One of the simultaneously heartening and dismaying aspects of the Obama era is how it demonstrates that bad ideas never, ever, ever, die. They can go into remission, to be sure, but the the bacillus lives on. Via Drudge, I just read this hideous call for a planetary one-child policy.

I don’t have the time to go through all of the arguments why Diane Francis’s supposedly brave truth-telling is disgusting and idiotic, but the good news is that I’ll have plenty of opportunities in the future!

But one point does cry out to be made. Imagine if someone wrote an op-ed saying that we need a planetary ban on abortion. Feminists would get their dresses over their heads in outrage about such a naked assault on “reproductive freedom.” But here is a woman in a very prestigious Canadian newspaper arguing, in effect, that every country in the world should force women everywhere to have an abortion if they already have a child. Put aside, for a moment, the pro-life objections to this. Even if you think the unborn are really just a bunch of cells, mere “uterine contents” with no more moral import than fingernail clippings, how on earth can anyone believe in “reproductive freedom” and not be absolutely horrified by the police-state evil of such proposals?