---

Former British Government Advisor Applauds World Population Collapse

Lashes out at Catholic Church for opposition to contraception, condoms

By Hilary White
 
SYDNEY, Australia, November 22, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A former advisor to the British government and past president of the Royal Society, Professor Lord Robert May, has called “encouraging” the fact human fertility has fallen below replacement level around the world.
 
Speaking to a meeting of the Lowy Institute in Sydney Australia on November 19, Lord May was quoted by The Australian saying that human populations must continue to fall for the sake of the environment. A priority, he said, was continued “education” of women to teach them methods to have fewer children through artificial contraception. May is a former chief scientific adviser to the British government and was made a companion of the Order of Australia in 1998.
 
May lashed out at the Catholic Church saying, “In my view, religious beliefs or other ideological prejudices prompt some major international organizations to oppose contraception, forbidding distribution of condoms or even advice about fertility control.”
 
Lord May will likely get his wish if the current situation continues. Global populations have been falling dramatically and few countries of the developed world have a fertility rate higher than bare replacement level. Recent statistics have shown that nearly 40 per cent of the world’s countries have fertility rates from 0 to 2.4 children born per woman, whereas the bare minimum replacement level is 2.1.
 
A United Nations report showed in August this year that 28 per cent of the world’s countries allow abortion on demand. 84 per cent of the wealthier countries allow abortion on eugenic grounds for “foetal impairment”; 78 per cent allow it on “economic or social” grounds and 84 per cent of wealthy countries allow abortion in cases of rape or incest.  
 
But not everyone is as sanguine about humanity’s impending self-induced extinction. Mark Steyn wrote last year that the falling fertility levels in Europe and the formerly Christian west will spell the end of western civilization. “We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world,” Steyn wrote.
 
“Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries....Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone.”
 
But Lord May will probably get his wish as more people, at least in the wealthy post-Christian west, hear the message that more people is a bad thing. The UK’s Daily Mail reports today that British women have been so completely indoctrinated by the environmentalists anti-human doctrines that they are foregoing motherhood, including by aborting their children, “for the planet.”
 
In a bizarre interview with the Daily Mail’s Natasha Courtenay-Smith, 35 year-old Toni Vernelli, an environmentalist and vegetarian, said she had an abortion and had herself sterilized rather than bring a child into the world.
 
Toni assured readers that her colleagues at the environmental charity where she works share her extreme, socially suicidal anti-motherhood views. She stated, “I didn't like having a termination, but it would have been immoral to give birth to a child that I felt strongly would only be a burden to the world.”
 
She said. “I've never felt a twinge of guilt about what I did, and have honestly never wondered what might have been.”
 
Courtenay-Smith wrote that Toni relished her decision “with an almost religious zeal”. “Having children is selfish. It's all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet.”

The exceptionally negative environmentalist creed was summed up by Toni, “Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population.”
 
Her husband, she said, agreed with her conviction. “We both passionately wanted to save the planet - not produce a new life which would only add to the problem.”

 Back to Top

---

MORE NEWS: LifeSiteNews.com Home Page  Last 10 Days   Archives   Special Reports

Copyright © LifeSiteNews.com. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License. You may republish this article or portions of it without request provided the content is not altered and it is clearly attributed to "LifeSiteNews.com". Any website publishing of complete or large portions of original LifeSiteNews articles MUST additionally include a live link to www.LifeSiteNews.com. The link is not required for excerpts. Republishing of articles on LifeSiteNews.com from other sources as noted is subject to the conditions of those sources.