Life
and family experts are calling it “scandalous,” “shocking,”
“confusing,” and “perplexing” that the Vatican would invite Dr. Paul
Ehrlich, the undisputed father of the modern, pro-abortion population
control movement, to present a paper at an upcoming Vatican-run
conference.
“The fact that Paul Ehrlich is advertised as a speaker at
the Vatican’s ‘Biological Extinction’ conference is scandalous,” Maria
Madise, manager of Voice of the Family, told LifeSiteNews.
“Through its choice of speakers, the Pontifical Academies
running the event are giving an unmistakable message of sympathy for the
radical environmental agenda, despite it going hand in hand with
abortion, birth control, and a total lack of compassion for the real
poor in today’s world, the unborn children,” she said.
Ehrlich, author of the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb,
is scheduled to speak in Vatican City during the February 27-March 1
conference that will discuss “how to save the natural world.”
The Stanford biologist champions sex-selective abortion as
well as mass forced sterilization as legitimate methods to curb
population growth. It is impossible to calculate the possible millions
of deaths globally the man and his population control ideas might
indirectly be responsible for over the past five decades — ideas that
are forcefully employed in countries such as China, India, Kenya, and
many others.
Ehrlich called for “compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion” in his 1977 book Ecoscience, as a way to fight population growth.
He once said
that allowing women to have as many children as they desired was like
letting people “throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s
backyard as they want.”
The conference, jointly sponsored by the Pontifical
Academies of Sciences (PAS) and Social Sciences (PASS), will address
what Vatican organizers call an unsustainable “imbalance” between the
world’s population and what the earth is capable of producing.
Reggie Littlejohn, founder of Women's Rights Without
Frontiers, which fights gendercide and forced abortion in Asia, said she
was “perplexed” by the Vatican’s choice of speakers.
“I am perplexed that the Vatican would invite someone to
speak whose theories have been discredited and whose dire predictions
have utterly failed to materialize, who says that women should not be
allowed to have as many children as they want, and who equates babies
with garbage,” she told LifeSiteNews.
“Ehrlich is anti-woman, anti-child, and ultimately,
anti-humanity. It's his kind of thinking that gave rise to China's
brutal One Child Policy,” she added.
The population alarmist is no friend of the Catholic
Church, largely due to its teaching against contraception. Ehrlich has
even gone as far as calling the pope and the Church’s bishops “one of the truly evil, regressive forces on the planet, in my opinion, interested primarily in maintaining their power.”
In a 2013 article, Ehrlich denounced Catholicism as “dangerous” for opposing the use of contraception and told reporters in 2015
that Pope Francis’s exclusion of population control in the
environmental encyclical Laudato Si’ was “raving nonsense,” and that the
pope was “dead wrong.”
Stefano Gennarini, director of the Centre for Legal Studies
at the Centre for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam), said he was
“shocked” to discover Ehrlich would be giving a paper at a Vatican
conference.
“He is also responsible for gender selective abortion as a
tool of population control, as well as forced abortion and sterilization
programs all over the world. Renown historian Michael Connelly of
Columbia University testified as much before Congress in 2013,”
Gennarini wrote, adding that the alarmist’s catastrophic predictions
about overpopulation have “all proven to be bogus.”
Gennarini wondered why the Vatican would invite as a
speaker someone who has denounced the Catholic Church and denigrated the
pope as well as Catholic bishops.
“While the Pontifical Academy for Science can invite
whomsoever it wants to speak at its conferences, especially if the
financial sponsors of the conference ask for certain speakers, it might
want to consider the confusion it can create in the minds of believers
and unbelievers alike when it offers a platform to speakers who
undermine the Church’s storied opposition to population control,” he
said.
Gennarini said the invitation amounts to Ehrlich and his views receiving a “moral imprimatur of the Vatican.”
Dr. Thomas Williams, a theologian who teaches Philosophical
Ethics at the University of Saint Thomas in Rome, was also puzzled by
the Vatican’s choice of Ehrlich.
“Just why the Vatican would wish to showcase the purveyor
of debunked, apocalyptic theories is anybody’s guess, but it certainly
cannot bode well for the relationship between faith and science,” he
wrote in a piece that appeared on Breitbart.
Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, criticized the Vatican’s choice of Ehrlich as a suitable speaker.
“Ehrlich’s opinions on biological extinction rates are just
as exaggerated as his failed predictions of a human population
explosion. Why the Vatican should be giving a platform to this secular
prophet of doom is beyond me,” he told LifeSiteNews.
“There are plenty of credible Catholic scientists around
whose fact-based opinions should be highlighted by their Church. What's
next? Inviting Raúl Castro to speak on human rights?” he added.
Mosher said there is nothing in the Vatican-run conference
that might distinguish it from a similar event that would be run by a
secular atheist university.
“This is not because there is uniformity of opinion on such
matters as global warming and extinction rates, but because the
Pontifical Academies of Sciences and Social Sciences have apparently
adopted the prevailing progressive views on these matters, which verge
on the hysterical,” he said.
Mosher called the conference’s claim, as outlined in a
brochure, that up to 40 percent of all biodiversity on Earth will be
destroyed “by the end of this century regardless of any other factors”
merely “speculation,” adding that it could likely be “grant-driven
speculation.”
“If the climate indeed warms (and by how much?), then some
species will follow the shifting boundaries of their habitats northward,
but that does not mean extinction. Bear in mind also that new species
are constantly evolving,” he said.
He took issue with how the conference organizers spoke
about protecting biodiversity by putting into place “appropriate social
conditions” while finding “substitutions for the destabilizing
aggression that we and our ancestors have been practicing for tens of
thousands of years.”
Commented Mosher: “Phrases like ‘putting the appropriate
social conditions in place’ are worrisome, since they imply social
engineering on a vast scale, and even the end of human freedom.”
“As far as finding a ‘solution for the destabilizing
aggression’ that is endemic among humans, I wonder if the PAS and the
PASS might consider promoting Christianity, the greatest force for good
the planet has ever seen, instead of wasting its resources propagating
godless and bootless theories,” he said.
Fr. John Zuhlsdorf, writing at the popular Catholic blog
Fr. Z’s Blog, said the Vatican asking Ehrlich to speak at a conference
was like asking “Sweeney Todd to cater your luncheon, [or] Jenna Jameson
to preface your book on sacramental marriage, [or] Nero to head up the
fire department, [or] Anthony Weiner to manage your social media, [or]
Godfried Danneels to head your commission on abuse.”
Ehrlich’s paper will highlight “Population Numbers” as he discusses “Causes and Pathways of Biodiversity Losses.”