Doctors for the what now?

I onced blogged about the inane self-conceit of organisations that have the appelation of "Doctors for..." in the title. It was called "Strippers for industrialisation, and other types of stupid" and still garners alot of misdirected google traffic. (Suckers).

So far, along with my favourite lumps of ca-ca to kick over at Doctors for the Environment (nope, still won't link them), I have found Doctors for Native Forests (they have the ENTIRE text of Dr. Seuss' "The Lorax" on their site), Doctors for Global Health (which makes sense for a change), Clown Doctors for Kids (acceptable), Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (OK), Doctors for Human Rights (meh) and Doctors for Life (Eew. I'm not even going there...)

But wait, whats this? Enter: Doctors for a Sustainable Population. Somewhere in the back of my head I started hearing that music that always played when Darth Vader entered the room. Then I noticed that they used to be called "Medical Association for Planetary Survival" (Why would you change that?)

I'll also give you a dollar and a big sloppy kiss if you can guess who they list as their "associated organisations". Oh, alright, I'll tell you. Its Sustainable Population Australia and, yep, pucker up, Doctors for the Environment Australia.

Doctors for a Sustainable Population are, interestingly, not too worked up about climate change, but are pretty freaked by peak oil. Unfortunately, they think they are just the guys to solve the problem, only because they are doctors, they think what they need to do is implement:

sustainable population targets by family planning and population reduction in the most socially acceptable way.

First, define which is the most socially acceptable way to enforce a reduction in population? I would be interested to hear it. And why is this a doctor's job, anyway? They say:

DSP believes that doctors, a relatively large group trained in science, are the most likely to realise the danger to the future to us and our descendants, and to be effective in explaining this to society.

Wow, this type of thing could never get out of hand, could it?

Also, referring to doctors as trained in science is kind of cute, because I can tell you this for free: The degree I'm studying does NOT give any training in the key basis of the methodology that is science. We are being trained as technicians. Its vocational training of a fairly ad hoc nature. Scientific methodology is assumed knowledge because once upon a time it had already been acquired by this stage. These days, though, you can even get through a PhD without ever having to comes to terms with the P for Philosophy. As a second-generation scientist, I was somewhat appalled to discover that most of my peers actually confuse science with a belief system, and wouldn't notice an Aristotelian logical fallacy if it put on a fruity hat and did the macarena.

Why do these types of people immediately jump to the conclusion that we have to MAKE people have less children? Clearly they have never had a 10 pound incontinence-making device exit a sensitive area of their anatomy. Most of the evidence from the developed world would indicate that if you give women access to birth-control and the choice between buying shoes and having so many children their uteri fall out, they tend to go with 1.8 offspring* and the sexy, faux-leather strappy numbers that show off some toe-cleavage.**

* Yes, thats right. Australia's total fertility rate has been below replacement level since 1976, hence immigration. Even developed Catholic countries like Spain have very low fertility rates. Spain's is lower than Australia's at around 1.3. Italy's is around the same as Spain's, probably because of all those fabulous shoes.
** I actually loathe shoe-shopping. The whole retail industry seems to be full of terrible, ill fitting shoes, and the only ones I like either never have my size, or are only available in white (white!) or cost in excess of $300 (which should be illegal). I was merely trying to make a point. Insert favoured retail item of your choice. e.g. an education or a new set of Makita power drills.

PopOffsets: A fart by any other name...

Next time you clamber into your SUV, back over the neighbours shrubbery and drive 45km out of your way to go to the grocery store with those funky chocolate covered freeze dried cherries, you can offset the resulting sasquatch sized carbon footprint by peddling condoms to South Americans.

Oh, you say. I was doing that already.

But just in case you weren't, the Optimum Population Trust can now do it for you. Following on from "research" (ha!) they recently commissioned that figured that reducing the number of humans would be the most effective way to curb human-induced global warming (well, ye-es, I suppose that makes sense) they have launched PopOffsets, just in time for Copenhagen. (Which is kind of incidentally funny, because in Australia, a Pop Off is slang for a fart, which is a teensy little green-house emission. Did'ya see what I did there?)

British environmental campaigner Jonathon Porritt, who supports PopOffsets, said family planning could help ensure there would be 500 million fewer people roaming the globe by 2050.
'Each of those people who would have been born otherwise would have had a carbon footprint,' he told BBC News.

