Bad science vs. beautiful babies

Judith Reisman
September 22, 2008
Reproduced with Permission

The outright loathing often displayed for Todd and Sarah Palin's refusal to abort Trig Palin and to welcome their surprise grandchild begins, in many ways in the 1950s. After winning World War II, Americans saluted life, babies, pregnancy and large families. Other, more urbane nations often mocked us as a "child-centered" society. We were. Children in big families generally had to learn to share and work, was the idea. These youngsters would become adult taxpayers, men and women who would build, support and protect America. By the late 1950s however, women who saw motherhood as service to society and who dreamed of scores of little kids to nurture, were suddenly caught in the crosshairs.

A new wind had blown in from academe. Chic "mental health" professionals were suddenly sneering at homemakers, even part-time working moms, accusing them of "momism" and "smother love," that was producing weak sons and aggressive daughters.

I had been ignoring the sneering columns in the press and ladies magazines about motherhood being parasitical and wasting women's talent. I had four great daughters and worked part time as a songwriter and television performer. Wherever my "little women" and I wandered, we were greeted by admiring glances and benevolent looks. That changed so suddenly I can remember the day I saw motherhood mutate from reverence to resentment.

It was August 1963. I had dismissed the doomsday warnings in the press that overpopulation was going to cause starvation and famine. As I walked down a grassy slope holding my littlest child's hand, an irate voice behind me shouted, "Don't you know how to prevent that?" I turned and knew those glaring eyes and spiteful words were meant for me. I should have "prevented" one, or all of my four daughters. Almost overnight I started to hear censure of my reproductive behavior. Even the public body language subtly changed. Few folks smiled upon my happy little troupe any longer.

Long before the child sexual abuse pandemic caused men and women to fear speaking to or touching children, the kindly head pats were over. What had corrupted the hospitable American view of children as a joy, a blessing, in such a short time?

Yes - more screwy science and screwier scientists. After Kinsey's sex blitzkrieg and pornographer Hefner's 1953 bunny launch, the public was hit with Margaret Sanger's "overpopulation" hysteria in 1957. By 1961 the fear of childbirth was so real that the National Council of Churches publicly endorsed birth control to avoid "illegitimacy" and "overpopulation."

By the mid 1960s, the prediction that babies meant world starvation was blighting the bliss of stoned sexual freedom breeders who were making much love, not war. Here was a natural activist cadre to battle for a cause, abortion on demand.

Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich galvanized such activists in a December 1967 interview when he forecast world famine between 1970 and 1985 caused by babies. In his 1968 best-selling book, "Zero Population Growth," he predicted that each year in 1970 "a minimum of 10 million people will starve to death." Moreover, by "1984 the United States will quite literally be dying of thirst."

Like global warming, life as we know it was doomed. Sorry. Millions of people, believing Ehrlich, Sanger and other Planned Parenthood gurus, saw my children, all live children, and certainly those unborn as threatening the very bread in their mouths. Sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll 'n' abort baby.

Propagandized by perverted sexologists to fornicate with Tom, Dick, Harry, et al, convinced by behaviorists that mothers "smother" their children, assured by biologists millions will shortly die overpopulation, told by doctors 10,000 women die annually from coat-hanger abortions, by 1973 a reeling Supreme Court would legalize abortion on demand. Feminists for Life point out that, "the anti-abortion laws that early feminists worked so hard to enact to protect women and children were the very ones destroyed by the Roe v. Wade decision 100 years later."

Obviously, this thought piece is how I now see it. Believing bad science - and the examples are legion - has always brought national tragedy in its wake. So here we are today, observing the often seething cynicism on the far left toward the growing Palin family.

As for me, whenever I see a family with children, I smile, and always congratulate moms with babies; they are always beautiful.

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