One alarmist group has already commented on this milestone: “Population growth rate soars to unsustainable 1.7 per cent”. Unsustainable? Sez who? So what pray tell is a sustainable rate? And who decides this? And how exactly is it calculated? This group lists as some of its objectives:

“-To promote policies that will lead to the stabilisation, and then to reduction, of Australia’s population by encouraging low fertility and low migration.
-To advocate low immigration rates while rejecting any selection based on race.
-To help promote policies that will lead to the stabilisation, then reduction of global population.”

Vague goals, but how will this all be achieved? Will these folks be leading by example here? Will they be bumping off family members and loved ones so that we can have a “sustainable population”? I eagerly wait to see them set the standard here, and show us the way.

Of course plenty of other alarmists and humanity haters have made the same – or worse – draconian calls. As but one example I have elsewhere mentioned media mogul Ted Turner. He is most clear on what he thinks on this issue. We are far too overpopulated and radical action must be taken immediately to deal with all this.

He actually believes the global population of seven billion must be reduced by at least 95 per cent! This is what he said back in 1996: “A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal”. And more recently he was still pushing this moonbattery, but at least now he thinks maybe 2 billion is OK.

So there you go, we only have to figure out how we eliminate 5 billion people now. And to see what a real human-hater he is, Turner was recently asked by Piers Morgan what he thought about the fact that more American soldiers commit suicide than are killed in combat. Morgan said it was shocking, but Turner answered: “No, I think it’s good.”

Nice guy. Real nice guy. But contrary to this doom and gloom brigade, plenty of experts have been warning about our population implosion. They are arguing that our real problem is a birth dearth. These demographers state that we are in bad shape, and desperately need to start having babies, or many nations will simply suffer massive shrinkage over time.

This global plunge in population will have all sorts of major ramifications, not least of which is how the shrinking pool of the young is going to pay for the social security benefits of the growing pool of the elderly. For those who are interested in more on this, I here offer a dozen highly recommended books on this topic:

Beisner, E. Calvin, Prospects for Growth: A Biblical View of Population, Resources, and the Future. Crossway Books, 1990.
Cromartie, Michael, ed., The Nine Lives of Population Control. Eerdmans, 1995.
Goldman, David, How Civilizations Die. Regnery, 2011.
Kasun, Jacqueline, The War Against Population: The Economics and Ideology of Population Control. Ignatius Press, 1988.
London, Herbert I., Why Are They Lying To Our Children? Stein and Day, 1984.
Longman, Phillip, The Empty Cradle. Basic Books, 2004.
Mosher, Steven, Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits. Transaction Publishers, 2008.
Simon, Julian L., Population Matters: People, Resources, Environment and Immigration. Transaction Publishers, 1990.
Trombley, Stephen, The Right to Reproduce: A History of Coercive Sterilization. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988.
Wattenberg, Ben J., The Birth Dearth. Pharos Books, 1987.
Wattenberg, Ben J., Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future. Ivan R. Dee, 2004.
Whelan, Robert, Whose Choice: Population Controllers’ Or Yours? Committee on Population and the Economy, 1992.

Buy this from Amazon: What to Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster by Jonathan V. Last Click Here

But let me finish with one brand new book, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster by Jonathan Last. While dealing primarily with the American situation, he certainly takes into account the global situation.

His thesis is this: “The ‘population bomb’ never exploded. Instead, statistics from around the world make clear that since the 1970s, we’ve been facing exactly the opposite problem: people are having too few babies. Population growth has been slowing for two generations. The world’s population will peak, and then begin shrinking, within the next fifty years.

“In some countries, it’s already started. Japan, for instance, will be half its current size by the end of the century. In Italy, there are already more deaths than births every year. China’s One-Child Policy has left that country without enough women to marry its men, not enough young people to support the country’s elderly, and an impending population contraction that has the ruling class terrified.”

The facts are quite clear: In 1979 the global fertility rate was 6.0, and now it is down to 2.52 and still falling. All Western nations are already below the 2.1 replacement level. Says Last, “Today only 3 percent of the world’s population lives in a country whose fertility rate is not declining.”

On present trends, and without a big influx of immigration, countries like Italy will shrink by 86 per cent, Spain by 85 per cent, Germany by 83 per cent, and Greece by 74 per cent. In Japan the population peaked several years ago at some 127 million: “If Japan’s fertility stays where it is, the country will contract by more than half – to 56.8 million – by the end of the century.”

Contrary to the alarmists, we are in a bad way – but because of a population implosion, not a population explosion. So if you are in the mood, pop out the champagne tonight as we welcome on board our 23rd millionth Australian. We should be celebrating life, people, and humanity – not hating them.

www.abc.net.au/news/2013-04-23/australia-to-top-23-million-today/4644974

www.population.org.au/

www.infowars.com/ted-turner-i-think-its-good-u-s-troops-are-killing-themselves/

www.lifesitenews.com/news/video-ted-turner-reduce-population-by-five-billion-people/

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Sadly we have had too many of these radical environmentalists who have pushed their destructive agendas on the rest of us. And some of them, even having been proven to be false prophets in the past, are still carrying on. The classic example of this is Paul Ehrlich. I have written about him often before, including here: www.billmuehlenberg.com/2008/01/08/demography-and-the-people-haters/

Even though he has been shown to be a fraud and a Chicken Little panic merchant, that has not deterred him from still making outrageous statements. He is at it again, declaring his draconian proposals to save the planet. Consider what one news report says:

“Paul Ehrlich, the doomsday biologist who coined the term ‘The Population Bomb’ more than 40 years ago with a book of the same name, says the world now faces ‘dangerous trends’ of global climate change and overpopulation, which threaten our extinction.

“Reducing the number of people is still the answer to civilization’s woes, Ehrlich and his wife Anne wrote in an article published Jan. 9 by London’s Royal Society. ‘To our minds, the fundamental cure, reducing the scale of the human enterprise (including the size of the population) to keep its aggregate consumption within the carrying capacity of Earth is obvious but too much neglected or denied,’ Ehrlich wrote.

“Ehrlich spelled out exactly what he meant in an interview with a liberal blog/news site called Raw Story. ‘Giving people the right to have as many people, as many children that they want is, I think, a bad idea,’ the Web site quoted Ehrlich as saying. ‘Nobody, in my view, has the right to have 12 children or even three unless the second pregnancy is twins,’ Ehrlich added.”

There you have it: don’t you dare even consider having three children. And the really scary thing is, if this guy had his way, he would ensure that this nonsense is enforced with the heavy hand of the law. No wonder these folks are known as coercive utopians.

But he is not alone in his anti-people agenda. Fellow environmentalist David Attenborough has also come out recently arguing for the very same thing. Indeed, he calls human beings a “plague”. Here is how one news report covers this:

“Humans are a plague on the Earth that need to be controlled by limiting population growth, according to Sir David Attenborough. The television presenter said that humans are threatening their own existence and that of other species by using up the world’s resources.

“He said the only way to save the planet from famine and species extinction is to limit human population growth. ‘We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now,’ he told the Radio Times.

“Sir David, who is a patron of the Optimum Population Trust, has spoken out before about the ‘frightening explosion in human numbers’ and the need for investment in sex education and other voluntary means of limiting population in developing countries.”

