Elon Musk has said, ” … population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” Musk is doing his part to prevent collapse – he's fathered 14 children with multiple women.
Musk is concerned because people are having smaller families and that we’re living longer. Apparently, he worries that there will not be enough workforce to do all the labor that society needs to continue. My interpretation is that he fears that the supply of cheap labor will diminish.
This is reminiscent of the mudsill theory. The “mudsill” is the lowest part of a building, and also refers to the lowest class of people in a society. It is the belief that there always has been, and must be, an underclass to work for the upper classes. This theory was developed by a South Carolina state senator in 1858 as an effort to justify slavery.
I fear that Musk and many politicians live in a billionaire’s bubble, and that they believe that the rest of us are needed to support them. They are unaware of the importance of the natural world, let alone the needs and wishes of normal people.
A new magazine for women, Evie, stresses classical femininity vs. feminism. Along with Evie, you can get an app – “28 Cycle, Period, Wellness,” which women can use to predict ovulation – but shouldn’t. It is unreliable at predicting a woman’s fertile time, and should only be used with another contraceptive method.
However, Evie’s originators also push “Birth Control Detox,” which contains several expensive herbs. They want you to fear hormonal birth control. I wonder how many subscribers to Evie who use “28” end up with unintended pregnancies.
Much that women have to control their fertility is being taken away. There are many barriers now including pressure to have more children. They distrust contraception (even though it’s much safer than childbearing). Furthermore, access to safe abortion care is absent in many states – and in La Plata County.
Durango is not immune from these pressures. In July, Planned Parenthood closed the clinic where I worked for 40 years. A person can still get telemedicine services and receive an abortion medication by mail. But for later term or procedural abortions, the nearest clinic is a four-plus hour drive.
In addition to performing procedural abortions for unintended pregnancies, (including some that resulted from rape or incest), the old PP clinic offered many other reproductive health services for women and men. These included: diagnosis and treatment of infections, prescribing birth control and cancer screening such as Pap smears. All these medical services were discounted in price or free, depending on a person’s ability to pay.
I remember Claire, an older woman, whom I met at PP. She had had a Pap suspicious for cancer and thought she couldn’t pay for a private doctor. At my office I did a procedure at no charge that showed that she had an unusual type of cancer. She had radical surgery in Denver and was cured. Without her Pap at PP, she would have died from the cancer.
One of the best times for a woman to start birth control is in the hospital, after giving birth. In addition to placing an IUD postpartum, it is easy to do a tubal ligation after birth by cesarean, if that is what a woman wants. Both of these are not possible at Mercy Hospital, owned by CommonSpirit Health, a Catholic health system, because of the pronatalist Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services.
Although Colorado is a safe haven for abortion care, La Plata County doesn’t reflect that. In addition, there is increasing social pressure to have children. Perhaps the very worst is that politics, medical care and religion have gotten mixed up, as opposed to the spirit of our Constitution’s Bill of Rights: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …”
Richard Grossman, M.D., is a retired obstetrics-gynecology physician who lives in the Bayfield area. Read his blog at population-matters.org.
