Saturday, January 10, 2009

Rx for 'demographic disaster'

Suicide by contraception:
Eighty five year old Carl Djerassi the Austrian chemist who helped invent the contraceptive pill now says that his co-creation has led to a "demographic catastrophe."
In an article published by the Vatican this week, the head of the world's Catholic doctors broadened the attack on the pill, claiming it had also brought "devastating ecological effects" by releasing into the environment "tonnes of hormones" that had impaired male fertility, The Taiwan Times says.
The assault began with a personal commentary in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard by Carl Djerassi. The Austrian chemist was one of three whose formulation of the synthetic progestogen Norethisterone marked a key step toward the earliest oral contraceptive pill.
Djerassi outlined the "horror scenario" that occurred because of the population imbalance, for which his invention was partly to blame. He said that in most of Europe there was now "no connection at all between sexuality and reproduction." He said: "This divide in Catholic Austria, a country which has on average 1.4 children per family, is now complete." . . .
Young Austrians, he said, were committing national suicide if they failed to procreate. . . .
The head of Austria's Catholics, Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, told an interviewer that the Vatican had forecast 40 years ago that the pill would lead to a dramatic fall in the birth rate in the west.
"Somebody above suspicion like Carl Djerassi ... is saying that each family has to produce three children to maintain population levels, but we're far away from that," he said.
And the United States might be following Europe into the demographic ash-heap of history, were it not for teenage motherhood.

3 comments:

  1. And the United States might be following Europe into the demographic ash-heap of history, were it not for teenage motherhood.

    Not to mention illegal aliens.

    I'm serious when I say that Bush's 'amnesty' program was designed to save Social Security.

    That was a major UN-mentioned motivation...

    But it seems to me that simply changing the quotas would be a better way to go about it, as PJB mentioned years ago (fruitlessly.) Increase Mexican, Canadian, and (generally) WESTERN hemisphere quotas, decrease EASTERN quotas...

    Ted Kennedy's design was simply a cluster-f&^%.

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  2. You should have added
    UNMARRIED teenage motherhood.

    So if it isn't demographic suicide it's at the very least cultural suicide-

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  3. Carl Djerassi has certainly changed his tune from the one he sang back in 1994:http://archives.cbc.ca/health/reproductive_issues/clips/3047/

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