As bad as all this human-hating rhetoric is, these folks in fact happen to be quite wrong. The real problem facing planet earth is not a population explosion but a population implosion – a birth dearth in other words. But I have spoken to that elsewhere, eg: www.billmuehlenberg.com/2011/10/29/seven-billion-is-good-news-not-bad-news/

But another very famous environmentalist has emerged as a breath of fresh air. He is as well known as the other two, but because he has not jumped on the radical climate change bandwagon and bought the PC agenda, he has turned from being hero to villain.

The story goes this way: “He turned 80 last week but he is just as he always was — a joy and a treat. Until, that is, we touch on climate change and the vicious backlash he suffered when, in 2004, and in the face of scientific convention and public opinion, he dismissed man-made global warming as ‘poppycock!.’‘From that moment, I really wasn’t welcome at the BBC. They froze me out, because I don’t believe in global warming. My career dried up. I was thrown out of my own conservation groups and I got spat at in London.

“‘And the worst thing that ever happened — I got a letter that said, “David Bellamy is the worst . . .” Oh, what was it? Damn, I’m always forgetting things. Rosemary?!’ ‘Are you on about the paedophile thing?’ she says, emerging with tea. ‘Yes! It said: “David Bellamy is a paedophile because he doesn’t believe in global warming and is killing our children”. And it’s just nonsense. For the last 16 years, temperatures have been going down and the carbon dioxide has been going up and the crops have got greener and grow quicker. We’ve done plenty to smash up the planet, but there’s been no global warming caused by man.’

“During his heyday as a conservationist and TV personality in the Eighties and Nineties, David was everywhere — peering through palm trees, wading through marshlands and delivering wonderful rambling monologues illustrated with madly windmilling hands. ‘I never used a script. I didn’t have people sitting in branches for six months to get a shot. I just talked and talked. It was wonderful.’ He made all those TV programmes, wrote more than 45 books, inspired comedian Lenny Henry’s ‘grapple me grapenuts’ catchphrase and starred in a Ribena commercial.”

Amazing how our elites and the MSM will turn on you if you do not toe the line and regurgitate the official PC nostrums. For those sins Bellamy has become a persona non grata. And here is an interesting part of the story. In a different article Bellamy says that Attenborough used to feel the same way about climate change:

“Mr Bellamy, 80, who used to present wildlife shows for the BBC and ITV, claims he has been ‘shunned’ for his views on climate change. In an interview with the Independent on Sunday, he said that ‘all the work dried up’ after he questioned whether the world was warming. ‘I was shunned. They did not want to hear the other side,’ he said. In contrast, Sir David, 86, who continues to broadcast, has gradually come to be a proponent of global warming after initial skepticism. ‘He (Sir David) was on our side at first but then he had a change of heart,’ said Mr Bellamy.”

So there you go: either hold the ideological party line, or face the consequences. No wonder so many do, with careers and money and endorsements and income all on the line, it is much easier to be a true believer and go with the crowd, than risk taking a challenging opinion.

This of course is not science in action, but scientism. They may not burn renegades at the stake any more, but the ‘heretics’ will still be ostracised, penalised and persecuted for daring to hold differing views. Fortunately some have enough honesty and courage to stand against the tide.

But most keep shouting the party line. And in doing so they betray what real human-haters and pseudo-scientists they really are. And as I keep saying, I will wait till these humanity cullers start leading by example here.

cnsnews.com/news/article/ehrlich-nobody-has-right-have-12-children-or-even-three

www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/9815862/Humans-are-plague-on-Earth-Attenborough.html

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2266188/David-Bellamy-The-BBC-froze-I-dont-believe-global-warming.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/9798713/David-Attenborough-was-sceptical-about-global-warming-claims-David-Bellamy.html

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www.billmuehlenberg.com/2012/06/16/do-you-know-where-your-money-is-going/

And I have written before about how foreign aid between nations is also often ineffective and/or used for morally dubious if not morally unjustified causes: www.billmuehlenberg.com/2009/10/17/rethinking-foreign-aid/

We have more cases of both activities again in the news. On the home front we have the recent announcement by our government that Australian aid money (that is, Australian taxpayers’ money) will be going into more baby killing overseas.

Here is how one news report covers the story: “Australia will double aid funding targeted at reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in the Asia-Pacific region. Australia’s contribution will increase from $26 million a year to $50 million by 2016 for developing countries in the region.

“The funds will provide contraception, reproductive health services and family planning information. ‘All women have a right to basic reproductive health care and family planning advice,’ Foreign Minister Bob Carr said in a statement on Thursday.

“‘Good family planning reduces maternal and child deaths, and is fundamental to improving economic outcomes for women and girls. That’s why Australia is making this new commitment to funding family planning in our region, and why we’ll be pushing others in the global community to follow suit.’ Australia also will commit to a global effort to raise up to $2 billion for family planning services.”

Radical social engineering programs always depend upon radical engineering of language to make them more palatable. Euphemisms, half-truths, and deception are used big time to try to sell rather ugly agendas. And we have that here big time.

This is all about baby killing pure and simple. Whenever you hear the weasel words “unwanted pregnancies,” “contraception,” “reproductive health services” and “family planning” you know what we really have is the coercive utopians from the West working overtime to decimate the populations of poor overseas nations.

And then Carr has the gall to say something incredible like this: “Good family planning reduces maternal and child deaths, and is fundamental to improving economic outcomes for women and girls.” How does killing unborn babies reduce child deaths Bob? How are people’s outcomes improved when they are killed?

We have not only governments involved in this sordid business, but individuals and organisations as well. Consider all the mischief one very wealthy individual is getting up to lately. Melinda Gates and her Gates Foundation, along with groups like Save the Children, are all up to their ears in using aid money as killing money.

One report begins this way: “Recently, Save the Children announced that family planning ‘saves lives’ of both women and babies. It has called for aid money to be spent on contraception, claiming that it is a good investment, cheaper than saving children from death by disease or starvation after they are born….

“In promoting contraception, Save the Children is echoing agencies that promote abortion and population control for poorer countries. The popular face of this campaign is a call to address the alleged ‘unmet need for contraception’ among the world’s poorest women. Although Save the Children says this would cost only one pound per woman per year, the UK government, the EU, the US, the Gates Foundation and others are proposing to give many billions of pounds more to stop around 0.2 billion poor women bearing children.”

Austin Ruse, the president of C-FAM, a pro-life group that works to press the pro-life cause at the United Nations, spoke about a Family Planning Summit in London hosted by Gates with two of the biggest pro-abortion groups in the world, the UN Population Fund and International Planned Parenthood Federation:

“They say they want to raise $4 billion to promote contraception among poor women. This is population control plain and simple, population control aimed at poor dark-skinned women. We have tried to get pro-lifers registered for this summit so there can be a counter voice but we are getting shut out by Planned Parenthood.”

Lisa Correnti of C-FAM made these comments: “The UK Family Planning summit has concluded and the total financial commitment by attending countries and foundations amounts to $4.6 billion, which exceeds the $4 billion goal. The Gates Foundation was clear from the onset that it expected solid commitments from countries that attended. Now as one of the presenters said from a prominent foundation ‘we need to create the need through education.’

