Eliminating People to Help People?
Can a “human-centered approach” to issues include policies with the express purpose of eliminating people?
This argument is cropping up, particularly in debates over climate change and now health care.
Hard-core believers of climate change have argued that a key way to reduce greenhouse gases is to reduce people. This was rejected most recently at Rio+20 when UNFPA and their allies lost their attempts to include shadowy abortion language in the final document.
At a UN conference on climate change in Copenhagen in 2009, China wanted credit for eliminating 400 million lives through its brutal one-child policy.
“Such a decline in population growth leads to a reduction of 1.83 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions in China per annum at present,” the Xinhua news agency quoted Zhao Baige, vice minister of China’s National Population and Family Planning Commission, reported Reuters.
More recently the UK’s Department for International Development excused its funding of a program in India that commits mass coercive sterilizations by claiming it’s a way to deal with climate change.
Rumors abound that U.S. Sen. John Kerry desperately wants to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. The pro-abortion politician gave a major address in the Senate this week claiming the threat of climate change is as important, or more, than nuclear war because “it affects life itself on this planet.” He is aggressively pushing UN treaties through the Senate in the final days of this congress, including the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities, which has language that some (like Hillary Clinton) say includes abortion.
Last week the ObamaCare mandate requiring employers to provide contraception and abortion-inducing drugs came into effect. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius has defended her mandate by arguing it will save money. How? By reducing the number of people that are born.
Sebelius testified at a congressional hearing that her mandate is justified as a way to reduce costs. (I’m sure her number-crunching analysis forgot to factor in that fewer people also means fewer taxpayers.) She stated, “The reduction in the number of pregnancies compensates for the cost of contraception.”
“By not having babies born, we’re saving money,” asked the astonished congressman. “Not having babies born is a critical health benefit?”
“Providing contraception as a critical preventive health benefit for women and for their children reduces health care costs,” Sebelius stated.
So, contraception/abortion is a health benefit for children? Surely not the ones that were prevented from being born alive.
You can watch this extraordinary exchange here (at 5:06 ).
What will happen if this argument takes root? What other drugs or procedures will be covered because they will eliminate lives, and therefore costs? Or policies will be adopted because they reduce the number of people (particularly the poor) and thereby help the environment? Will one life can be traded away in order to benefit someone else?
You know that pro-lifers are making headway when our opponents use, or try to co-opt, our pro-human argument. But being “as wise as serpents” justifies skepticism. Particularly when their solutions remains the same: placing some other priority above human life.
