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Page added on June 5, 2013
Peter Singer: Women Should Sacrifice Having Kids to Protect Environment
Bioethicist Peter Singer compared women and children to cows overgrazing a field and said — at the global Women Deliver Conference last week, hailed as the most important meeting to focus on women and girls’ human rights in a decade — that women’s reproductive rights may one day have to be sacrificed for the environment.
The controversial Princeton University professor, known for championing infanticide and bestiality, was a featured panelist on Thursday at the three-day Women Deliver conference attended by Melinda Gates and more than 4,000 abortion and contraception activists in Kuala Lumpur.
Singer said that since the world’s affluent are not likely to restrain their high rate of consumption compared to the world’s poor any time soon, and since it’s possible that family planning efforts may “turn out to be not enough…we ought to consider what other things there are that we can do …in order to try stave off some of the worst consequences of the environmental catastrophes…”
“It’s possible of course, that we give women reproductive choices, that we meet the unmet need for contraception but that we find that the number of children that women choose to have is still such that population continues to rise in a way that causes environmental problems,” he said. Women have more children because of their “ideological or religious views.”
Singer added that “greenhouse gases… are getting very close to a tipping point,” and climate change could become a “catastrophe and cause hundreds of millions or billions of people to become climate refugees.”
In that case, he said, “we need to consider whether we can talk about trying to reduce population growth and whether that’s compatible with the very reasonable concerns people have about women’s right to control their life decisions and their reproduction.”
Singer, who has also argued the case for bestowing international human rights on primates, said it is “appropriate to consider whether women’s reproductive rights are “fundamental” and unalterable or whether, in bioethicist speak, they are “prima facie — good and important to respect but there can be imaginable circumstances in which you may be justified in overriding them.”
Then Singer compared women’s right to bear children to the traditional villager’s right to graze their cows on “common” grounds. As the villagers get more affluent and their cows die less from disease, he said, until the commons are overgrazed, “yields are falling… and that’s a road to disaster.”
“Turns out that the right to graze as many cows as you like on the common was not an absolute right,” said Singer. “Obviously this is what I think we ought to be saying even about how many children we have… I hope we don’t get to a point where we do have to override it… but I don’t think we ought to shrink away from considering that as a possibility.”
His views were not entirely well received. Babtunde Osotimehin, executive director of the UNFPA objected that “There is no way we will come to a point where we are limiting the rights of people in this way.”
Osotimehin was one of a number of speakers at the conference to highlight what pro-lifers have been saying for decades: that “global population growth is actually coming down” and that predictions of worldwide famine and overpopulation disaster were way off the mark.
“India not only feeds itself, it exports food,” said Osotimehin. He added that while some regions of the world continue to grow, others have “more 65-year-olds than 5-year-olds and those countries have issues with how they are going to remain competitive.”
Earlier at the conference, Karolinska Institute Professor of International Health, Hans Rosling, clearly demonstrated (as opponents of population control have also contended for decades) that falling fertility is related to declines in infant mortality and to rising affluence. He also conceded that fears of a population “explosion” are grossly exaggerated and the world’s population will likely peak at about 9 billion, and then start to fall.
Harvard School of Public Health’s Alicia Yamin also said that the original population explosion proponent, Thomas Malthus, was wrong. “Human beings are more than just consumers” she said. They have “capacity for reason,” and are “active agents” able to solve problems.
The problem, a number of speakers identified, is overconsumption by the world’s wealthiest. “One third of the food that is produced in the world today is wasted, “ said Osotimehin. “So sometimes it is not about what is available, it is about the politics distribution and it is about the politics of access.”
“A homeless person in Denmark actually consumes more than a family of six in Tanzania,” he added.
And wealthy people in developed nations aim to consume as much as wealthy Americans. The “new population problem,” said Osotimehin, “is that every young person who grows up in Tanzania wants to drive an SUV.”
Kavita Ramdas, an Indian representative of the Ford Foundation in New Delhi pointed out that the “ecological footprint” of the average American’s consumption is 9.7 hectares, compared the average for a person from Mozambique: 4.7 hectares. An American SUV requires 44,000 gallons of water to produce it. And American houses grew 38% in size between 1975 and 2002, even though the number of people per household fell.
