Too many of you. Just enough of me.

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Feb 06, 2005

As many as nine Sri Lankan couples were locked in a custody battle for the foundling Tsunami Baby 81. Surely there must be some mistake. After all, First Worlders with post-graduate degrees have long targeted South Asian countries for population control programs, and here was a perfect opportunity -- by the lights of Planned Parenthood and their crew -- for the overburdened Asians to lighten their liabilities and cut up the family pie into fewer, thus larger, slices. "Babies? Did we have babies?" But contrary to the Alan Guttmacher cost-benefit equation, many economically constrained South Asians actually seem to love the little South Asians they've engendered. P.J. O'Rourke nailed it in an essay on Bangladesh:

Going around the poor parts of the world shoving birth-control pills down people's throats, hustling them into abortion clinics, and giving them prizes for getting sterilized is to assume that those people don't want babies as much as we do, that they won't like those babies as well as we like ours, and that little brown and yellow babies aren't as good as the adorable, pink rich kind. American children grow up to be valuable citizens. Bangladeshi children grow up to be part of the world population problem.

Remember the "Population Bomb" scare tactics -- showing the planet earth dripping (dark) masses of humanity like bees swarming on the underside of a nest? The way the globe was canted in the illustrations made it plain that the crowded part was not to be understood as Cambridge, MA or Redmond, WA. O'Rourke doesn't hesitate to connect the dots:

Fretting about over-population is a perfectly guilt-free -- indeed, sanctimonious -- way for "progressives" to be racists.

You opine. They decide. Why don't they call themselves "Planned Unclehood"?