I kind of said this already

Pro-choice activist Jennie Bristow of spiked writes in Population reduction: a war on women’s bodies that

There is now great sensitivity surrounding explicit population-control programmes that have been used by governments in the developed world, and imposed on countries in the developing world. Today there is little sympathy within the West for continuing population control programmes such as China’s One-Child Policy, which is being relaxed in some districts of China. However, it would be naïve to assume from this that birth control today is always promoted positively, with the only considerations being women’s rights and bodily autonomy. Old arguments about why women’s personal reproductive decisions should be made to fit with broader social objectives can be recycled in new forms, and this requires continued vigilance from those working to promote the cause of genuine reproductive choice.

…[P]ro-choice advocates have fought their arguments on the basis that the woman should be absolutely at the centre of reproductive decision-making. It is a woman who must bear a child, and in our society it is usually she who will have the practical, emotional and financial responsibility for raising that child. To attempt to displace the woman from this decision by encouraging her to regulate her fertility in line with the abstract demands of ‘the environment’ implicitly pushes the woman to a more marginal, negotiable and ultimately vulnerable position in the decision-making process.

I have written previously that population control under the guise of environmentalism will be used to destroy women and children.  What is really naïve, though, is the notion that birth control was today or ever “promoted positively, with the only consideration being women’s rights and bodily autonomy.”  Many men have welcomed birth control because it has relieved them of responsibility, while mainstream feminists rarely think of “reproductive choice” as anything other than choosing to prevent or terminate pregnancies.  (This is why they are often deafeningly silent on the subject of maternal and infant health, for instance.)  Since the feminists have embraced collectivism, anything that might hold back the professional advancement of one woman is seen as damaging the “movement” as a whole.

Now, of course, fertile women will be seen as damaging not just to the feminist movement, but the environment as well.  I predict that women will be as sexualized as ever, if not more so, but the pressure to have fewer children will only ramp up.  From observing the mixed reactions to the 30-year-old Polanski case, for instance, it becomes apparent that even 13-year-old children don’t get to say no, especially to powerful older men.   So to save the environment, enable rapists, and boost the pharmaceutical companies’ bottom line, we should probably just start all girls on mandatory birth control upon reaching adolescence.  (Hey, they did it with Gardasil!)  Everyone wins!

I’m sure the above sounds cynical, but I truly would not be surprised if mandatory birth control for girls is proposed within the next decade.  I’m sure there are people who want to propose it right now.  And, lo and behold, a Google search for “mandatory birth control” yields, among many other gems, the Facebook page awkwardly entitled “The Planet Being Saved By Mandatory Birth Control.  We’re doomed, y’all!

[UPDATE]:  As I mention in the comments, I think I was wrong to allege that feminists are “deafeningly silent” on maternal and infant health.  For instance, Pushed:  the painful truth about childbirth and modern maternity care, which challenges the rise of obstetric intervention,  was written by a feminist and former editor of Ms. magazine.  I think these texts are nonetheless relatively rare in the feminist/gender studies canon.

Maybe, Just Maybe, Environmentalism is Hostile to Women

Death (and Sterilization) By Government « LewRockwell.com Blog.

Karen De Coster writes:

John P. Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar, has, surprisingly, received little mainstream press on his crazed worldviews. Thus, every so often I like to post a reminder for people that may spur them to do some additional research on their own.  Here’s a short editorial from the Washington Times to remind us of Holdren’s book, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, that he co-wrote with Paul and Anne Ehrlich (the Times article commits a spelling error on the last name). From the Times editorial:

In case compulsory abortion wasn’t enough to diffuse his imaginary population bomb, Mr. Holdren and the Erlichs considered other extremist measures. “A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men,” they wrote. “The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control.”

It gets worse. The Holdren-Erlich book also promotes “Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods.” After noting that, well, yes, there were “very difficult political, legal and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems,” Mr. Holdren and his co-authors express hope that their idea may still be viable. “To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements,” they wrote. “It must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets or livestock.”

Wow.  So much for the idea that environmentalism is about getting back to Mother Earth or revering womankind, as some eco-feminists might claim.  This passage makes it sound like just about everyone and everything–”members of the opposite sex,” “children,” and “livestock”–have a greater claim to existence than women’s fertility.

At least the Erlichs and Holdren have made it plain.  All the claims of environmentalism–that we emit too much carbon, use too many resources, or hurt too many animals–will ultimately be made on women’s bodies.  There will be the show of attacking traditionally male-oriented industrialization and production, but ultimately the blame will fall on women, for having babies either when the region is too poor (say, in the dark continent) or too rich (America.)  Women are the wretched culprits and should be punished accordingly by coercive sterilization or worse.  Was someone telling me that Western Christianity oppressed women and that green socialism would set me free?  Eve may have been kicked out of the garden, but at least she got to keep her kids.

Wait, what? Market Fundamentalism?

The Longview Institute has a fascinating project devoted to the capitulation of “Market Fundamentalism,” which they define as “the unquestioned faith in the capacity of markets to solve all social and economic problems.” They fail to name an economist or anyone else who would actually posit that markets can solve all social and economic problems. To begin with, who even believes that all problems can be solved? Do we have God on the line?

Dare I be so bold as to label my ideological opponents “government fundamentalists”, with their unquestioned faith in the capacity of governments to solve all social and economic problems? In addition, would someone from the Ford Foundation provide me with a hefty grant to peddle my flawed arguments? Where would the money for that grant come from, anyway? Oh, right: the market.

Strangely enough, this very day I’ve learned of a market-generated solution to all of our problems: the website for the Church of Euthanasia (google it; I just don’t feel comfortable linking to it from my site. It’s that bad.) I’ll be damned if these folks haven’t come up with the ultimate solution: the total cessation of reproduction, by any means necessary. I don’t think the feds came up with this one all on their own, though they’ve certainly deployed it around the world. Comfortable Westerners with enough idle time to propagate the ideals of nihilism and extinction via the internet: who said the market never did anything for ya?

See Joseph Schumpeter on the inevitability of socialism, and George Reisman on its related ills, such as population control. I’m going to P.O. myself if I think any more today of the bilge described above.