It is difficult to say how receptive the conference attendees were to this attack on American consumerism (Melinda Gates’ house is 66,000 square feet and features an indoor swimming pool is piped with an underwater sound system.) But Ramdas was just warming up.
“I don’t think all rights should be put in stone,” she said. “ Why can there not be a prima facie right imposed on the countries that are truly putting an unsustainable load on the planet for all of us?” She continued saying that the United States and Europe are not always going to have this “post-colonial glow in which they assume they are always going to have control.”
“If Americans consume more than Africans, they should be forced into a one child policy,” she said at one point.
When a journalist on the panel said he didn’t see “how to get the rich world to consume less,” Ramdas said: “You force it… you can force women to have less children, you can force people to consume less… Suck it up!”
“The world order has to change,” said Osotimehin, a Nigerian family doctor. “Not only about the environment, it has to change about rights, it has to change about transportation. It won’t do any country any good to stick to some norm that is actually hurting the rest of the world. It just won’t fly.”
Ramdas said the Global South will no longer tolerate Western “hypocrisy and their “other agenda.” “We have been there before, “she said. “ We have seen forced sterilizations. We have seen the fears that the West has of brown people overrunning the world. We are tired of being slaves to colonial masters.”
It is a point population control opponents at the Population Research Institute have been making for decades.
Ironically, Ramdas works for the Ford Foundation, one of the original architects of the global population control policies that she denounces. One Ford official, in the 1960s heyday of overpopulation fears of brown people reproducing themselves across the globe, speculated on record about “spraying an aerial contraceptive over India that could be neutralized with an antedotal pill on medical prescription.”
14 Comments on "Peter Singer: Women Should Sacrifice Having Kids to Protect Environment"
Plantagenet on Wed, 5th Jun 2013 9:23 pm
It always amazes when well-off hypocrites like Peter Singer advocate that poor people make huge sacrifices for his comfort and well-being.
rollin on Wed, 5th Jun 2013 10:29 pm
Good, we now have a list of extreme activists and can put them someplace where they won’t hurt people.
Singer is forgetting that climate change, sea level change, and peak fuels will all adjust the population without his actions. Is this just a need to dominate and control on his part?
Does anybody have a list of attendees for this perversely named conference?
Juan Pueblo on Wed, 5th Jun 2013 11:17 pm
I had a Vasectomy and no children, but I don’t think anybody should be forced to get one.
The truth is we will not face or solve our problems until we are forced by nature to do it, and by then it will be many decades too late to implement any solutions.
KingM on Thu, 6th Jun 2013 12:49 am
You could solve global population problems quite simply. Pay anyone between the ages of 18-25 $1,000 for permanent sterilization. No other questions asked.
Then fund the required numbers of health workers to do the task. It would cost a few tens of billions a year and help put cash in the hands of impoverished communities at the same time.
DC on Thu, 6th Jun 2013 2:23 am
While those folks correctly point its amerikans that are primary drivers of planetary destruction, the idea that the vast hordes of poor in Africa and India etc, are somehow not a problem themselves, is dubious, if for different reasons. Im all for highlighting US hypocrisy on consumption and overpopulation, but the idea that Indians and Africans are essentially blameless themselves because they lack SUVs and wall-mart to emulate amerikas destructive ways doesn’t fly either im afraid. Indians are a perfect example. As soon an indian gets two Rupees to rub together, they off to look for an SUV to throw onto Indias barely functional road
network. Indians are not poster children for environmental consciousness.
Yes, the worlds poor are poor in order that amerikans remain ‘rich’ or quasi rich-but those poor are more than capable of dustbowling there own lands with hand tools and sheer numbers. So what if amerikans dustbowl there own nation with ‘high-tech’ agri-farms and unsustainable chemical-ag, while the worlds poor do it one tree and stream at a time with hand tools? End is result is bad no matter how you get there. Something that we all need to acknowledge.
The lady is correct about one thing though. Coercive measures will be required. The only way to avoid official coercive measures however, is collapse of the industrial system itself. Then, nature can do it business of trimming human numbers and curing us of our selfish desires w/o people getting all worked up some evil gubmint plot to tell them what they can and cant do.
PrestonSturges on Thu, 6th Jun 2013 3:20 am
Peter Singer is one creepy scarey dude.
