Nancy Pelosi, Population Controller
By Stephen W. Mosher
Most of us understand that children are the only future a nation has. The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, apparently does not.
In the name of fiscal austerity, she wants us to embark upon a population control program here at home to drive down the birth rate. How else can one understand her desire to add hundreds of millions of dollars of family planning spending to the stimulus package under discussion in the Congress?
You see, for Speaker Pelosi, it is all about costs. As she said on ABC’s This Week, Family planning services reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children’s health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs.
Sure it costs money to raise children, but the vast majority of these costs fall upon parents, not the government. Moreover, the baby born today will not be enrolling in school for five years, not to mention that the lion’s share of the cost of their education will be paid by the parents through taxes.
But the main point is this: Those of us who celebrate the natural family and the new life that it brings into the world do so in part for hard, practical reasons. Babies grow up into productive workers. They marry and buy homes and cars. They help defend this country from its enemies and they pay taxes, including social security taxes, that provide for the care of the elderly, among other things.
Of course, Speaker Pelosi’s anti-people attitudes are not uncommon during a recession. Wealthy elites-people who are already predisposed to blame the poor for their poverty-are emboldened by the current crisis to demand that something be done about the surplus population. As the unemployment rate goes up, they will seek to discourage people from having children. They will demand, in particular, that the poor be aborted, sterilized and contracepted in great numbers. Never mind that it was not the poor of the world who brought down the U.S. financial system, or caused the housing crisis, but the wealthy and powerful.
One might be tempted to conclude that we are beyond all that. That as the unemployment rate goes up, wealthy elites will not demand that the poor be aborted, sterilized and contracepted in even greater numbers.
But Speaker Pelosi’s proposal suggests that we haven’t come that far after all.
In one sense, Pelosi’s position is a reflection of the incoming U.S. administration. President-elect Obama’s positions on life and family questions are the more radical than any of his predecessors. He will undoubtedly support Pelosi’s move to drive down the birth rate by targeting the pregnancies of the poor. Never mind that he himself, as the mixed race offspring of a single mother, not to mention Pelosi’s Italian Catholic ancestors, would have been among those targeted by an earlier generation of population controllers for elimination.
Obama’s appointment of moderates to key financial and security positions has angered the Left wing of the Democratic Party, and will probably make his adoption of aggressive pro-abortion, pro-population control policies more likely as he seeks to placate his base. Pelosi will follow suit.
Welcome to population control, American-style.
Steven Mosher is the president of PRI