The Population Dud

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, March 20th. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s Culture Friday.

Author and speaker Katie McCoy joins us today—and we can add a new line to the bio now: author, speaker, and co-host with Jonathan Morrow of Reality Check, an exciting pilot feature of WORLD Watch—our video news program for students.

Katie, good morning.

KATIE MCCOY: Good morning, Nick and Myrna. How about that? That was so fun to do.

EICHER: And congratulations, by the way.

The show looks really good.

Just this week, on Wednesday, Reality Check made its debut. We’ve got a 10-episode pilot season … so it’ll go each week for those 10 episodes. It’s a short—not even five minute—feature Wednesdays on WORLD Watch. The idea is it pauses a cultural argument, and poses a simple question: what are the worldview ideas driving it—with the aim of helping students see what assumptions are really shaping the debate.

This has been a long time coming, but it’s something else to finally see it on the screen. So what was it like for you seeing the finished product?

MCCOY: It was so fun to go from speaking into a teleprompter to seeing the full produced version. The creativity of the whole WORLD Watch team is phenomenal. They took all these concepts and packaged them in a way that is engaging and informative.

Please make sure your listeners know we want to hear from them—what they think about it and what we can do to improve. This is a work in progress, but we’re really excited about it.

EICHER: Well, we’re excited about it too.

And I’ll say to the listener … if you’re not a WORLD Watch subscriber yet, you can try it free for 30 days at worldwatch-dot-news. That won’t get you all 10 weeks of Reality Check … but I think after a month, WORLD Watch will be indispensable for any home with young students in it. Check it out, worldwatch-dot-news. Free preview on the house if you’ve never tried it before.

BROWN: Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. And Katie, you know, I’ve been on that side of the camera. It ain’t easy. You made it look easy.

MCCOY: Oh, thank you.

BROWN: Yes, well, let’s talk. Let’s begin with Paul Ehrlich. He’s the best selling author. Died at 93 a week ago, but lived long enough to see populations around the world decline thanks to sowing seeds of unfounded concern about population overwhelm. So how do you think, Katie, he will be remembered or regarded in history? What do you think?

MCCOY: There’s a few things happening at play. Dr. Mohler had a great piece on WORLD Opinions about this, about how he was effectively a false prophet. He said that this was going to be mass starvation back in the ’80s and ’90s and this gloom and doom.

But really what he did was give this ecological philosophical excuse to a lot of issues that we’re seeing be front and center today. For instance, when you look at some very pro-abortion progressive arguments, you’re going to see a connection between climate change, food insecurity, and abortion.

Some of these groups say things like “reproductive justice is climate justice,” that you have to have abortion in order to have a healthy and balanced planet.

The logic goes we need to eliminate unwanted births, unwanted pregnancies, and certainly “forced pregnancies.”

This isn’t just fringe corners of the internet either. This was on a website for the School of the Environment at Yale University, and they were talking about how we need to reduce the population so that we can retain our human rights and liberties. The way to do that is to prevent unwanted births.

There’s another element to this too—the psychological element. You may remember former Vice President Kamala Harris talking about how young Americans are suffering from climate anxiety.

Gen Z is reluctant to have children because they don’t even know if they’re going to have a planet in ten years. Why would they want to bring children into the world?

One study found that over one-third of Gen Z was less likely to have children because of climate change.

So these issues are trickling down to major sociological developments, and here we are. We’ve been talking for about twenty years now how in the West there is what we call demographic winter.

One more thing about this. You’ll find another correlation between some of the things that we’ve talked about on this show related to critical theory and majority culture.

Some of these climate activists and population-control advocates make the argument that someone who is born into a third-world country produces exponentially less carbon emission than someone born in a wealthy country—by wealthy, read the West.

So someone who is born in America or Europe, by the time you have a baby, well, that baby is producing all kinds of greenhouse gas. But third-world countries—totally different story.

And so really fascinating to see this intersection—this convergence—of different cultural and political values that are brought to the surface by this man’s theories.

EICHER: Let me turn to something we saw last week involving Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri.

He’s introduced a bill called the Safeguarding Women from Chemical Abortion Act. The bill would bypass the federal Food and Drug Administration to effectively issue a nationwide ban on the abortion pill Mifepristone by stripping the drug of its FDA approval.

About a week ago, he put on a press conference, and stood with several women who described serious complications after taking the abortion pill.

What struck me was how different their stories were—one of them a woman who took the pill but changed her mind, and got a reversal that saved her child. The woman is Rebekah Hagan, now a pro-life activist. But even as I say the stories were different, there was a very similar pattern. Listen to Ms. Hagan:

HAGAN: Reminded that I was running out of time, that the window for having a chemical abortion was quickly closing. I swallowed the abortion pill in front of a nurse, signed some paperwork, and was sent on my way with a little brown bag of abortion drugs … to take soon after. The only medical guidance I received, and I still remember her exact words to this day were, “once you start this, Rebecca, there will be no going back. Expect bleeding, expect cramping, take your pain medication, rest, and call us if you pass blood clots larger than the size of a lemon.” … What I didn't understand was that I had just been sent home with instructions to literally send myself into labor. No one talked about the complications, what I might feel, what I might see, and no one talked about my baby.

