On his nightly news show, Fox News host Tucker Carlson had an interesting exchange with a top environmental lobbyist. Carlson asked Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, what the organization’s abortion advocacy had to do with protecting the environment. Brune’s response:
“We believe in empowering women’s rights,” Brune said. “We believe that women who have rights and who have the ability to have choice about their reproductive—make their own reproductive choices—will help to produce strong families and will help to protect the environment at the same time. Sierra Club is pro-choice.”
Carlson, sensing that Brune was evading his question, pushed for a specific answer.
“It helps to address the number of people that we have on this planet,” Brune replied. “We feel that one of the ways that we can get to a sustainable population is to empower women to make choices about their own families.”
There are a couple things to notice. First, it is a bit of a shock hearing an abortion-supporter so candidly speak of abortion as population control. Many are of the opinion that this kind of thinking died out with the eugenicists, but alas, here it is, indicating that the grisly ideas of the eugenicists are still influencing Americans.
Second, it doesn’t take a logician to see the horror in what Brune is saying. He’s not prescribing population control through contraception or other means of preventing human life from coming into existence, but the taking of existent human life. If ending human lives is a moral good because it’s good for the environment, mass human suicide or euthanasia would seem to be a moral good as well. That may seem like a stretch, but that is Brune’s ideas taken to their logical conclusion.
Unfortunately, this save-the-trees-but-kill-the-babies reasoning is not outside of mainstream progressivism. This is a worldview that puts an extremely low value on human life, especially in comparison with the Judeo-Christian worldview. As Dennis Prager (who will be the special guest at our 2017 Annual Dinner) puts it, “As ironic as it may sound, the God-based Judeo-Christian value system renders humans infinitely more valuable than any humanistic value system.
This is because without God, humans, born and unborn, are quite literally just clumps of cells, ultimately worth nothing more than the matter they are composed of. On the other hand, the Judeo-Christian worldview acknowledges the special place human life occupies within creation.
Both the Judeo-Christian worldview and the intersectional environmentalist worldview hold that the beauty of nature is not to be squandered. However, the Judeo-Christian worldview also posits the value of protecting human life as society’s greatest good. The earth and its resources were created to serve human life—not the other way around.
James Silberman is a guest contributor to the FPIW Blog. He is a pro-life activist from Gig Harbor, WA, and a student at Whitworth University.
