Progressive Misanthropy

Yet Another Reason to Support Abortion Rights

During the pandemic — remember? — while people were laying low, animals began stirring, expanding, showing up in old haunts, and having an easier time of it. Among the pleasures that I experienced during Covid-19 — the solitude, the outdoor socializing while being perpetually at home — I particularly enjoyed learning about how creatures of all kinds were thriving, relative to their usual suffering under the human assault. Wild grazers were reclaiming their paved-over grazing grounds by nibbling grass along the edges of empty urban parking lots. Whales were able to communicate with each other, mother-to-child and pod-to-pod, without being drowned out by ship engines. Animals were ambling about without being in a constant state of fear.

I recalled all this while reading an article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs that details how nearly every region of the Earth, apart from sub-Saharan Africa, is steadily losing human population because of low birthrates. Within one generation, writes Nicholas Eberstadt, “over 130 countries across the planet will be part of the growing net-mortality zone, an area encompassing about five-eighths of the world’s projected population.” In India, China, Japan, Latin America, and throughout Europe, birthrates have already dropped well below the replacement rate. These societies are being confronted by the tough economic and social challenges of having fewer and fewer working-age people and more and more old folks.

Why is this happening? Mostly because women are living more independent, educated, prosperous, and often unmarried lives than ever in history — and when women live that way, they have fewer children. Glory be! (Vote Kamala.) Abortion, contraception, and being unmarried are the new building materials for Noah’s Ark.

The United States is one of the few developed countries that is holding its own in population — thanks to immigration, of course. Bingo! (Vote Kamala.)

The fact that I could rejoice while absorbing Eberstadt’s article cemented my self-perception as a misanthrope — a progressive misanthrope. I look at human beings’ heedless despoilation of our Earth, and their horrible mass behavior towards one another (under every conceivable ideological umbrella), and I sigh in hopeless wonder. But how can we safely kill off vast numbers of us?

I can’t support war, because war is a HUGE environmental destroyer. And pandemics can’t match up to our science any more. I don’t support starvation, because those swollen-belly baby pictures are just too, too grim — besides which, solutions to starvation, mostly technological, are potential cousins to climate-change solutions, so let’s let science do its thing . . .

Cute a fascist as he is, I doubt that billions of human beings are going to follow Elon Musk to Mars. So what’s left?

Women’s liberation, that’s what! — women controlling their own bodies. (Vote Kamala.) It’s already doing wonders for the global birth rate, which is in inversely proportional to the well-being of animals, plants, and every species on Earth.