Just about every nation in the Western world is grappling with a demographic crisis of one sort or another, as are major Asian powers like Japan and China.
The United Nations frets about overpopulation. Environmentalists and left-wing parties, very definitely including the Democrat Party in the United States, regard human reproduction as a virus that must be controlled by reducing births or flat-out killing children.
But in many countries, people are urged to have more children as quickly as possible, a fecundity that contrasts sharply with the death wish that seems to come along with middle-class prosperity, even in places like China that were deeply concerned about overpopulation a generation ago.
Doctors in Kenya, for example, are urging women to have as many children as possible to improve their health and avoid conditions that lead to infertility. As the Digital Standard reported on Monday:
Endometriosis is a health condition where abnormal tissues align themselves in a woman’s reproductive organs, causing them extreme pain, especially during menses, and consequent infertility.
However, as Yamal Patel, a doctor, said, the tissues will have no room if the woman conceived frequently.
He said at least one in 10 women was affected by the condition.
“When you have 14 children in a row, like our mothers did in the past, there is no room for menses, hence no endometriosis,” he said.
Kenyan doctors went so far as to recommend young women freeze their ova for in-vitro fertilization if they do not want to get cracking on childbirth in their teens or early twenties, as would be necessary for a woman planning to have a large number of children. The doctors recommended avoiding repeated surgeries for endometriosis because the surgeries could lead to infertility.
Meanwhile, here in the United States, major news networks are quoting discredited crackpot environmentalists to instruct viewers they should have fewer children if they want to save the Earth from climate change.
Left-wing ideologues are telling young people to think of childbirth as a sinful act, a crime against Gaia and against the children themselves, who will be dragged into existence only so they can suffer terrible lives on a dying planet. Abortion extremists have spent years teaching people that unborn babies are not human, a message they repeat with mounting hysteria as ultrasound technology provides mothers with visible evidence to the contrary.
The message is definitely being received because young people across the Western world are declaring “birth strikes” because they have been terrorized out of having children. Much of their rhetoric echoes ancient pagan beliefs in human sacrifice to appease the gods of nature, reframed as pseudo-scientific gobbledygook about sacrificing human generations to keep animal and plant species alive.
The grimmest irony of the Left’s flourishing anti-humanism is that they are not doing much to reduce the overall human population — they are just forcing a demographic change away from the populations who, through their wealth and educational opportunity levels, are most likely to generate the prosperity and technological advancements necessary to make the environment cleaner.
Environmental sensitivity is perhaps the ultimate luxury for human societies. It is something developing nations simply cannot afford, and those peoples are not going to return to more primitive lifestyles and begin obediently dying off at prehistoric mortality rates because greens think it is immoral for them to have electric power and reliable transportation.
In fact, a great many people in developing nations will understandably take every opportunity they get to relocate to more advanced countries, and the Left is aggressively attacking every aspect of borders and citizenship, so it will be impossible to refuse them.
Everyone who migrates from the Third World to the First instantly increases the size of their “carbon footprint” enormously. The people who already live in those advanced nations are figuratively or literally sterilizing themselves so they will never have to hear the pitter-patter of little carbon footprints around their houses. It is a path that can only end in either untold human misery or far greater damage to the Earth’s biosphere, and probably both.