pinnacle of life on our planet, perhaps in the universe.

Many of the arguments in support of abortion fall flat if it can be shown that the environment, specifically the climate, is not in crisis. In next week's article, I will show pro-life advocates how to fight back against the unscientific climate scare threatening their movement. Stay tuned.