Hinrich on Thu, 6th Jun 2013 4:10 am
Bioethist? what a joke. The only ethical thing this godless chimp raper contributes to the human race is that hopefully he practices what he preaches and doesn’t continue his family line.
BillT on Thu, 6th Jun 2013 5:03 am
I would suggest that all of the rich 1%, that are over 65, suicide today. That would take out about 10 million old farts and improve the world immensely!
Granted, we need to cut births…but it isn’t going to happen and is too late anyway.
rollin on Thu, 6th Jun 2013 5:17 am
To reduce or stop valuing the raising of children in a society is extremely dangerous. The mentality is unnatural and leads to a dead end.
To make having children a social stigma would strongly polarize people and cause massive civil problems.
Of course in an over-crowded world, we are all undervalued.
kervennic on Thu, 6th Jun 2013 7:04 am
The intellectual ability of those people living of tax money or organised robery (gates) to show off in large meetings is lose to zero.
Just read “too smart for our own good” Techological progress, environemental exploitation, overconsumption and population growth are one and the same thing.
Arthur on Thu, 6th Jun 2013 7:40 am
“The controversial Princeton University professor, known for championing infanticide and bestiality”
This overpaid jewish dude could of course set a fine example and get lost on a permanent basis himself and stop worrying about ecological footprints of homeless Danes. Maybe that is something worth contemplating next time he gets intimate with his pet goat.
PrestonSturges on Thu, 6th Jun 2013 4:19 pm
Keep in mind this is the same guy that wants to use prisoners and the retarded for medical experiments instead of rats.
John on Thu, 6th Jun 2013 10:55 pm
Until we can discuss the demographic reality underlying the ‘population bomb’ disaster, I’ll not give these people my support.
Whites, who already have a below-replacement fertility, cannot afford to have even fewer children.
The replacement level fertility is 2.11, so the way I see the solution as proposed by Peter and his ilk, if certain countries and peoples are having 3.. 4 children per woman, whites should pay the burden and have a 0,5.. 1 fertility.
It’s true, folks — this issue touches political correctness in that it’s a racial thing, and not a problem distribued evenly throughout the globe.
Look at the fertility of Europeans and the Japanese. Can they afford to have even less children? No wonder, then, that people such as Peter Singer would be the first to claim that Europe needs immigration because of an ageing population and a young demography unable to support the economy.
1) Tell young white students in the West that they are destroying the world with overpopulation
2) Wait until a demographic shift takes place and we have too many old people and too few working age ones
3) Recommend immigration as the solution to the problem they created in the first place
Peter and unfortunately many of co-ethnics form a hostile elite to the culture and peoples of the West.
Now, regarding the ‘global south’ population control debate, I believe they should mind their own business without our meddling. Just don’t expect us to admit millions of your starving poor into the West.
And the Indian saying that Americans and Europeans should be forced into a one child policy while it’s alright for Africans, Indians, Chinese etc. to have as many children as they please — nevermind the sorry condition they live in — that is the most absurd thing I have ever heard from the population control crowd. Even if all oil was gone, we in the West wouldn’t be living in the conditions that these peoples live — think of the Amish, for example. Modern society would be gone, yes, but it is still to maintain a decent rural life, at least I believe so.
Arthur on Fri, 7th Jun 2013 4:26 am
John is entirely correct. Concern for the future should not go hand in hand with the disappearing of white culture altogether, far from it. We are the only sort of people that are actually contracting and at a larger rate than is desirable. What is needed is a radical protection against being overwhelmed by those who will never display any restraint in procreation. Old humanitarian attitudes from past decades should be abandoned, as we are no longer in a position to live up to these standards and we should go in the self-defense mode… in order to survive. Sure, we should aim for sustainable living and accept lower standards of living at a lower ecological footprint, say goodbye to economic growth, but we should not accept our own extinction. And that should be a higher category than ‘the economy’. Liberalism is a political vehicle that is useless in the face of the challenges of the future. What is needed is a ‘green-right’ political movement, that addresses the ecological problems of the future, resource drpletion and climate change, puts economic development on the backburner, and put its cards on local development, in segregated communities and opposes mass immigration. Interaction with other cultures is ok, as long as it is based on mutual benefit and not takeover of our historic lands. One world marxism is to be rejected, as well as interventionism. The world is multipolar, meaning segregated poles, living next to each other, not mixed.