No one will publicly endorse such a thing in today’s world. But how else will they bring about global population control if you cannot control which humans have babies and how many?
Now, it is not going to be an overt approach like in China, but just legalizing and promoting contraception and abortion work well enough in most parts of the world.
Education (especially for women), reduced poverty, and access to voluntary family planning all reduce birthrates. That is why birthrates in the 1st world are lower than in the 3rd world.
I would argue it is primarily contraception and abortion. Reproduction rates plummet wherever those are introduced, so much that a demographic winter occurs.
So you would agree that birthrates in India have fallen sharply without forced sterilization, correct?
Yes, sterilization doesn’t have to be forced to occur. Much of the west is eliminating its population voluntarily. However, voluntary != good.
Contraception isn’t sterilization.
Choosing not to have children is not eliminating anyone.
Sterilization is a form of contraception, and chemical contraception can result inadvertantly in sterilization.
Abortion is killing existing members of the population before they arr born. Contraception keeps the future population from existing, a counterfactual kind of killing.
Category fallacy. All dogs are mammals, but not all mammals are dogs.
No one is forcing women to get abortions in the Western world.
Seriously?
Certainly not all contraception is sterilization, but many of the most used have that effect. It is one possible explanation considered for today’s high rate of infertility.
Yes, a person could have existed, but the choice to use contraception means they will never exist. In a world with libertarian free will, the real possibility of a person has been terminated forever.
References???
That’s like saying that the choice of not raping someone means that person will never exist. You have your morality and reasoning completely backwards.
Are you sure it is the same: rape and consensual sex between male and female? The setting for creating people matters as well.
This is a good question. I will have to find references. But, it does seem odd that falling fertility coicides with the introduction of chemical contraception.
It also coincides with steeply rising environmental toxicity levels all over the planet.
The historian Tony Judt believed that contraception and the availability of abortion played a role in declining birth rates, but he would have not make an unqualified claim that they are lone, decisive factors. Birth rates in Europe started falling between 1960 and 1990. These years are within the time frame of post-industrialization when an increasing number of women, Judt says, worked away from home. (1) Women (and men) who achieved higher education and earned higher incomes tended to put off marriage and child rearing later than other people as they still do today.
Post-industrialization is not universal, of course, and Judt notes that declining birth rates in some poor European countries may not fit with this explanation. (791) However, researchers studying population growth in Latin America found that the average fertility vary across regions within individual countries. Perhaps a region has better access to education and/or employment prospects for women than another region.
If Judt is still alive, I wonder what he would have make of declining sexual activity in today’s post-industrial countries.
(1) Tony Judt, Postwar : A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 490, 536.
(2) Ibid., 791.
Thank God for that.
Indeed! They will become replaced by those who do not self eliminate 
Sadly, this is a very limited group of people you are experiencing with their myopic views. What country? USA?
The state and its people are not “voluntarily” self-eliminating the population in Europe and North America. Whatever the exact causes of declining birth rates are, they boil down to the aggregate of individuals making choices based on their socio-economic circumstances and personal inclinations. However, the governments of post-industrial countries worry about this decline because they cannot sustain economic growth and welfare with an aging population and a total fertility rate below 2.1 (population replacement ratio). This is why not only many policymakers across the political spectrum see passing pro-natalist policies as advancing their national interest but also there is no grand, global conspiracy to reduce populations with man-made diseases.
Putting population growth aside, I see consumption as a bigger issue, especially in the USA. Population growth throughout this century will continue to decline or level out in numerous countries, but the whole world cannot live and consume like the USA. This critique of unlimited consumption is something many Christians can agree on because we are called to not be worldly and to take care of Earth. I want Christians to put their fears behind and collectively work together for the future of Earth, our “Common Home” as Pope Francis puts it. I believe that this is a way we can bear witness to Christ for the whole world.
All this conspiracy mumbo jumbo is exactly what my sister-in-law says. Right down to the whole “wearing masks will lead you to take the Mark of the Beast.” Even when my wife sends her good quality articles debunking this bogus stuff or at least explaining it, she doesn’t read them and doesn’t seem to care that she could be wrong–all the while saying we should care that we could be wrong.
This is how I’m starting to feel…
It seems like debating with these people doesn’t lead to anything. My sister-in-law won’t listen, so what else is there to do?
At the same time, I feel like resigning oneself to their antics might be irresponsible. I don’t know.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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