“Apparently much of the unmet need is from women who don’t know they have an unmet need. Leave it to affluent western nations, billionaires foundations and pharmaceutical companies to do this. In the afternoon session of the UK Family Planning Summit Melinda Gates pledged to increase support for family planning by $560 million through 2020. This addition to current funding will bring the total to $1 billion over the next 7 years. Imagine if this funding was directed to providing clinics in the poorest regions of the world rather than for implants, injectibles, and sterilizations. What a shame.”

Denise Hunnell, MD, offers more details about just what is going on here: “Empowering women, reducing poverty and improving the overall health and well-being of women and children are noble goals. As with all great visions, however, the devil is in the details. Melinda Gates claims that the key to reducing poverty is to flood the developing world with contraceptives and abortifacients.

“A cornerstone of this effort is the development of a new injectable contraceptive that would be analogous to the currently available medroxyprogesterone acetate also known as DMPA, or by its brand name Depo-Provera. Unlike Depo Provera, which requires an intramuscular injection and must be administered by a medical professional, this new form is a self-administered subcutaneous injection. Ms. Gates hopes that her efforts will bring contraception to at least an additional 120 million women worldwide, with the primary focus being in sub-Saharan African and South Asia.

“But what exactly is Ms. Gates offering these women? Her ‘solution’ will result in the death of countless newly conceived children, it may double the transmission rates of HIV and it will certainly increase the risks for breast cancer. In addition, progestin-only contraceptives are associated with a significant risk for blood clots and strokes.

“There are two mechanisms of action for injectable contraceptives like Depo Provera to prevent pregnancy. The first is to prevent ovulation so that conception does not occur. However, if this mechanism is unsuccessful and conception does occur, Depo Provera keeps the lining of the uterus so thin that implantation will not occur. The result is that the newly conceived life is aborted.”

Her concluding words are especially worth noting: “This effort is just another iteration of the Malthusian principles that have been around since the nineteenth century. Concerns about overpopulation lead to efforts to limit the fertility of those deemed ‘undesirable.’ Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger pushed contraception on African-American communities to limit their growth. Likewise, the Gates Foundation sees contraception as way to limit the population of the impoverished people of Africa and Asia.

“Improving the health and well-being of women does not depend on increased availability and use of contraception. No professional medical association recommends the routine use of hormonal contraceptives in healthy women as a means of preventing disease or maintaining good health because of the significant risks associated with their use. On the other hand, women are empowered when they are educated. A longitudinal review of women in Chile over a fifty-year period found that the most critical factor in improving maternal health and in reducing both maternal and infant mortality was better education, not contraceptives.

“The answer to poverty must be grounded in respecting the dignity of impoverished peoples – not in eliminating them. Both men and women need to be educated in order to contribute to the public discussion and formulation of social policy, and this should include education in the harmful effects of the drugs Ms. Gates is proposing be used to lower fertility in the developing world. Motherhood should be considered a valuable vocation and not a drain on society. Only then can the real roots of poverty be addressed.”

Yes quite so. The new population controllers are really just the old eugenicists. Their coercive utopian agendas, their secular humanist ideology, and their contempt for poor people in poor countries is resulting in an ongoing “Final Solution”. Sure, the message has been repackaged and spruced up, but the diabolical agenda remains the same.

Buy this from Amazon: Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population by Matthew Connelly Click Here

As Columbia University historian Matthew Connelly wrote in his important 2008 volume, Fatal Misconceptions: “The great tragedy of population control, the fatal misconception, was to think that one could know other people’s interests better than they knew it themselves. . . . The essence of population control, whether it targeted migrants, the ‘unfit,’ or families that seemed either too big or too small, was to make rules for other people without having to answer to them. It appealed to the rich and the powerful…”

www.couriermail.com.au/news/breaking-news/more-aust-aid-to-stop-unwanted-pregnancies/story-e6freono-1226424170533

www.lifenews.com/2012/07/09/hey-melinda-gates-poor-need-food-not-contraception/

www.lifenews.com/2012/06/22/melinda-gates-to-host-event-with-top-pro-abortion-groups/

www.lifenews.com/2012/07/11/melinda-gates-family-planning-summit-raises-4-6b-for-population-control/

www.lifesitenews.com/news/melinda-gates-false-and-dangerous-solution-to-poverty?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=2ca774d20a-LifeSiteNews_com_Intl_Headlines_07_12_2012&utm_medium=email

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I have documented far too many appalling cases of these human-haters and virulent anti-natalists. Their heinous proposals of culling are presented presumably with a straight face, and maybe even with all the best intentions in the world. After all, who doesn’t want to parade his green credentials?

But the radical proposals being made are simply shocking in the extreme. Consider the latest example of this. Media heavyweight Ted Turner has long been on record as being a bit of a green nutter here, and he is at it again. Consider these opening paragraphs from a recent report:

“Media mogul and population control advocate Ted Turner recently told citizen journalists he would like to reduce the world’s population by five billion people, asking parents to be a ‘one child family…for 100 years.’ Turner had to answer for his history of provocative statements, and made a few new ones, when members of the website wearechange caught up with him on camera late last month.

“One individual asked the CNN founder what his goal was for world population. ‘I think two billion is about right,’ Turner said as he walked briskly away. In October, the number of people in the world reached seven billion. Before disappearing around the corner Turner said he hoped to eliminate five billion people through the ‘one child family.’ The interviewer responded, ‘One child policy.’ Turner answered, ‘For 100 years.’

“In a subsequent interview, Turner was asked if he had said ‘a 95 percent decline from present [population] levels would be ideal’ in the 1990s. Turner replied, “I might have said that, ‘96 was a long time ago.’ In a third confrontation, the amateur journalists asked Turner if he formulated his views during the Bilderberg conference.

“Although it is not clear Turner was endorsing China’s one-child policy of forced abortion, he previously denied Beijing had taken ‘draconian steps’ to control its birthrate during a 2009 interview on the Diane Rehm Show. Instead, he claimed China merely ‘encouraged’ its citizens to have one baby, though he volunteered, ‘I’m not intimately familiar with everything.’ Experts and eyewitnesses were ‘shocked and appalled’ by his comments.”

The obvious question which arises here is this: will Turner lead the way in this and bump off 95 per cent of his own family? If not, why not? Why the blatant hypocrisy and double standards? If one of his daughters is pregnant with a second child, will he force her to abort him or her?

The article continues: “Turner, a dedicated globalist, donated $1 billion to the United Nations, much of which has been used for ‘projects dealing with women and population issues.’ The outspoken atheist told a gathering of Society of Environmental Journalists in 1998 his views were incompatible with Christian doctrine or the Biblical admonition to ‘be fruitful and multiply’.”

But we know that these UN- and US-led population control programs have been disastrous. One simply has to study a detailed volume like Fatal Misconceptions by Columbia University historian Matthew Connelly (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2008). In over 500 pages of heavily documented analysis, Connelly shows the real nature of the population controllers.

