{"id":174914,"date":"2017-11-16T10:16:09","date_gmt":"2017-11-16T15:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=174914"},"modified":"2017-11-16T15:01:12","modified_gmt":"2017-11-16T20:01:12","slug":"children-not-enemies-liabilities-theyre-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/children-not-enemies-liabilities-theyre-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Children are not our enemies or liabilities. They’re our future."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Yesterday, NBC News published an opinion piece<\/a> by Travis Rieder, a Johns Hopkins bioethicist, who suggests that people must stop having children in order to be truly “moral.” Rieder has peddled this idea before on Netflix’s “Bill Nye Saves the World,” where he stated<\/a> we should “encourage our culture and our norms to change” regarding the idea of children.\u00a0Note that he’s not suggesting that we change our culture to “stop killing each other” or “stop wars,” or anything of that sort. No, in order to save the planet from the disastrous effects of climate change, we must simply stop reproducing<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The idea that people should have fewer children has been around for a very long time — but the reasoning behind it continues to change. In the early 1900s, population control for the “unfit” was the hallmark of the eugenics movement; today, population control is clothed in the garments of the environmentalist.<\/p>\n

As I wrote<\/a> in September, Planned Parenthood<\/a> founder Margaret Sanger, a eugenicist, wrote “a publication<\/a>… in which she stated, ‘Women of the working class, especially wage workers, should not have more than two children at most.’ More children than two, she wrote, ‘are not really wanted,’ adding that ‘women of intelligence’ are those who prevent too many pregnancies.”<\/p>\n

In Sanger’s words, “too many” children means you’re less intelligent. Today, in Rieder’s words, “too many” children means you’re less moral<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Rieder believes that “[h]aving a child imposes high emissions on the world, while the parents get the benefit. So like with any high-cost luxury, we should limit our indulgence.” This perspective — that children are some sort of excessive “luxury” — is the sort of attitude espoused by Margaret Sanger in her writings. She wanted people to apply to eugenics boards for permits to procreate. With his lack of positivity about children, one has to wonder if he might support something similar.<\/p>\n

Rieder later writes, “I am certainly not arguing that we should shame parents, or even that we\u2019re obligated to have a certain number of children,” but this statement seems disingenuous at best, because Rieder spends his article lecturing about how “[i]f having one fewer child reduces one\u2019s contribution to the harms of climate change, the choice of family size becomes a morally relevant one.”<\/p>\n

Eugenic philosophy is utterly blind to the value of individual human beings — it only sees people as liabilities.\u00a0Rieder’s ideas are not new; therefore, we know where they lead: death.<\/p>\n

Assisted suicides, abortions<\/a>, and the so-called “mercy killing” of disabled human beings are all part of the culture that views people only as liabilities — and when life choices are taken away from individuals and given to the State, this eugenic\/population control death culture leads to euthanasia<\/a>, forced abortions<\/a>, forced sterilizations<\/a>, and the like<\/a>.<\/p>\n