Umm. I've been worried about this type of attitude before, and before. I'm a breeder. Guilty as charged. In fact, I've had enough things exit my uterus to know that its probably not a good idea. Ever. Hence the fact that I am a contraception / family planning groupie. Just can't get enough of it. Hell, I'd have Mr. Paua laminated if he'd hold still long enough. But this. This makes my blood run cold. Tell me I'm not the only one who is a bit worried about where all this could end up?

We really don't want to start hooking up population control to Anthropogenic Global Warming hysteria, this can only end badly. Why can't we just support family planning initiatives in developing nations because it really helps people if they want to use it? I don't think we need to force some kind of moral imperative onto having less children.

I might be getting a bit ahead of myself, but it wasn't that long ago that Sanjay Gandhi thought there were too many Indian peasants and figured enforced sterilization was just the ticket, and his son has expressed a desire just this year to follow up on his fathers policy.

I've worked in a gynaecology department in a Chinese hospital (strictly BYO speculum - Im not kidding, patients have to buy their own disposable ones before you do an exam), and probably half the day is spent writing women up for abortions. Y'see, unless you're a rich movie starlet with many important friends, its hugely problematic having a child out of wedlock in the PRC, they can't be officially registered, go to school etc. And with the one child policy, even if you're married, if you can't cough up the massive fine for having children above your quota then you can either hide in a closet for nine months and leave the baby at a train station, or you can have an abortion. Which is sad because many of those people would have otherwise welcomed another child. For me, the thing about being pro-choice, is the choice bit.

So we might all be wise to remember that no matter how seemingly altruistic the motives, the road to hell is paved with good intentions (and bad climate science). Im all for contraception, but population control is NOT the same thing as family planning.

My uterus is an anthropogenic global warming free zone

I still think our Aussie climate alarmist medico might be out front in the crazy-stakes, but I have discovered to my chagrin that we don't have a monopoly on nuts. At least one Canadian (?) has jumped on the population control bandwagon, and I don't know whether to be relieved that its not just Australian doctors that have lost the plot, or disturbed that this hysteria is going global.

Dr. Mehta published an essay in the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association detailing how the real culprits of climate change have been overlooked. Who are these dastardly swine, you say? Physicians! Jerks the lot of them, apparently.

According to Dr. Mehta:

If we accept that the total number of humans living on this planet as an important contributor to climate change, then we must look to who is responsible for this exponential increase in population.

(Psst. In case you can't work it out, he reckons its physicians).

When I read this, I had this vision of physicians taking part in some global ius primae noctis, dropping in on couples on their wedding nights for a quick game of "doctors and nurses" and siring a league of doctor-spawn. Awesome, I said. How did I miss that memo?

(Kind of like the time I was told that a medical association ball was going to be held in a "Gentleman's club". My immediate reaction was "Cool! Strippers and beer. Great choice!", then I was told that the gentleman's club to which they were referring was one of those no-girls-allowed posh old men's clubs. Apparently they were willing to make an exception for the female med students on the grounds that doctors are toffy-nosed enough they wouldn't bring the tone of the establishment down. Clearly they had never met me, then.)

Anyway, back to the Canadian. After reading further I realised that what he was actually advocating for was for doctors to get busy with the population control measures. Really sell it to people, y'know. ("Hey you! You walk like man who want vasectomy! I do nice and cheap! No problem!")

Citizens and the scientists who would like to slash our carbon footprint also need to consider the unsustainable number of humans on this planet and acknowledge that this is a critical factor and that reducing our number is fundamental to efforts to curtail climate change, as well to improving the quality of life for all. Physicians have the glorious opportunity to rise above the boundaries of nations, race, and religion for this very worthwhile cause.

Does anyone else get a bit jumpy when people with wacky, slightly totalitarian ideas start using the words "glorious" and "for all"?
I'm not morally opposed to even the most contentious of contraceptive issues - abortions (because given my past it would be damned hypocritical if I was), but I am VERY wary of attaching ideology to a woman's reproductive rights. A woman deciding on whether or not to access a pregnancy termination already has enough on her mind without pinning the future of the planet on the contents of her uterus.
Men too. No man should have "the snip" because he's worried about his carbon footprint. Thats more retarded than commercial free-to-air TV programming.

Luckily, other Canadian doctors appear to agree with me. One of the responders felt:

...that he (Mehta) is part of a trend within the Green movement that goes to a misanthropic extreme. Within his argument, language and ideas are used that likens the human race to, for example, a rabbit population that needs to be culled.
Insidiously related to this is the notion that, like rabbits, humans are totally subject to instinctual drives. If we, as physicians, perpetuate this cynical view of humans as automatons, we will continue to hand over fertilityreducing technology exclusively and abandon the biopsychosocio-spiritual model that views human beings as more than matter.

