This past weekend was a busy one for the League staff. Joe Scheidler gave a talk in Mauston, Wisconsin, I gave a talk to a group of teens in Garden Plain, Kansas, and Eric Scheidler gave a talk at Sacred Heart Parish in Lombard, Illinois.
Generations for Life Conference, 10/21
Sacred Heart in Lombard is also the site of this Saturday’s Generations for Life Third Annual Pro-Life Youth Conference. Please encourage your high school-aged sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, nieces and nephews, to attend. Teachers, youth ministers, DREs, and clergy are also invited to attend.
This year’s conference promises to be the best one yet. The theme of this year’s conference is, “What Are You Thinking?!” The highlight will be a talk given by Vicki Thorn, founder of the post-abortion outreach Project Rachel. Vicki’s talk is titled, “What Are Teens Thinking?” and will explore the psychology behind abortion, and why young women experiencing unplanned pregnancies often feel pressured to have abortions.
For more information on the conference is available at the Generations for Life website.
Pondering Population
Any day now, the U. S. population will cross the 300 million mark. We at the League view this as self-evidently good news. Georgie Anne Geyer, in a recent article that appeared in the Chicago Tribune titled, “A World of Hurt Will Follow Population Explosion”, believes it’s bad news. She’s wrong.
Father Tom Euteneuer’s analysis of this news, however, hits the nail on the head. Dismissing the all too common handwringing about so-called overpopulation, Father Euteneuer recently asked:
First, why is it that “growth” is only a problem when it concerns humans? When a new calf is born to a farmer he knows he’s a richer man; but when a new baby is born to him we call him irresponsible.
Father also notes:
Second, there is a deep-seated hypocrisy in the attitudes of westerners toward world population growth: that is, we only become alarmed at the growth of the populations of poor people, not rich ones. Ask the average American what areas of the world are overpopulated and she will inevitably tell you Africa and Asia. She may add Latin America due to the number of people who are undoubtedly so populous that they have to sneak across our borders to feed themselves. She will be wrong on all counts but facts are not relevant to overpopulation propaganda. Ask her what country has the third largest population in the world and she will likely not know that it is her own. We’ve been programmed to intuitively connect population growth with people of color and then to think that the best way to eliminate their poverty is to eliminate them.
Third, there is a profound ignorance about the nature of modern population growth. Since the end of the Second World War the world’s population more than doubled, sending shock waves of panic throughout the well-developed countries blaming the growth exclusively on the number of babies that all those poor people were having. The over-population histrionics ignored the reality that advances in health care and modern technology have contributed the lion’s share of that growth by simply keeping people alive longer and providing them with a better standard of living.
As usual, Father Euteneuer is right.
