Confessions of a Mid-Life Birth Striker
A response to CBC's Darryl Whetter
Folks, if you've ever wondered what a head-on collision between acute narcissism and climate fixation might look like, look no further than this train wreck of an op-ed. Keep in mind this article isn’t satire. It’s the article satire lies awake at night dreaming of one day becoming. In a nutshell, it’s the first-person account of a man who desperately wants to convince us that not having children is the best way “to love the world and the life already on it.” He will attempt this feat by embarking on a philosophico-activist reimagining of family, love, marriage, and the world in general. He will then proceed to break his nose on the pavement of reality because none of those things are actually subject to private interpretation.
Initially I was just going to leave this burnt-hair smelling mess to bleed out on its own. But as I began to recognize the simpering “just telling my truth” rhetoric for what it was, a conviction grew that it was not only my responsibility, but my civic duty, to shake the living daylights out of it like a small, wet animal.
For animal, not human, is exactly what this article is.
First of all, there’s not a shred of evidence, anywhere, that we are in the midst of a “climate emergency.” None. All we have are a diaspora of fawned-over climate executives, of the sort who can spend four years carbon-binging their way around Asia on a “work honeymoon” and then come home to clutch their pearls at overpopulation myths. The reason you can’t get away from them is because the success of the Climate Industry™ depends on everyone buying into the syllogistic connection between carbon emissions and natural disasters. Doesn’t matter if their “proof” amounts to a time-worn bag of tricks, out of which rolls a collection of appeal-to-fear fallacies, suspect climate models, and a half-naked David Suzuki who was up all night shooting planet-positive daiquiris. They’ll just keep beeping like a seatbelt warning until everyone is eventually annoyed into compliance.
This same class now wants us to believe that “love without children” is a noble sacrifice — achievable only by those who are selfless enough to want sex, but not the commitment and responsibilities that go with it. Indeed, as I read this article, I couldn’t help but wonder how well-loved and respected Whetter’s “successive romantic partners” must have felt as he finger-snipped his way through each of their lives.
But let’s address Whetter’s thesis: “How can we bring a child into a world we know doesn't want it, will have trouble feeding it, and will lose more plant and animal life because we added yet another needy human?”
Here we have two claims that immediately fall apart like sustainably-sourced seaweed paper once examined.
“How can we bring a child into a world we know doesn't want it?”
I’m deeply curious to know how exactly Whetter arrived at such a conclusion. Did the world tell him in a private video call? Did it leave a note on the windshield of his Nissan Leaf? Did it speak to him in a vision as he languished in the throes of Japanese encephalitis? Or is he making a bogus assumption based on a bogus worldview.
When God made Adam, His command was, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” Not, “‘K, two of you should be good. You kids go enjoy yourselves.” The only thing that “wasn’t good” in the otherwise perfect paradise wasn’t that there was too many people, it was that there wasn’t enough. God created the world to be man’s vassal — the prime arena of his dominion — not unwilling host to a race of parasites. True, we’re currently bombing the mission, but that doesn’t change the world’s essential place in the cosmic hierarchy.
So the question isn’t, “Does the world want us?” but, “What should we be doing in the world?” And God’s answer is — be fruitful and multiply. Fill it up. Make it loud and laughing. The joyful, exuberant world our Creator calls us to pursue is exactly the opposite of the silent planet Whetter Scissorhands and Co. would see ushered in.
Children are the intended product of sex, as sex is the intended product of marriage. “Co-creating” isn’t an incidental hobby that some couples opt to participate in. It’s the intended goal. Yes, there are some couples who cannot, to their sorrow, have children. I’m not talking about these. I’m talking about couples who, because of some supposed higher calling from Gaia, refuse to actually do what God has commanded. And call a curse what God has declared a blessing.
When we attempt to separate what God has joined together, we don’t get love. We get rank dysfunction. So the question Whetter should have been asking all along is, “How can we not bring children into a world when we know the world needs more children.”
“How can we bring a child into a world we know . . . will have trouble feeding it and will lose more plant and animal life because we added yet another needy human?”
Let’s get one thing straight.
If the West is going to burn, it’s not going to be because of a climate disaster. It’s going to be because of a population disaster. Canada’s birth rate now sits at a record low of 1.40 children per woman. The only reason we’re even able to partly fill the job vacancies we have now is because we’ve blown the roof off immigration caps, which is ushering in a whole other set of problems. Nations need new people if they’re going to keep growing. Nations need new people if they’re going to be prosperous.1
It’s why everyone could afford to own their own home in the 1950s, when the birth rate hovered around 5 births per woman, and why you now need to take out a second mortgage to buy a small bag of apples.
The environmentalists are faced with a massive problem. Their problem is how to stay relevant when their entire platform revolves around mankind’s self-destruction. They atttempt to solve this problem by posturing as harbingers — posing a problem, but also a solution. But then, their solutions also suck, because they too revolve around mankind’s self-destruction (fuel taxes, zoning restrictions, birth caps, prison cities, etc.). So far, the plan is to shock people to the point where they’ll be scared enough to hand over the steering wheel for a while.
Right up until they drive us all off the first cliff they come to.
A Better Way
The cherry on the cake is Whetter’s final paragraph, where he attempts to equate his “climate grief” with those who’ve actually lost children. Or who can’t have children. I have literally never read a more calloused, idiotic statement than the following: “My climate grief is sewn inside my body, more intimate and more indelible than a Greenpeace tattoo.” He’s talking about his vasectomy here. In other words, he’s comparing his voluntary “sacrifice” of procreation to the anguish and heartache of a stillbirth or a childless home. This false equivalence, no doubt shared by many in Whetter’s camp, is perhaps the most telling symptom of a moral compass in freefall.
Dudes like this don’t love the world, they don’t love women, and they certainly don’t love the climate. They love themselves.
Christians need to resist the environmental death cult that has found an ideal breeding ground in Canada. We need to reject the lies and alarmism of the environmental gatekeepers. But more importantly, we need to positively resist by holding out a better way.
“Children are a heritage from the Lord,
offspring a reward from him.
Like arrows in the hands of a warrior
are children born in one’s youth.
Blessed is the man
whose quiver is full of them.
They will not be put to shame
when they contend with their opponents in court.”
- Psalm 127:3–5
“This phenomenon is the focus of a new book by Cato senior fellow Marian Tupy, editor of HumanProgress.org, and his coauthor, Gale L. Pooley of Brigham Young University–Hawaii, titled Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet . . . To their surprise, the authors also found that resource abundance not only increased with population growth, it actually increased faster than the population―a relationship that they call superabundance. On average, every additional human being created more value than he or she consumed. This relationship between population growth and abundance is deeply counterintuitive, yet it is true and amply demonstrated by the data.” Read the entire article here. Accessed December 6, 2023.
Thank you for writing a response to such an article. As a mother of six and grandmother of seven (so far) I am saddened that so many have been deceived in this way. A point which the population controllers often miss is that those of us raising large families are generally already used to making do, sharing resources and tend to be modest in our consumption of material goods. A family of 8 in India growing their own food and raising goats for example would have a much smaller "carbon footprint" (to use a term used by these folks) than a well off single North American owning all the latest gadgets and flying around to exotic places for margarita sipping vacations. Have a good day.