Just like this, woman after woman described being given the pills, sent home, and largely left to deal with the consequences on her own.

We know all Democrats are opposed to Hawley here, but so are some Republicans. There are some anonymous White House staff dishing to the press how mad they are about Hawley’s move here but is that a reason not to move ahead?

MCCOY: Thank the Lord for Senator Josh Hawley. He is taking up the mantle of advocating for preborn Americans.

Let me juxtapose it with this, Nick. The Trump administration so far has been out to lunch on abortion. They have utterly failed their pro-life constituents who were looking to them to continue a lot of the advances made in the first Trump administration—namely this issue of mifepristone.

By the way, the vast majority of abortions now are chemical. They happen in a woman’s apartment, her home, her bathroom—completely apart from medical care.

Our friends at the Ethics and Public Policy Center have uncovered that about one in ten or one in eleven women have a serious and urgent health complication because of these drugs.

But our current FDA and Department of Health and Human Services have done nothing to rein in the Biden-era liberties with which mifepristone was disseminated.

You can get it by telehealth. You don’t even have to see a doctor, and you can get it in your mailbox.

Just this week the Trump administration continued trying to fight GOP states and their efforts to rein in mifepristone—to reinstate some of the restrictions that were in place before Biden.

Those restrictions related to telehealth, requiring a doctor’s visit, or requiring the pills to be dispensed in a medical facility.

But it gets worse. They’ve talked about continuing to study or move toward approval of a generic mifepristone.

If they want to hide behind legal process, I say that’s not convincing. If the government can change the food pyramid or vaccine schedules, it can deal with a drug harming one in ten women.

But they won’t.

The word for that is midterms. Midterms.

We are seeing this administration play the political game like so many have before when it comes to abortion.

Every believer needs to make their voice known. We may be grateful for many things an administration does that align with our values and a biblically shaped worldview.

But on abortion this administration has failed, continues to fail, and has given no indication it intends to do anything but fail.

BROWN: I want to end talking about another Pew Research Study that reveals about seven out of 10 Americans now believe that belief in God is not essential to being moral or holding good values. Pew started asking this question back in 2002, as I understand it. “Is it necessary to believe in God in order to have good values and morals?” And the number who said no, 68% which is the highest that it’s ever been.

MCCOY: Yeah, so first, let’s talk about what that Pew Research poll reveals. The idea of, can you just be a good, moral person and not believe in God at all? It’s incoherent. The whole premise of it is completely incoherent. Let’s look at why.

If there is no God, then the only worldview to explain the universe and the existence of you, me, and every other person on this planet is naturalism, meaning that the world evolved from purely material sources.

You may recall Nietzsche’s philosophy was all about power, and this goes with Darwinian naturalism and materialism perfectly, because the only thing that exists is power.

Well, if you have a world where the only thing that exists is power, then there is no right and wrong.

In fact, this is why Nietzsche hated Christianity, because he said Christianity did things like valorize humility. Well, in a world of everything is power, you don’t need humility. Humility is something that gets in the way of you exercising your power.

So the very values that people say they believe and would value—like kindness, like hospitality to strangers, like equality—you don’t get those things without there being a transcendent being to whom you can lock those ideas into.

So the idea that you can have a naturalistic, materialistic world and just evolve into morals—it is utterly incoherent. It simply doesn’t work.

And then, as we’ve talked about before on this show, the values that we value, the values that we espouse and prize in our culture, are linked all the way back to the influence of Christianity in Western society.

But if anybody watched the Oscars, you might have seen that the Best Actress award went to Jessie Buckley for Hamnet and the Best Actor award went to Michael B. Jordan for Sinners.

Fascinating little tidbit: both of those movies—and they won other awards—but both of those movies feature some sort of pagan spirituality, some sort of valorizing witchcraft, the occult.

In Hamnet she is a forest witch who can do incantations and see the future.

In Sinners there’s this protagonist who practices hoodoo, which is African ancestor worship and folk magic.

And Christianity, generally speaking, is portrayed as oppressive, whereas pagan spirituality is portrayed as a means to spiritual freedom.

And so we’re seeing these ideas play out not only in broader culture that you might find with a poll like Pew Research, but even in Hollywood.

And we’re seeing what our world valorizes and elevates and then wants to get rid of.

It really is living in our post-Christian and even post-secular society, where we want to hang on to Christian values, we recognize we need something more than materialism to make it make sense, but we’re just trying to make it all up as we go in our own image.

BROWN: All right, author, speaker, and cohost of WORLD Watch’s Reality Check, Katie McCoy, always good to have you. Katie, thank you!

MCCOY: Thanks, Nick and Myrna, always good to be with you.

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