Paul Ehrlich has died at the old age of 93. I am grateful he lived long enough to witness how many of his doomsday predictions were wrong. But he does not seem to have recognized his faults. As late as 2018, Ehrlich predicted (once again) that the collapse of civilization would happen in decades. How could a person who is consistently wrong about everything maintain his status as a public intellectual? I think the short answer is that Ehrlich told progressives what they wanted to hear and reaffirmed their world view. When a progressive uses the phrase “trust the science” or “evidence based,” especially about the climate, think of Paul Ehrlich.
There is much to say on Ehrlich’s death, but it may be most useful to connect his writings on population control with Roe v. Wade. The Population Bomb was published in 1968. The book opens, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” Ehrlich endorsed mandatory sterilization to remedy overpopulation. But he also favored abortion as a way to promote, shall we say, swinging tricks, without the consequences of reproducing.
Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. There is a sentence in Justice Blackmun’s majority opinion that is edited out of most ConLaw casebooks, but that Randy and I include:
We forthwith acknowledge our awareness of the sensitive and emotional nature of the abortion controversy, of the vigorous opposing views, even among physicians, and of the deep and seemingly absolute convictions that the subject inspires. One’s philosophy, one’s experiences, one’s exposure to the raw edges of human existence, one’s religious training, one’s attitudes toward life and family and their values, and the moral standards one establishes and seeks to observe, are all likely to influence and to color one’s thinking and conclusions about abortion.
In addition, population growth, pollution, poverty, and racial overtones tend to complicate and not to simplify the problem.
What do “population growth, pollution, [and] poverty” have to do with abortion? Well, as more children are born, there will be more pollution, less food, more poverty, more death, and the end of the world as we know it. Or so Ehrlich would explain.
Justice Blackmun was almost certainly alluding to Ehrlich’s work, which was in the ether. An amicus brief submitted by National Organization for Women, among other groups, expressly cited Ehrlich‘s book:
A state cannot seriously contend today that restrictions on abortion are justified by an overriding state interest in increasing population. See Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 1968. On the contrary, it is accepted government policy to limit family size and to encourage family planning.
Jane ROE, John Doe, and Mary Doe, Appellants, James Hubert HALLFORD, M.D., Appellant-Intervenor, v. Henry WADE, Appellee. Mary DOE, et al., etc., Appellants,, 1972 WL 126045, at *27
Justice Ginsburg spoke to those concerns in a 2009 interview:
Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong.
Justice Ginsburg was quite right about how Ehrlich and others viewed abortion. I scanned through the Population Bomb. Here are some of the things Ehrlich wrote about abortion.
Page 138: Two other functions of the DPE would be to aid Congress in developing legislation relating to population and environment, and to inform the public of the needs for such legislation. Some of these needs are already apparent. We need a federal law guaranteeing the right of any woman to have an abortion if it is approved by a physician. We need federal legislation guaranteeing the right to voluntary sterilization for both sexes and protecting physicians who perform such operations from legal harassment. We need a federal law requiring sex education in schools — sex education that includes discussion of the need for regulating the birth rate and of the techniques of birth control.
Page 141: If we take the proper steps in education, legislation, and research, we should be able in a generation to have a population thoroughly enjoying its sexual activity, while raising smaller numbers of physically and mentally healthier children. The population should be relatively free of the horrors created today by divorce, illegal abortion, venereal disease, and the psychological pressures of a sexually repressive and repressed society.
Page 148: Biologists must point out that contraception is for many reasons more desirable than abortion. But they must also point out that in many cases abortion is much more desirable than childbirth. Above all, biologists must take the side of the hungry billions of living human beings today and tomorrow, not the side of potential human beings. Remember, unless numbers are limited, if those potential human beings are born, they will at best lead miserable lives and die young. We cannot permit the destruction of humanity to be abetted by a doctrine conceived in total ignorance of the biological facts of life.
In Ecoscience, published in 1977, Ehrlich invoked Roe to argue that the federal government could impose “compulsory abortion” to reduce the population:
Page 837: To date, there has been no serious attempt in Western countries to use laws to control excessive population growth, although there exists ample authority under which population growth could be regulated. For example, under the United States Constitution, effective population-control programs could be enacted under the clauses that empower Congress to appropriate funds to provide for the general welfare and to regulate commerce, or under the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Such laws constitutionally could be very broad. Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.
Never forget that Roe v. Wade favorably cited Buck v. Bell, alongside Jacobson v. Massachusetts:
The privacy right involved, therefore, cannot be said to be absolute. In fact, it is not clear to us that the claim asserted by some amici that one has an unlimited right to do with one’s body as one pleases bears a close relationship to the right of privacy previously articulated in the Court’s decisions. The Court has refused to recognize an unlimited right of this kind in the past. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11 (1905) (vaccination); Buck v. Bell, 274 U. S. 200 (1927) (sterilization).
Perhaps Justice Blackmun would have also supported the constitutionality of mandatory abortion if the state had a sufficiently compelling interest.
Roe v. Wade was an illegitimate decision on every conceivable ground. At some level, the Justices were motivated by the worst quack science in modern history, which led to oppressive family policies around the world. Indeed, at least part of the underpopulation problem we are facing can be traced directly to Ehrlich, Roe, and the five decade culture it spawned. Dobbs was right, just, and inevitable.