Touche.

Our medical nutters are scarier than your medical nutters...

I have a new contender for scariest, hysterical alarmist medical doctor ever:

Professor David Shearman, author ofThe climate change challenge and the failure of democracy. (He is touted as a professor, but the University of Adelaide website fails to have a bio or contact details for him that I can find. I'll keep trying.)

Just in case you thought you might have misconstrued where he was going with the title of this little piece of quality (that incidentally has a picture of....wait for it.....an iceberg on the front), he made it nice and clear in an opinion piece where he extolls the virtues of the Chinese government and makes it pretty clear he is no fan of "liberal democracy", as he puts it:

Cimate change, is democracy enough?

We are going to have to look how authoritarian decisions based on consensus science can be implemented to contain greenhouse emissions. It is not that we do not tolerate such decisions in the very heart of our society, in wide range of enterprises from corporate empires to emergency and intensive care units. If we do not act urgently we may find we have chosen total liberty rather than life.

I told you this guy was scary. Way scarier than anything Al Gore was banging on about. I've actually lived in China, which is interesting for the fact that it manages to turn you off both unrestrained capitalism and communism, all at the same time. I also got used to the fact that you have to register your whereabouts with the local police, who can, and will visit you at odd hours to make sure you're not stealing state secrets or having sex with Chinese people.

The authoritarian nature of the Chinese government may seem attractive to environmentalists because they can choose to put a blanket ban on plastic bags virtually overnight, but they can also kick you out of your centuries old house to build a new highrise or MSG factory, flood your town, or accidentally give most of your village HIV.

Dr. Shearman also gets into bed with the wimmin (and not in a fun way) by suggesting that having children makes global warming worse, that we should cancel the baby-bonus (from my cold, dead hand David) and force people to pay a climate tax on their children.

Paying a fine when you have children, thats sounds familiar, where have I seen that before? Oh, thats right! China! The one child policy fines people (alot) for any subsequent children after baby number one. Interestingly, theres alot of multiple child Han families around in China these days. They're called rich people. How does breeding more snobs help the planet?

Not content with just advocating for a totalitarian state, he has also suggested that we should stop globing warming because we might get sued:

Professor David Shearman (and co.) reviewed the scientific evidence for the effects of global warming and analysed the legal basis of potential legal claims. They said the scientific evidence showing the "human signature" on global warming was as great as that linking cigarette smoking with cancer.

So far I'm hoping that the only people actually listening to this guy are our old buddies over at Doctors for the Environment, where he maintains a sporadic blog and, I suspect, had something to do with their Population Policy. (If you have a few minutes its quite a read, it manages to tie in everything from the war on terror to impending innundation of Pacific islands without really coming up with any clear goals. I came out of it with the general impression that they want current Australian citizens to stop having babies so we can bring in more unskilled refugee migrants, move to the bush, join hands and sing Kumbaya.)

If you feel like catching up with David, you can find him at the next DEA student meeting in Melbourne, where he will be a guest speaker.

"Well, of course we're going to throw poo at him!"

Driving the pink 'n' purple pajero family wagon 'round the vulvic cul-de-sac

Given all the femininity that has been going on over here at the daily suppository lately, I felt it only fair to explore the issue further. After all, women wimmin are human humen people, too, and they're pissed about climate change.

So pissed that some of them have decided that the only right thing to do is to not have children to reduce their carbon footprint. One young woman reported that she was sterilised to "protect the planet" and felt a sense of relief after the irreversible procedure. (As long as she doesn't regret it later, then we're relieved too.)

A social demographer has outlined how climate change and family planning are linked, the Lancet has concurred and the London School of Economics has costed it for them as the cheapest way to combat climate change. (Sorry, I can't link to the original paper at the moment as it's mysteriously disappeared).

Meanwhile, Asian women are getting so irate over climate change that they're gonna....they're gonna....sew a quilt...dammit!

I'm all for contraception, and in some ways I can understand the temptation to hook-up an under-represented issue you care about, like access to family planning, to the latest funding-cash-cow-de-jour: Climate change. What concerns me is that given the level of hysteria and general holier-than-thou attitude of many of our climate true believers (and it has legal precedent as a religion, remember) that this could start getting out of hand.

On the other hand, if alarmists stop having children to save the planet, then eventually the whole issue is bound to right itself in about, oh, one generation or so.

Darwin would be proud.