In graphic details he demonstrates how these programs have led to horrific abuses of human rights, and the implementation of eugenicist practices that have ruined millions of lives. Anyone who thinks we should be in the business of population control after reading this book is obviously not very morally attuned.

Buy this from Amazon: Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism (New Atlantis Books) by Robert Zubrin Click Here

Or consider the brand new book, Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism by Robert Zubrin (Encounter Books, 2012). The entire volume is excellent, but he has several shocking chapters on the population control movement which are alone worth the price of the book.

In them he offers six solid reasons why the population control campaigns are so harmful. “First, they are top-down dictatorial.” These groups for example speak much of “choice” to Third World women when it comes to childbirth. But, a woman’s right to choose must include the option of having children. Says Zubrin, “rather than providing ‘choice’ to individuals, the purpose of the campaigns is to strip entire populations of their ability to reproduce”.

“Second, the programs are dishonest.” As an example, peasants in the Third World are often “told by government population control personnel that sterilization operations are reversible, when in fact they are not”.

“Third, the programs are coercive.” There are “incentives” which “are frequently employed in the provision or denial of food or cash aid to starving people or their children”. And “disincentives” include “personal harassment, dismissal from employment, destruction of homes, and denial of schooling, public housing, or medical assistance”.

“Fourth, the programs are medically irresponsible and negligent.” More often than not the programs use “defective, unproven, unsafe, experimental, or unapproved gear, including equipment whose use has been banned in the United States”.

That and untrained or poorly trained personnel mean that millions of people’s lives are being put at risk, especially in Africa, “where improper reuse of hypodermic needles without sterilization in population control clinics has contributed to the rapid spread of deadly infectious diseases, including AIDS”.

“Fifth, the programs are cruel, callous, and abusive of human dignity and human rights.” Forced abortions are typical, as is the sterilization of women without their knowledge or consent. All this “is tantamount to government-organized rape”.

“Sixth, the programs are racist.” Invariably these programs are being carried out on non-white Third World nations by primarily white Western nations. And even within nations, one group can be targeted by another group. For example, in India the upper-caste Hindus have used these programs to eliminate lower-caste Muslims and untouchables.

He goes on to offer detailed and gruesome case studies of all this. It makes for some pretty revolting reading. Yet all this is par for the course with the eugenicists and population controllers. And all this is what human-haters like Turner want to see cranked up to a much greater degree.

These people really do not like human beings – at least whole groups of them living in faraway lands. And the really bizarre thing is that they engage in all these anti-human activities in the name of humanitarianism. I just hate to imagine what they would be proposing – and doing – if they didn’t actually like people!

www.lifesitenews.com/news/video-ted-turner-reduce-population-by-five-billion-people

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But there are other ways at looking at the costs of abortion. Two recent articles have demonstrated that there are other very real costs associated with the abortion holocaust. The first story comes from the UK and is quite an alarming report about serial abortion and the huge public expense that goes with this.

Far too many women, it seems, simply see abortion as an after-the fact form of contraception. And they are often repeat offenders. Some women are having multiple pregnancies dealt with by multiple abortions. And the tax payer is being asked to foot the bill.

Here is how one newspaper report covers the story: “The Health Service is spending around £1million a week providing repeat abortions. Critics said figures revealed yesterday show thousands of women are using the procedure as a form of contraception. It is not unknown for some women to have seven, eight or even nine terminations in their lifetime.

“According to the statistics, single or unmarried women account for five out of every six repeat terminations. Around a third of all abortions carried out in England and Wales are repeats. The figures will fuel the debate on whether abortions, which cost the NHS up to £1,000 each, are being sanctioned as more of a lifestyle choice than a medical requirement.

“In one London borough, half of all abortions are requested by women who have already aborted at least one foetus. In 2010, the latest year for which figures are available, some 189,000 abortions took place. Of these, more than 64,000 terminations were on women who had already aborted a foetus in the past.

“More than 50,000 of them were single or living with a partner; while around 9,500 were married – with the marital status unknown for the rest. Critics of the current legislation said terminations have become just another form of contraception because of the lack of independent counselling at clinics which leads to women making the choice to have an abortion rather than continue with their pregnancy.”

The article features the story of one young woman who had her first abortion at age 12. She then had another at 13, 15 and 16. She says after her first abortion she was told about contraceptives, and was given a contraceptive injection. But then she did not bother to come back to get her booster injections.

The article goes on to detail the number of repeat terminations: “There were 19,295 of them in 2010 [in London]. The North West is next on 7,537; while the West Midlands on 7,190. Figures late last year showed that each abortion costs the NHS an average of £680. It means around £850,000 is spent on repeat abortions every single week in England and Wales. The figures do not include Scotland and Northern Ireland, which means the full UK cost will be around £1million a week.

“Stuart Cowie, a spokesman for pressure group LIFE, said: ‘These figures show that “no questions asked” abortion on demand trivialises the process so much that it is no longer seen as the last resort. We would like to see more counselling offered to women, and more conversations in the classroom about responsibility’.”

The second article which speaks to the costs of abortion comes from the US, and looks at all the lost income of entire generations of people who have been aborted. The article speaks of how these costings were determined: “Our early research focused on the impact of abortion on downstream tax revenues, but we changed to using gross domestic product (GDP) per capita because that’s more indicative of total economic impact.

“Our principal sources were abortions reported by the Guttmacher Institute—a subsidiary of Planned Parenthood—as published in the U.S. Statistical Abstract going back to 1978. We supplemented this with state data for California, Colorado, and New York going back to 1967 (six years before Roe v. Wade). Two million babies were aborted in these states before Roe. We update this data every year and project it to the current month using regression analysis based on most recent trends. Trend adjustments are made annually based on the newest data.

“We use Guttmacher as a source to put our studies beyond challenge from the abortion industry. However, we know these numbers are on the low side because they are based on surveys of abortion providers taken every three to four years, with projections for intervening years using the same kind of regression analysis we use to project the most recent figures. Changes in trend are picked up with each new survey. How much higher might the actual number of abortions be? This number could err by 20 to 30 percent because providers are less likely to report abortions paid for in cash and those with negative outcomes. Former abortion providers like Dr. Nathanson confirm this bias. Center for Disease Control data are even less reliable because many jurisdictions do not legally require reporting.

“Unfortunately, there is no accurate way to estimate the number of abortions caused by abortifacients—including RU-486 abortions, abortions produced by drugs like the morning-after pill, or by IUDs. Unsurprisingly, sexually active women using these methods may have as many as three to four pregnancies and three to four abortions a year. However, no one can carry three or four pregnancies to term in a single year, so we have to discount its economic impact. Normally, such women might carry a pregnancy to term every two or three years. That would have a measurable economic impact, but it is hard to estimate reliably.”

So what were the findings? “Based on these estimates, abortion has cost us an estimated $45 trillion in lost GDP and that loss continues growing by $2.5 trillion each year. We do not currently include second generation lives missing because their putative parents were aborted, but that number is clearly growing and will add to the future loss in GDP. For example, at least half of the current total of 55 million aborted people would currently be in their child-bearing years. Since the leading edge of the abortion generation has reached age 45, that has at least a 15 percent negative impact on current births. We are tracking this indirect effect and may include it in future reports.”

