Some abortion advocates say that abortion is necessary to stop the world from becoming
overpopulated. But is this true? Is the world really facing an overpopulation crises? And even if it
were true, would aborting large numbers of people be a moral way to respond? It goes without saying
that mass slaughter is a crime against humanity, and should never ever be proposed as the solution
to any human problem. Overpopulation or no, would you support the annihilation of any segment of
humanity--the elderly, for example, or the very young-- or women, or men, or people of a certain race or
culture? Of course not. The mass extermination of all or part of humanity is the stuff of
supervillains or invading aliens.
MOVIE CLIP - AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR Thanos: Too many mouths, not enough to go around.
And when we faced extinction, I offered a solution.
Dr. Strange: Genocide.
MOVIE CLIP – THE MATRIX Agent Smith: Human beings are a disease.
A cancer of this planet. You are a plague.
MOVIE CLIP – SNOWPIERCER Wilford: For optimum balance, however,
there have been times when more radical solutions were required,
when the population needed to be reduced rather... drastically.
And yet, there are those who not only support the mass slaughter of the preborn, but are
actually engaged in carrying it out. Take China, for example, which I know well. The Chinese government
brags that it has eliminated 400 million people from its population over the last forty years. I was
in the operating room in China as government doctors were forcibly aborting and sterilizing
women who, in some cases, were only weeks or days away from giving birth. These atrocities were
committed in the name of combating – you guessed it overpopulation. In many other developing countries,
from India to Indonesia, tens of millions of unborn children have also been aborted in the name of
population control, many of them were little girls. Even if overpopulation were real, the destruction
of so many people--each a unique and wonderful human being--would constitute the greatest tragedy
in the history of the world. But "overpopulation" is not real; it is a myth. The world is not running out
of living room or resources. Take food for instance there are currently 7 ½ billion
people on the planet, but we could easily feed, with current agricultural technology, twice that number.
Since the "Green Revolution" of the 1970s, we are producing more food on less land, and humanity
is eating better than ever before. Are there still hungry people? Of course there are. But this is not
because there is a global shortage of food but because of corrupt governments, poor distribution systems,
and ongoing Wars and civil unrest. Even more striking, the evidence indicates that the
world is not in danger from overpopulation; it's in danger from underpopulation. Around the world,
birth rates have fallen, workforces are shrinking, while the numbers of the elderly are dramatically increasing.
This is a recipe for economic stagnation in countries like Japan. Japan is in the
grip of a long-running "demographic recession." The answer to the world's "population problem" is not
aborting babies, it's having babies! David Brooks has written in the New York Times, "For decades,
people took dynamism and economic growth for granted and saw a population growth as a problem."
Now we've gone to the other extreme, and it's clear that young people are the scarce resource. In the
21st century, the United States could be the slowly aging leader of a rapidly aging world." Dozens of
countries now have shrinking populations, and nearly all have adopted policies that encourage
people to date, to get married, and to have children. Too many Americans have bought into the myth that
having children will ruin our world. The truth is that there's plenty of room on God's green earth
for all of us. America needs to encourage young couples to marry and to have children.
Children are the only future a nation has the only future of family has; they are the ultimate resource.
Overpopulation is not only a myth, it is a myth that kills. And it kills both people and economies.
In the world of the 21st century we need more babies not fewer and that means ending abortion.