Save the World!

” Save the world! Stop having children! Such was the rather drastic solution to the problem of climate change proposed in an editorial in the prestigious British Medical Journal , no less, the other day.” As The Independent goes on to note , the paranoia of overpopulation is nothing new: Two centuries ago, Thomas Malthus was advocating population control—especially for the hapless and helpless in Africa and India. Eugenics is another name for it, and we still hear his gospel preached.

Then, in 1968 Paul Erlich warned, “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” The problem, he said, wasn’t the lack of fertility but its unbridled excess, resulting in national starvation. Now, however, with the population of Europe poised to half itself every sixty-five years, the tune is changing—or at least it should be.

All of which makes George Weigel’s latest column of especial interest:

It’s hard to imagine a less auspicious time for the reception of a papal encyclical reaffirming the Church’s classic teaching on the morally appropriate means of family planning than the summer of 1968. Now, forty years after it was issued, Pope Paul VI’s letter, Humanae Vitae , may finally be getting the hearing it deserves.

Why? Because the developed world is in demographic crisis from decades of plummeting birth rates. Because younger women have figured out a truth that eluded their mothers in the Sixties: the sexual revolution — made possible in part by easily available contraception — is great for predatory men, and not-so-great for women. And because John Paul II’s “theology of the body” has set the Church’s teaching in an engaging, humanistic framework. The Catholic Lite Brigade will doubtless make this anniversary year the occasion to celebrate two generations of theological dissent; wiser souls will ponder the wreckage caused by the sexual revolution, especially to women, and think again.
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It bears repeating yet again, because the mainstream media consistently get it wrong: the Catholic Church does not teach an ideology of fertility-at-all-costs. To the contrary: the Catholic Church teaches that every couple has a moral responsibility to welcome new life as a gift from God, to consider the number of children they can rear and educate, and to order marital life in concert with those two responsibilities. Where the Church is boldly countercultural is in teaching that the morally appropriate means to regulate fertility is through biology rather than technology. Natural family planning according to the rhythms of biology, the Church proposes, honors the integrity of women and the special nature of the marital bond; natural family planning honors, if you will, the iconography of marital sexual love and its dual nature as both love-sharing and life-giving. Technological means of family planning impede that.

“Save the world! Stop having children!” is a cry doomed to silence itself, but, as those worried about third-world and inner-city poverty will be quick to argue, the answer isn’t simply “Have children!”

Save the world! Have families! —Now that’s worth a try.