The Conservative Cat

My problem begins with the following paragraph.

The Republicans who get their marching orders from on very high want all women to have babies. This goes deeper than a fear there will not be enough of them to kiss come campaign time. They are driven by a conviction that the earth is underpopulated, an opinion which they share with corporate farm managers, out-sourcers and people looking for inexpensive help in the garden.

This could be an unjustified generalization from articles like this one, or it could be sarcasm. Von Hoffman could be making an oblique reference to the standard liberal belief that abstinence education (which many conservatives favor) leads to higher rates of pregnancy. But if he is being sarcastic, then the rest of the article qualifies as little more than mean-spirited fluff. He goes on to make the following statement.

The big league begatters of this world are poor. Ask the Chinese. Even though they have come up in the world of late and are proclaiming the Chinese Dream they are still babifying at a rate which can only be described as tasteless.

If you look at actual population growth figures, the first thing that jumps out at you is the fact that the highest growth rate is a pathetic 4.77%, That's for Afghanistan, which ranks 30th in terms of poverty rate. The poorest county-- Zambia-- is 50th in terms of population growth. It has roughly twice Afghanistan's poverty rate and half its population growth. The correspondence is a little better when you look at birth rates, but all this is really telling us is that poverty corresponds to a shorter life expectancy, and a shorter life expectancy makes birth control socially less useful. China's birth rate is actually lower than ours, by the way, which is not surprising given their draconian population control measures.

All this stuff about poverty and population control leads von Hoffman to the following conclusion.

Force is not needed to solve the problem in China or here, just a foreign trade-off. We teach the Chinese how to get rich so that they will stop having babies and they teach us how to get poor so that we start having them again.

Of course, the statement is based on a mind-boggling factual error-- that China's birth rate is higher than ours-- but it also has nothing to do with the original topic of the article-- the morning-after abortion pill known as Plan B. Von Hoffman is so enamoured of paragraph two's sarcastic in-joke against conservatives that it obscures any legitimate point he may be trying to make. It is similar to a schoolyard conflict where the parties have so much fun name-calling that they forget the reason for the original disagreement.

Thankfully, I'm available in my capacity as a superior life form to refresh his memory

My dear Nicholas: if life begins at conception, then killing a day-old blastocyst is just as wrong as killing a six-week-old fetus. Calling it emergency contraception, Plan B, or the morning after whoopsie fun pill doesn't change the fact that it's a form of abortion. Until you figure that out, all you're doing is blowing hot air, and that seems a singularly stupid thing to do if you're worried about global warming!

I don't understand why they can't figure this out.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat