China has ended its tyrannical one-child policy. Not because it was a profound violation of human rights. The Chinese Communist Party could give a fig about human rights.

No, the policy was ended because it hurt China.

But don’t tell that to Bowdoin philosophy professor (of course!) Sarah Conly. She wants a world-wide one-child policy. In fact, she claims in the Boston Globe that no one has a “right” to have more than one child:

Even having two children — the replacement value for the population — as the new Chinese policy allows is likely to be too many children. Due to what specialists call “demographic momentum,” the population will continue to grow for quite some time even if we all cut back now to two children.
By the time the birthrate stabilizes, the global population will be at an unsustainable level. So, we don’t have a right to have so many children. We can live happy, fulfilled lives with just one child, and one child per couple will keep the human race going until we get to that point when we do reach a sustainable population and can go back to allowing ourselves to reproduce at replacement value — two children per two parents..

But here’s the thing, China’s policy led to forced abortion, infanticide, and sex selection eugenics. Conly mildly acknowledges that these actions are “unacceptable” human rights abuses. Big of her.

And in the USA, Europe, and Japan, couples are already having far fewer children, in a few countries, below replacement numbers. Sure there are large families in the West. But they are the exception. Indeed, one reason some say that massive waves of immigration are required in Europe is to bring young workers in to replace and support aging populations.

In contrast, large families are common in the developing world. People in those places want children, for love, for culture, for tradition. And they believe they need many children to help support the family and care for their parents in places where there are few social services.

Typically of liberal Malthusians, after painting a dire picture of apocalyptic environmental collapse, Conly thinks that we can achieve her desired end through engaging distinctly mild policies:

We may well be able to reduce the fertility rate without using sanctions at all, and that would, of course, be best…
First, we can educate people about the need to have fewer children…
Second, we can make it easy to control how many children we have. We could make contraception free and readily available.
Or, we can go farther, and reward those who have fewer children, say with tax breaks…
Lastly, if we ever did discover that we needed sanctions to get people to refrain from having an unsustainable number of children, they wouldn’t be physical in nature. Fines may be the best way to go, and again, there is reason to think suitable fines, fixed on a sliding scale relative to income,

Utter nonsense. Even the barbarous abuses in China (far worse than “unacceptable”) did not reduce the number of people in that country. Just slowed the rate of population growth.

To really reduce the world’s population would require unremitting tyranny and population cleansings.

And here’s the thing: I fear that liberal want-to-be population controllers would willingly engage the most brutal forms of coercion, as we saw last century in the eugenics movement, which was a progressive cause. After all, there’s a planet to save!

They just won’t say it.