Wow, what a massive amount of lost income. And this is becoming an immense problem all over the West. With declining fertility rates – in big part due to abortion – we are creating an inverted population pyramid, with the largest and growing group at top – the elderly – being propped up by a shrinking group at the bottom – the young.

Simply trying to pay pensions and other welfare benefits to the elderly with a shrinking workforce is becoming increasingly difficult. Less and less births mean less and less workers, which means less and less government revenues to be used to pay for looking after the elderly. It is a massive social and financial problem. And abortion is a leading contributor to all this.

The article offers this conclusion: “Basically, we need to restore the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence ‘that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.’ That’s the goal we are committed to at the Movement for a Better America. However, a great many of our political, business, education, and even religious leaders are still asleep at the switch or confused about the solutions. Certainly such a counter-revolution is not going to come from the mainstream media, the academic left, pandering politicians, or a corporate environment where the bottom line is the primary benchmark. Well-intended economic solutions from the left or right can’t resolve these costly social issues. Such ‘cures’ may help the business environment and ease the job and real estate markets, but they can’t solve the underlying social malaise.

“Our best hope lies with society’s fundamental social and economic unit—the family. Families make up the warp and woof of our social fabric. Their concern for the future of their children gives them a vision beyond the next quarter or the next election. It was this kind of vision that prompted our founders to pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to ‘secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity.’ If churches, schools, and pro-life, pro-family groups can tap into that same vision, they can change things dramatically for the better. If they succeed, the economy will take care of itself. Meanwhile, we need to be wary of the wolves in sheep’s clothing—like Planned Parenthood and self-serving politicians—who try to exploit these concerns and use them to destroy the family and the country’s future.”

Quite right. We need to work for a culture of life, and stop the abortion genocide which is so very costly in so very many ways.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2143936/NHS-spends-1m-week-repeat-abortions-Single-women-using-terminations-form-contraceptive.html

www.all.org/article/index/id/MTAzNjc/

[1537 words]

In the past people simply had to wait until a baby was born to determine what the child’s sex was. If the “wrong” gender occurred, a baby was often simply dumped. This was a common practice in many places throughout history. But new breakthroughs in medical and biotechnology mean we can now readily determine a baby’s sex in utero.

Unfortunately we have enough bad reasons to abort a baby – indeed, all reasons are bad. But now we can add an un-preferred gender as another reason to kill the unborn. It may not be exactly the same as allowing a newborn to die of exposure, but the end result is just the same.

Writing in a recent issue of The New Atlantis, American demographics expert Nicholas Eberstadt had a very chilling tale to tell about where this is all headed. In “The Global War Against Baby Girls,” he tells of how almost overwhelmingly, sex-selection abortions are done on females, not males.

His article begins as follows: “Over the past three decades the world has come to witness an ominous and entirely new form of gender discrimination: sex-selective feticide, implemented through the practice of surgical abortion with the assistance of information gained through prenatal gender determination technology. All around the world, the victims of this new practice are overwhelmingly female — in fact, almost universally female.

“The practice has become so ruthlessly routine in many contemporary societies that it has impacted their very population structures, warping the balance between male and female births and consequently skewing the sex ratios for the rising generation toward a biologically unnatural excess of males. This still-growing international predilection for sex-selective abortion is by now evident in the demographic contours of dozens of countries around the globe — and it is sufficiently severe that it has come to alter the overall sex ratio at birth of the entire planet, resulting in millions upon millions of new ‘missing baby girls’ each year. In terms of its sheer toll in human numbers, sex-selective abortion has assumed a scale tantamount to a global war against baby girls.”

He examines in detail these practices in China, India and elsewhere. He continues, “Sex-selective abortion is by now so widespread and so frequent that it has come to distort the population composition of the entire human species: this new and medicalized war against baby girls is indeed truly global in scale and scope. Estimates by the United Nations Population Division (UNPD) and the U.S. Census Bureau’s International Programs Center (IPC) — the two major organizations charged with tracking and projecting global population trends — make the point.

“According to estimates based on IPC data, a total of 21 countries or territories (including a number of European and Pacific Island areas) had SRBs [sex ratio at birth] of 107 or higher in the year 2010; the total population of the regions beset by unnaturally high SRBs amounted to 2.7 billion, or about 40 percent of the world’s total population.”

The social implications of all this are of course enormous: “The consequences of medically abetted mass feticide are far-reaching and manifestly adverse. In populations with unnaturally skewed SRBs, the very fact that many thousands — or in some cases, millions — of prospective girls and young women have been deliberately eliminated simply because they would have been female establishes a new social reality that inescapably colors the whole realm of human relationships, redefining the role of women as the disfavored sex in nakedly utilitarian terms, and indeed signaling that their very existence is now conditional and contingent.

“Moreover, enduring and extreme SRB imbalances set the demographic stage for an incipient ‘marriage squeeze’ in affected populations, with notably reduced pools of potential future brides. China’s persistently elevated SRBs, for example, stand to transform it from a country where as of 2000 nearly all males (about 96 percent) had been married by their early 40s to one in which nearly a quarter (23 percent) are projected to be never married as of 2040, less than 30 years from now….

“Finally, there is the speculative question of the social impact of a sudden addition of a large cohort of young “excess males” to populations with sustained extreme SRBs: depending on a given country’s cultural and institutional capabilities for coping with this challenge, such trends could quite conceivably lead to increased crime, violence, and social tensions — or possibly even a greater proclivity for social instability.”

One recent bit of commentary on this by Ken Connor offers some hard home truths: “When feminists talk about abortion, they do so in terms of women’s rights. Legalized abortion empowers women, they assert, because it puts them in control over their bodies; it gives them the choice whether or not to bear a child who has been conceived. What these proponents of ‘liberty’ fail to consider, however, is that in many cases women are ‘choosing’ abortion at the behest of someone else. Cultural pressures, fear of retaliation, and other factors are driving them to end the lives of their unborn children because daughters are deemed undesirable. Thus, abortion is being used as an instrument of oppression against females, not as a tool of liberation.

“No doubt abortion advocates would argue that it is not abortion that is at fault here, but backward cultures that are misusing the tools of liberty in order to further their misogynistic agendas. Third world abortion might be an abusive, repugnant phenomenon, but that says nothing about its use in the western world. Such logic is nothing short of delusional. When it comes to questions of life and death, there is little gray area. You are either an advocate of life, a supporter of inherent human dignity, or you aren’t. You can’t justify the killing of the unborn in the name ‘choice’ and then complain when others exercise that choice in ways you find objectionable.

“So this leaves the feminists of the west in somewhat of a pickle. What will they make of these new demographic trends? Will they stick to their guns and defend the use of abortion even as a tool of gender-based infanticide? Will they attempt to somehow construct a ‘morality of abortion’ in which only certain motivations for the procedure are deemed justifiable? Will they evade the issue altogether?

“For the sake of millions of unborn women around the world, here’s hoping this trend puts some pressure on the pro-abortion movement to reconsider the implications of their inhuman and inhumane conception of human ‘rights’.”

