Population – Population Matters-USA

Image courtesy of Plan C

Michael McLachlan walked up the steps of the US Supreme Court Building alone, with his mind set for the trial, while his family watched from the oval plaza outside. McLachlan was the Colorado Solicitor General in 2000, and was intent on keeping abortion access safe.

Colorado’s “safe access zone (SAZ)” law was at stake. It says that no one could approach closer than 8 feet of a patient without the patient’s permission. This applies when the patient is inside a 100 foot zone, based on the door of a clinic. This law, enacted in 1993, did not limit speech—it only limited unwarranted approach. The law was contested as interfering with the First Amendment right to free speech but was supported by the Colorado courts.

When I asked Barbara McLachlan, Michael’s widow, about the actual trial with the Supremes, she told me about one question asked by Judge Scalia:

“Why is the limit 8 feet?”

McLachlan was always sharp and ready for anything, so replied “Because that is the maximum distance a person can spit.” And Scalia laughed!

Colorado has been very supportive of access to abortion care. It was one of the first states to legalize abortion (1967), before access became legal nation-wide (1973). Although there have been several attempts to decrease this access, we recently provided protection to this right by passing an amendment to the Colorado constitution. It prohibits state and local governments from denying, impeding, or discriminating against that right to abortion. It also repeals the prohibition against using public funds for abortion services.

Unfortunately, many other states have limited access to abortion or completely prohibited this vital part of medical care. Many women are coming to Colorado for abortions. In addition, women are also receiving abortion pills by mail from Colorado-based telemedicine.

Some of the states that forbid abortion care try to keep their women from having abortions. Some laws try to forbid a pregnant woman to leave her state to go to a more liberal state. Nevertheless, abortion providers in Colorado and New Mexico see a lot of patients from Oklahoma and Texas.

Pills have caused a revolution in abortion care. Pills can be mailed to a pregnant person living in a restrictive state; organizations have been started for just that purpose. Plan C (www.plancpills.org) is one of the organizations started to inform women about the availability of abortion care by telemedicine. When contacted by someone who is pregnant and who desires an abortion, Plan C will ask them to fill out a form about their medical history, then (if they qualify) refer them to a site where they can purchase pills for an abortion. This system can be used by anyone in any state in the union, but people in restrictive states are most likely to use it.

The people who actually supply the medication are at risk of retaliation by authorities in restrictive states. Perhaps the worst example is Texas. It has an malevolent law the purpose of which is to intimidate non-Texans who provide medication abortion pills to Texan women. The law would levy a fine of at least $100,000 to someone who prescribes or mails abortion pills to a woman in Texas. This law encourages Texans to spy on each other and relies on fear. The differences of abortion laws in different states has incited interjurisdictional abortion wars.

Coloradans who prescribe abortion pills to people in restrictive states risk being indicted for breaking the law in the other state. Last spring the Colorado legislature voted for a law to offer them protection. The name of the prescriber must be left off the medication. In addition, The new Colorado law shields abortion patients and providers from actions initiated by other states.

©Richard Grossman MD, 2026

“Alfie & Me” is a many-layered joy to read! Its main story is as delicious as they come. An orphaned baby screech owl is found and fostered by a human family who have the knowledge to sustain her. Even though there is much love in this story, there are also times of stress and doubt. Will Alfie (the owl) grow up to act like a wild animal? If she does, will she fly away and leave her human family? Will she survive living in the wild? Worse, will she not take to the wild life and have to remain a pet for the rest of her life?

The story of Alfie is the honey in this literary pastry. There are two other parts to this baklava book, however—chopped nuts, and thin, crisp layers of filo. The nuts are the real meat of the story. Compared to the sweet story of Alfie, these tidbits of philosophy, history and religion are more serious reading. The “Me” of this book, Carl Safina, trained as an ecologist, with work on sea birds. I am amazed that a biologist should have such deep knowledge of Eastern religions, Greek philosophy and other aspects of the origins of our modern society. He regrets the turns of events that have allowed modern humanity to have so little respect for the planet upon which we depend. He is especially troubled by Plato, who set the stage for the destruction of our planet which we are now experiencing.

Safina writes about the three forces that are destroying our world. They are: loss of biological diversity; human overpopulation; poisoning of our air and water—and of ourselves. It was refreshing for me to read someone who is so knowledgeable and who shares my concerns so strongly and eloquently. You will have to read the book to fill in the details of how Plato set us up for failure. You will also learn what these three horsemen of the apocalypse are doing to destroy us and the rest of the natural world.

Filo dough is the final component of this delicious book. It forms the structure of the baklava that holds it together and gives it shape. At first it was a bit disconcerting to me to go instantly from owl to Plato, but then I got used to it. After all, the book’s subtitle is “What Owls Know, What Humans Believe”.

The book documents a relatively short period of time, about a year during the early COVID pandemic. It also takes place in a small geographic area in New York state—mostly in Carl and Patricia Safina’s yard, plus a little surrounding territory with woods and neighbors’ yards. There is also the stop sign on the street in front of the Safina home, and several other landmarks that I’ve gotten to know well. It is a territory sized to a small species of owl, but also a friendly space that we get to know from Safina’s fine descriptions. This is the compact but complex space describing “what owls know”.

The scope of the philosophizing, however, is much broader than the owl territory. It covers millennia, its physical dimensions vary from subatomic particles to the universe, and it heads from the concrete to the spiritual. This vast breadth of subjects explains “what humans believe” in the subtitle. A recurring theme of the book is that our species has had the liberty to fabricate lots of ideas that explain the mysteries of our human experience, while animals cannot afford to indulge in this sort of nonsense.

“Alfie & Me—What Owls Know, What Humans Believe” puts Carl Safina in the same league with top nature writers/philosophers such as Rachel Carson, Ed Abbey and Robin Wall Kimmerer.