Population – Page 9 – Population Matters-USA

*Ann Telnaes Editorial Cartoon* used with permission of Ann Telnaes and the Cartoonist Group. All rights reserved.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” First Amendment to the United States Constitution

The United States of America is becoming a theocracy. The Dobbs decision has bypassed the Congress by having the Supreme Court establishing a de facto religion which forces unwilling women to become mothers.

So far this religion has evidenced itself with the Court’s failure to uphold the Roe v. Wade decision. The Court’s decision in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization gave power to individual states to regulate the legal status of abortion. Remember, the majority of Americans are prochoice, according to several recent polls. There are fears that more is to come, perhaps even resuscitating the Comstock laws which forbad use of contraception.

Abortion has not always been frowned upon. Back when the Constitution was written, women’s healthcare was in the hands of women, including herbal abortifacients, and it is likely that men had no idea what was going on. It is silly to think that the Constitution would include anything about women’s healthcare, let alone abortion, yet part of the argument in the Dobbs decision is that there is no mention of abortion in the Constitution. Remember, the people at the Constitutional Convention were all white males! Abortion was acceptable in colonial America and didn’t become illegal until the mid-1800s.

This new religion was sired by the coupling of rightwing politics and conservative religions, including Roman Catholicism and the evangelicals who have overtaken the South. The primary tenets of the new religion pretend to be in favor of narrowly defined “life”, claiming that human life begins when human sperm and egg meet. It appears that most followers of this new religion don’t care much what happens to the “life” except when it is in the woman’s reproductive tract—with little attention to the person who supports that uterus. After birth, they tend to not support healthcare, social services or education—especially sex ed. Teen pregnancy rates are highest where the evangelicals are strongest.

In reality, the “prolife” people may be courting death. They are encouraging continued human overpopulation with consequent destruction of Creation. Humans are causing the massive extinction of species, many of which are essential to our own existence. Our clever synthesis and use of chemicals is toxifying the air and water with poisons, some of which last forever. And don’t forget the climate chaos that even Trump cannot ignore.

The high priest of this new religion is Samuel Alito, the principal author of the Dobbs decision. His bishops are John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett; all supported the Dobbs decision. These 6 justices were all appointed by Republican presidents; the three dissenting justices were appointed by Democratic presidents. It is unlikely that this happened by chance. The unescapable conclusion is that this judgement was politically based.

What can be done about this apparent incursion of a state religion into the USA? A group of religious leaders have sued the State of Florida, which has one of the most prohibitive abortion laws in the country. These leaders claim that that their ability to live and practice their religious faith is being violated by the state’s new abortion law. One of them, Reverend Laurie Hafner of the United Church of Christ, stated “I am pro-choice not in spite of my faith, but because of my faith.”

Similarly, a patient at Planned Parenthood asked me, after her abortion, “Are you a Christian?”

“Yes”, I responded. “I am a Quaker. I feel obliged to perform abortions because it is one way I can help people and also help this overpopulated world.”

Rather than preserving the sanctity of human life, as believers in this new religion profess, it worships the contents of a pregnant woman’s uterus and damns the imagined evil of abortion. This religion ignores the fact that one in five human pregnancies ends in a spontaneous abortion, also called “miscarriage”. If human fetuses are so holy, why does God allow miscarriages to happen?

I am worried that minority religious beliefs are being imposed on the majority by a powerful minority. We must push back in the upcoming elections and send a signal to the Supremes that we won’t tolerate a state religion.

The map above, from Wikipedia, shows the extent of the Russian invasion as of 3/15/22

“We believe that widespread, effective and voluntary use of medically sound and individually acceptable birth control is an essential factor in any humane design to raise world living standards and achieve international peace.”

I read these words in Scientific American in 1960. It was close enough to World War II that I knew about the quest for the Germans for “lebensraum”, so it made intuitive sense.

Hitler was envious of the people who left Europe and settled the Americas. Immigrants were treated to unspoiled forests and fertile land, unlike what they had left behind in Europe. Those settlers used murder, disease and starvation to rid the land of the indigenous people who were already there. We descendants benefitted hugely from the Americas’ resources.

As part of the “Masterplan for the East”, Hitler and the Nazis invaded what is now Poland, Ukraine and other countries. This genocidal plot was to get rid the of the inhabitants of the rich land to the east and replace them with Germans. Fortunately, however, the Nazis were fighting on other fronts and the masterplan was only partially accomplished. Starvation, outright murder and disease were the Nazi tools of extermination.

The Russians took over after WW II, using similar techniques of annihilation. Stalin was just as cruel as the Nazis, and perhaps even more successful in killing. Although millions died, it was more than just luck that some survived. Survivors used whatever means they could to eke out a living. In 2008 my wife and I visited western Ukraine and met a distant family member who had been an OB-GYN in a town similar in size to Durango. (I have changed the family’s names.) Dimitri Kovalenko’s mother and grandmother planted plum trees during Stalin’s reign of terror, and sold prunes to pay Dimitri’s medical school tuition. After graduation, Dimitri was able to build two homes, one for his mother and the other where he raised his family.

When we visited, Dimitri’s wife, Iryna, was still working parttime as a pediatrician. Their two daughters, Kira and Natasha, were both in the same town. Kira, also a physician, lived in the house that Dimitri had built for his mother, a short walk away. Natasha had recently moved from Kherson, a large city to the south, to be with her elderly parents.

Kira’s husband, also a gynecologist, gave me a tour of the local hospital. The hospital was similar in many ways to what I was used to, but with some major differences. I remember a patient’s room as being drab, with no TV, and the equipment was similar to what we had in the USA 30 years earlier.

I have stayed in touch with this family. Dimitri’s health continued to deteriorate; he died 3 years ago. Iryna retired to help take care of him—she is now in her 80s. When the Russian invasion started, Kira and Natasha decided to leave Ukraine any way they could. Sasha wanted to stay in her home, understanding well the horrors she that might face. Fortunately, she has neighbors who will help take care of her.

The two younger women left Ukraine with only a small bag each, not knowing what the future held for them. They made their way to Moldova, then to Rumania and are now in Germany. They are safe there, living in the home of some kind strangers. Fortunately, they have had our help and the help of a friend who speaks German. I imagine that most of the Ukrainian refugees have no one who can translate for them, nor much money, nor friends in the USA to assist them.

US media talk about the millions of refugees from Ukraine. For me it is much more personal, knowing Dimitri’s family.

Many wars are over resources. Putin may want to take over the Ukraine’s rich agriculture and natural resources, including uranium, or it is possible that he is trying to reconstitute the Russian empire. What is clear is that Putin is a megalomaniac, and cannot be trusted. I don’t know if overpopulation is playing a part in the invasion of Ukraine, but in general, more people lead to more conflict.