Yes quite so. The brave new world we live in today keeps getting braver – and scarier. And all sorts of people are paying a heavy price for it.

www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-global-war-against-baby-girls

townhall.com/columnists/kenconnor/2012/03/28/aborting_womens_rights

[1163 words]

Every one of them has come out this year, and all are well worth getting and carefully perusing. They deal with various topics, ranging from theology, ethics, apologetics, politics and social issues, to Islam, atheism and homosexuality.

While I have read well over 200 new books this year, it is well worth highlighting at least a tenth of them. Here then are twenty-one new volumes which I am quite happy to endorse:

Wright, NT, Simply Jesus. HarperOne, 2011.
Tom Wright is always worth reading, even if one disagrees with him along the way. This volume continues in what he has been discussing for decades now, and offers a nice introduction to his thoughts about Jesus and his mission. Vintage material from Wright.

Perrin, Nicholas and Richard Hays, eds., Jesus, Paul and the People of God. IVP, 2011.
Speaking of Wright, there is never a shortage of dialogue, debate and controversy surrounding his writings. We find all this here in a collection of essays assessing and critiquing his work, along with responses from Wright. A number of key theologians and New Testament scholars go head to head here with Wright in both agreement and disagreement.

Noll, Mark, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind. Eerdmans, 2011.
For decades now Mark Noll has been encouraging us to love God with our minds, and in his latest offering he makes the case for Christian learning and scholarship. Anti-intellectualism has long been a curse on contemporary Christianity, and Noll calls us to serve Christ in every way, including in the study, the academy, and the classroom.

Leithart, Peter, Athanasius. Baker, 2011.
Hot on the heels of his very important 2010 volume, Defending Constantine, this inaugural volume in the Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality series is now available. It is a detailed look at the theology and thinking of the great Church Father.

Horton, Michael, For Calvinism. Zondervan, 2011.
This and the next volume make for a nice counterpoint series in which the old debates about the strengths and weaknesses of Calvinism are again thrashed out. Here Horton makes the case for Calvinism, offering detailed biblical, hermeneutical and theological arguments for it.

Olson, Roger, Against Calvinism. Zondervan, 2011.
In this, the other volume in this helpful set, Olson offers the Arminian version of events, criticising the Calvinistic scheme of things, while offering his own preferred theological and hermeneutical alternative. These two volumes nicely lay out the assorted pros and cons concerning Calvinism and I highly recommend both to you.

Stewart, Kenneth, Ten Myths About Calvinism. IVP, 2011.
Since we are discussing Calvinism, I might as well mention this helpful new volume. It discusses a number of commonly-held myths about Calvinism, such as: it is anti-missionary; it leads to theocracy; it opposes the creative arts; it promotes antinomianism; and so on. A good corrective to much sloppy thinking on Calvinism.

Groothuis, Douglas, Christian Apologetics. IVP, 2011.
In well over 700 pages the noted Christian apologist offers a very fine introduction to the major themes and issues in apologetics. He covers all the important material carefully and judiciously. A welcome addition to the ever-growing library of works on philosophy of religion, Christian apologetics, and biblical worldview studies. Highly recommended.

Blanchard, John, Does God Believe in Atheists? EP, 2011.
Although first published in 2000, this very helpful volume has been heavily updated to especially interact with the new atheism. In over 700 pages the popular English apologist covers all the bases as he defends the Christian faith from a range of objections and criticisms. Packed with thousands of references, this is a goldmine of information and solid argumentation.

Buy this from Amazon: The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion by Rodney Stark Click Here

Stark, Rodney, The Triumph of Christianity. HarperOne, 2011.
The renowned sociologist of religion here offers yet another important volume, looking at the benefits and advantages of the Christian faith. An enormous amount of historical and sociological detail and insight is presented here as Stark traces the rise and rise of the Christian movement over the past 2000 years.

Bell, James Stuart, ed., From the Library of A.W. Tozer. Bethany House, 2011.
And for some devotional reading, here are some great spiritual gleanings from some of Tozer’s favourite authors. In this collection are nearly 200 excerpts from 36 great Christian preachers and writers, such as Moody, Spurgeon, a Kempis, Bunyan, Calvin, Augustine, Fenelon and Wesley.

Goldman, David, How Civilizations Die. Regnery, 2011.
In this very important new book the issues of religious faith, population trends, and national flourishing or suicide are discussed. Goldman capably demonstrates that when faith wanes, so do nations. The loss of faith in individuals and nations leads to demographic decline and eventual extinction. A very valuable book by a noted economist and commentator.

Goldman, David, It’s Not the End of the World. RVP, 2011.
In this collection of essays Goldman covers many of the themes he addresses in the volume above, plus various other topics, ranging from the arts to economics. Once again we have some excellent and incisive commentary on why civilisations die, and what can be done about it.

Geller, Pamela, Stop the Islamization of America. WND Books, 2011.
Creeping sharia and stealth jihad is occurring all over the West. While this volume focuses on the US, it is of real help to all those concerned about how Western democracy and freedoms are being whittled away. An incisive look at the very real battle we are in.

Sowell, Thomas, The Thomas Sowell Reader. Basic Books, 2011.
I don’t think Thomas Sowell has ever written a bad article or book. This is a collection of some of his many writings on various topics from over the last three decades, ranging from economics to politics, culture, and education. The fact that I own 23 of Sowell’s books tells you how highly I think of him and his writings.

Shapiro, Ben, Primetime Propaganda. Broadside, 2011.
If you wonder why so many of the offerings of contemporary television are so left of centre, here is why. In this thoroughly documented volume Shapiro shows why Hollywood finds it so difficult to offer anything at all in tune with mainstream American values and beliefs. Over a hundred key players were interviewed for this work, so we get to hear directly from those involved. An eye-opening expose.

Stanton, Glenn, The Ring Makes All the Difference. Moody, 2011.
For years now we have known that cohabitation is a poor substitute for marriage, with plenty of research to back this up. In this volume the social science data is nicely brought together, showing that marriage really does matter, and for everyone involved.

Muehlenberg, Bill, Strained Relations: The Challenge of Homosexuality. Freedom Publishing, 2011.
Hey, I’m allowed to plug my own work, am I not? This fully-documented volume examines every aspect of the homosexual debate, including marriage and adoption rights. It also looks at the biblical debates arising from theological revisionists who want to rewrite Scripture to suit their agenda. With over 700 endnotes it covers all the bases in a thorough and comprehensive fashion.

Forthcoming

Finally, three volumes which have either just been released or soon will be. Because of the authors and publisher, I think I can quite safely go out on a limb here and recommend these three volumes in advance:

Beale, G. K., A New Testament Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New. Baker, 2011.
This massive work of nearly 1100 pages is the result of decades of careful scholarship by a leading New Testament professor. He carefully assesses NT theology in the light of the OT, and shows the unfolding drama of a single divine story, culminating in Christ.

Keener, Craig, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts. Baker, 2011.
In over 900 pages the prolific NT professor provides us with a comprehensive and detailed examination of the subject of miracles: what are they, how do they occur, objections to them, and miraculous occurrences in the past two millennia. Biblical, theological, philosophical and historical issues are all covered in this sweeping study.

