We knew this was coming.
Last weekend, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the socialist congresswoman from New York, made an Instagram video saying young people are questioning whether it’s “okay” to still have children in the age of climate change.
I’m 33 years old, and I know plenty of young couples having their first, second, even third or fourth child this year. No one I know is fretting over whether their reproductive habits are acceptable to the Climate Change Cops. It seems the only people asking whether it’s “okay” to have children are the same people pushing population-control propaganda, using “climate change” as a cover story.
Who are liberals talking about when they say people are having "too many" children? Certainly not upper-middle-class, college-educated suburbanites and urban elites like themselves. Those people tend to have one or two carefully planned children anyway. There’s a reason entire blogs are dedicated to the absurd parenting practices of couples in tony neighborhoods like Park Slope, Brooklyn. Rich people in Park Slope aren’t going to stop having babies because of “climate change.” They’re still going to have their own over-indulged, over-parented only children. They tell themselves it’s okay in their case. After all, they diaper their babies in eco-friendly cloth diapers, and they breastfeed until the kid is talking, in order to nurture his all-natural, organic-fed immune system. When urban elites say people are having “too many” children, they’re not talking about themselves.
No, expect the Womb Police to start cracking down on the reproductive rights of poor women and women of color, because they are producing "too many" children and wrecking the scenery for the suburbanites. And it won't involve just gently instructing them to use birth control and avoid unplanned pregnancies. Get ready for coerced tubal ligations and abortions, as well as leftist social workers becoming more aggressive about ripping away poor women's kids and giving them to "better" homes to discourage them from having more.
That's not "green," that's fascist.
This world has a long and ugly history of leftists using ulterior motives to discourage childbearing among the “unfit.” In the past, the "unfit" were accused of poisoning the gene pool or sucking up too much welfare. Now, they're accused of causing "climate change" with their hordes of children. The ulterior motive always sounds benevolent and progressive, but the real goal is to oppress marginalized groups and send a message about their place in society.
Think of the Stolen Generation in Australia, the Baby Scoop Era in 1940-1970s America, and the 1980s hysteria over “crack babies.” All of these examples involved hysteria about “overpopulation.” As Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg put it, there were disingenuous “concerns” about “population growth, and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”
And fake concerns about “overpopulation” have always been a part of the pro-abortion mentality. This type of pro-choicer often singles out young women, poor people, and people of color as the ones who shouldn’t be having children. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, described poor immigrants as “human weeds,” “reckless breeders,” “spawning … human beings who never should have been born.”
The people screeching about overpopulation might think they support women’s reproductive rights, but they don’t.
“Reproductive rights” means the right to be pregnant. It means the right to continue a pregnancy to term, and to say no to abortion—regardless of whether your parents, your doctor, or your boyfriend think you should get one. It means the right to receive adequate health care, instead of getting substandard care from a doctor who thinks you “shouldn’t” be pregnant—because you’re too young, too old, unmarried, black, an immigrant, or have “too many” kids already.
It means the right to birth and raise your own children, without some authoritarian social worker showing up to judge your motherhood and try to take your kids away to a “better” home. You have no right to neglect or abuse your kids, of course. But if you’re not, you have a right to be left alone and exercise your rights as a parent.
And it includes the right to bear children even though Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thinks you're wrecking the planet.
Is it “okay” to still have children? That decision is up to you, not to authoritarian leftists bleating about climate change.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member