Green, Joel, ed., Dictionary of Scripture and Ethics. Baker, 2011.
This is another sizable (900 pages) theological reference work which is well worth adding to your library (if your budget and book shelves allow). It covers some 500 different topics, all within the interface of ethics and Scripture. A solid and helpful reference work worth getting hold of.

So then, happy reading and Merry Christmas.

[1446 words]

Simply put, nations with high levels of religious faith are holding their own when it comes to population levels. But nations which are secular are seeing rapid population decline. But it also makes a difference what kind of religious faith we are talking about. It might surprise many to know that the Muslim world is now in one of the most radical periods of population decline in human history.

Thus it is not just the developed world which is suffering a population implosion. Much of the Muslim world is also in demographic decline. All these truths have profound political, social and geopolitical implications. And all of this is brilliantly discussed in two very important new books by David Goldman.

Buy this from Amazon: How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too) by David Goldman Click Here

The economist and political commentator has two brand new books out, both released just this September. These are: How Civilizations Die (Regnery) and It’s Not the End of the World, It’s Just the End of You: The Great Extinction of the Nations (RVP).

The first is a book-length (300 page) treatment of this subject while the second is a collection of essays on these themes. Both make for fascinating reading, and help to give us a handle on how nations thrive or die. And faith and demographics are at the heart of all this.

Says Goldman, “A good deal of the world seems to have lost the taste for life . . . Today’s cultures are dying of apathy, not by the swords of their enemies.” The degree of religious faith and human hope determine how nations fare. The more secular a nation is, the more likely its fertility rates will be plummeting.

A purely secular analysis will simply not do here: “Our strategic thinking suffers from a failure to take into account the existential problems of other nations. We think in the narrow categories of geopolitics, but we need to study theopolitics – the powerful impact of religious beliefs and aspirations on world events.”

The statistics bear this connection out: “The degree of religious faith explains a great deal of the variation in population growth rates among the countries of the world. The industrial world’s lowest fertility rates are encountered among the nations of Eastern Europe where atheism was the official ideology for generations. The highest fertility rates in the developed world are found in countries with a high degree of religious faith, namely the United States and Israel. And demographers have identified religion as a crucial factor in the differences among populations within countries. When faith goes, fertility vanishes, too.”

As Goldman rightly summarises, “The members of sick cultures … cease to have children.” When a nation loses hope and a sense of purpose, its members cease having children. Indeed, when there is loss of faith in the future, people simply stop having children. This is true of individuals as well of nations.

He traces this truth through history as well. The classical civilisations died out because of “moral inanition” and “self-imposed infertility”. Ancient Greece and Rome for example simply no longer wanted to live, and their anti-fertility practices ensured a fatal outcome.

As Rodney Stark stated in The Rise of Christianity, the pagans were essentially anti-life, resorting heavily to contraception and infanticide. The early Christians on the other hand were strongly pro-life. Thus the pagan world died out while the new Christian faith flourished and spread.

But what about Islam? Why is it too experiencing steep demographic decline if it is such a strong religious community? Goldman spends a number of chapters on such questions. While Muslims as a whole still have more children than do most Westerners, this is changing.

“Most of the variation in birth rates among Muslim countries is explained by a single factor: literacy. . . . Across the entire Muslim world, university-educated Muslim women bear children at the same rate as their infecund European counterparts.” Religious practice also is a factor here, with Muslims who frequently attend a mosque more likely to have big families.

The shrinking Muslim population spells real danger to the West. Consider a nation like Iran for example where fertility rates are well down. “Iran’s looming demographic disaster makes the country more dangerous. People stop having children when they lose faith in their future.”

He continues, “Loss of faith may express itself in passive despondency. … But it also may express itself in a desperation to achieve victory before the window of opportunity closes.” And this is the far more likely outcome for Iran warns Goldman. Indeed, “nothing is more dangerous than a civilization that has only just discovered it is dying.”

Thus geopolitical considerations must also be addressed in terms of theopolitical realities. While the West as a whole is in perilous population decline, America is remaining steady. But it is “not that Americans in general are having children, but that Americans of faith are having children, and there are more Americans of faith than citizens of any other industrial country.”

While secular Europe is suffering a massive population implosion, the US is maintaining its fertility rates. In contrast, the death of Christianity in Europe has led to the death of Europe itself. It is now the most secular continent on earth, and it is also experiencing some of the lowest fertility rates on earth. “Abnegation of child-rearing is the ultimate expression of nihilism.”

Thus it seems that Yahweh had it right three millennia ago when he said, “All who hate me love death” (Proverbs 8:36). Pagan and/or secular societies with no belief in an afterlife and immortality have little reason for hope, and therefore have little reason to remain fertile and reproduce. The will to live is lost, and civilisations die out. As Goldman correctly notes, “Demographic winter arises from a crisis of faith.”

I close with his incisive words: “Spengler, whose Decline of the West remains the standard for pessimism, claimed that human civilizations followed a biological cycle of growth and decay. But there is no reason to believe this to be true; some very ancient civilizations – China and India, for example – are in resurgence. The truth is that humankind cannot survive without faith, specifically faith that our lives have meaning beyond the mere span of our years. Civilizations that lose their faith also lose their desire to continue and fail to reproduce themselves.”

[1083 words]

Of course this can be either good news or bad news, depending on where a person is coming from. Indeed, for some, it is terrifying news, and the cause of great panic. They think any new person is only a case of bad news. Consider this very simple chart of human population milestones:

1805: 1 billion people
1927: 2 billion people
1960: 3 billion people
1974: 4 billion people
1987: 5 billion people
1999: 6 billion people
2011: 7 billion people

In what appears to be wildly exponential growth, it seems that the world is surely doomed: we will soon – if not already – have far too many people and disaster will occur. The gloom and doom brigade will look at such a chart in sheer horror.

But a few things need to be said about this chart. As frightening as it may look, it of course only tells us part of the story. We need to look at how the chart is likely to continue. What will these numbers be in the future? Admittedly, such forecasts are always difficult and imprecise.

Indeed, for decades now I have been following the various forecasts made by the UN Population Division and other bodies as they seek to predict where world population levels will be heading to. The interesting thing is how the predictions have had to constantly change over time.

Back in 1968 one noted gloom and doomer, Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb. In it he assured us that because of our “population explosion” the battle to feed the world’s population was over, and we could soon expect catastrophe big time. Of course things did not quite pan out the way he promised, but he still, even today, keeps on with this dark message.

In fact, he said as late as 2009 that “perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future”! So he is a true believer, and no amount of evidence will persuade him to abandon his Chicken Little worldview.

But as I said, the experts have been revising downwards their estimate of peak global population for decades now. I clearly recall being told some years ago by the experts that the world would reach a peak of 25 billion people in the near future. Then they said 22 billion. Then 20.

On and on went the downward revisions: 18; 16; 15; 13; 12; 11; 10; and now the 9 billion people peak, predicted to arrive around mid-century. Then things level off and even head back downwards. And some are now arguing that we will not even reach the 9 billion figure. So population forecasting is a tricky game, and many wrong predictions have been made over the years.

And as also already mentioned, the numbers are open to widely differing interpretations. Are the figures good news, bad news, or should we simply be indifferent about them? Should we be panicking or celebrating this newest arrival on Monday?

One expert who thinks we should be popping the champagne cork is demographic expert Steven Mosher, President of the Population Research Institute. He believes this is good news, and not something we should be wringing our hands about. As one news item recently put it:

“The United Nations Population Division has projected October 31st 2011 as the day on which the world will be home to seven billion people. ‘This is a happy occasion,’ says Mosher, a leading population expert and best-selling author.  ‘The world’s population has more than doubled since 1960, and humanity has never been so prosperous.’

“Family-planning groups, Mosher contends, supported by many feminists and environmental groups, and no-growth types, are abusing this milestone to promote the myth of overpopulation and to raise more money for anti-people projects. ‘The attitude of the anti-people types is arrogant and elitist,’ says Mosher. ‘They say, in effect, to Africans, Asians and Latin Americans: “there are just enough of us, but there are way too many of you”.’

“According to Mosher, ‘contrary to what you might hear, the most pressing problem in country after country today is not overpopulation, but underpopulation.  In a time of fiscal austerity, the last thing that we need to be doing is spending more tax dollars to drive down the birth rate, reducing the amount of human capital available, and making us all poorer in the long run.’

“‘We are grateful that Baby Seven Billion will come into this world,’ Mosher says. ‘Baby Seven Billion, boy or girl, red or yellow, black or white, is not a liability, but an asset; not a curse, but a blessing for us all. Humanity’s long-term problem is not going to be too many children, but too few children.’

“Mosher’s analysis of world population trends stands in contradiction to the United Nations Population Fund’s (UNFPA) report on The State of World Population 2010, which Mosher contends is misleading. Further U.S. funding of the UNFPA is presently in jeopardy because of UN population control agency’s continued involvement in China’s coercive one-child policy. PRI investigations have repeatedly shown that the UNFPA is complicit in a policy that is carried out by means of forced abortions and forced sterilizations, and which has eliminated some 400 million Chinese.”

The PRI website is well worth visiting at in this regard. The videos which appear on its home page are especially invaluable, and everyone should give them a look, including this one: overpopulationisamyth.com/content/episode-5-7-billion-people-will-everyone-please-relax

Also very much worth reading is this article, and the graphs which accompany it: www.pop.org/content/lies-damned-lies-statistics-and-population-graphs

The truth is, human population growth rates are slowing big time. Fertility rates all over the world are in steep decline, and our big problem now is a birth dearth. A population implosion, not a population explosion, is our main problem. We will soon reach our peak population, and a steady decline afterwards will take place.

People are a blessing and a boon, not a curse. But I argue elsewhere about the dangers of our declining population rates. See the 31 other articles in my population section of this website for more details. So I for one will look forward to this newest arrival on planet earth. I hope you will as well.

www.sacbee.com/2011/10/28/4014140/mosher-celebrate-the-seven-billionth.html

[1084 words]

Of course when a church does faithfully stick to its core business of proclaiming the life-saving news of Jesus Christ, the media will tend to ignore it. But when a church, or church leader, or denomination, becomes a regular feature of the MSM, then the warning signs should be going off.

We had a great example of this yesterday. Making front page headlines we read of how a major church body is so worried about population growth that it wants to can the baby bonus. Here is how the Herald Sun story begins:

“A leading church body wants the baby bonus scrapped and migration cut to curb Australia’s rampant population growth. The Anglican Church’s key advisory group also wants migration cut. In a submission to a federal population inquiry, the general synod’s public affairs commission has described population growth as a taboo subject and ‘the elephant in the room’. The commission has proposed a halt to ‘any policy that provides an incentive specifically and primarily to increase Australia’s population, notably the baby bonus’.

“Last year there were 278,000 baby bonus payments, including almost 67,000 in Victoria. The $5294 baby bonus is paid to families who earn $75,000 or less for the six months after the child’s birth. A spokesman for Melbourne’s Anglican diocese said a recent resolution by the general synod called on the Government to ‘avoid any reliance on continuing population growth to maintain economic growth’.”

There are plenty of problems with all this. The first one I have already mentioned: it sure would be nice to see churches making the headlines for the right reasons, like actually preaching the gospel. And if it does insist on getting involved with political and social issues – and there certainly is a place for that – then I wish they would pick the right ones.

If I read a headline in tomorrow’s press about 35 church leaders arrested for standing up for the rights of the unborn, that would be a better sign of the vitality of the church. The taking of human life is – or should be – a major concern of the church.

The sanctity of life and the blessings of children should be loudly proclaimed by the Christian churches. But what do we find here? It seems that this church body actually views children as a curse, not a blessing. Instead of running with the biblical line here, they prefer instead an unbiblical one.

Another problem is this: what population problem? Do we have one? Well yes, but not as these folks imagine. Australia, like almost all of the rest of the Western world, has a major under-population problem; not an overpopulation problem. Our biggest problem today is our birth dearth.

We are below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman, and in other Western countries this is reaching disastrous proportions. A number of European nations are hovering around 1.1 children per woman. This is a recipe for big trouble.

Indeed, things are so bad in Russia, for example, that they are now talking about restricting abortion and taking other harsh measures to turn things around. One press report said this: “In a speech last week Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said that measures must be taken in the Russian Federation to boost the birth rate.

“Putin said that 1.5 trillion roubles will be invested in ‘demography projects,’ to improve the average life expectancy and to boost the birth rate by 25 to 30 percent over three years. Following Putin’s speech, the Russian parliament, the Duma, introduced a bill to disqualify abortion as a medical service in the national health plan. It would also allow doctors to refuse to commit abortions.”

As Larry Jacobs of the World Congress of Families put it, “It’s not Russia alone that’s experiencing demographic winter. Worldwide, birthrates have declined by more than 50 per cent since the late 1960s. By the year 2050, there will be 248 million fewer children under 5 years old in the world than there are today. This birth dearth will be one of the greatest challenges confronting humanity in the 21st. century.”

Finally, these churchmen are quite wrong to say that governments should “avoid any reliance on continuing population growth to maintain economic growth”. The fact is, people are our greatest resource and our greatest form of capital, and a healthy economy is the best answer to poverty and the sorts of social concerns most churches have.

As the secular newspaper The Australian editorialises, this call “is symptomatic of the short-sighted ‘small Australia’ mindset that both major parties pandered to at last year’s election. The suggestion that our vast, richly resourced and innovative nation is somehow nearing capacity is as foolish as it is selfish. Clearly we have the space and resources to expand our population, and a charitable, even Christian, interpretation of our global responsibilities might suggest we have a duty to share our prosperity with as many people, native-born and immigrant, as possible.”

These calls for population reduction are just part of foolish and failed leftist political policies, which see both humanity and capitalism as the problems instead of the solutions. These clerics are living in a time warp, and are out of step with proven successful policies.

But I guess we shouldn’t expect our trendy churchmen to come out with sensible policies based on a biblically-informed worldview.

www.optuszoo.com.au/news/state/news-com-au/dump-baby-bonus-says-church/344550

www.lifesitenews.com/news/russia-considering-abortion-restrictions-to-slow-population-collapse?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=1c2dbffc95-LifeSiteNews_com_Intl_Headlines04_28_2011&utm_medium=email

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