Here’s some irony for you. The same environmentalists that fervently supported the Pope’s call for global governance over the climate and oceans are also pushing explicitly anti-Catholic policies to fight global warming: more access to contraceptives and abortion.
The Sierra Club was just one of many environmental groups that supported the Pope’s call to address man-made global warming. When Pope Francis published his encyclical in June, they issued a strong statement of support for the Bishop of Rome’s call to action.
“This Encyclical underscores the need for climate action not just to protect our environment, but to protect humankind and the most vulnerable communities among us,” Sierra Club president Michael Brune said in a statement. “The vision laid out in these teachings serves as inspiration to everyone across the world who seeks a more just, compassionate, and healthy future.”
But that was last month, and now the Sierra Club is touting “family planning” as a way to fight global warming. The eco-group tweeted out its support for the United Nations Foundation’s Universal Access Project, a project pushing for increased access to contraceptives and abortions for women in the third world.
Family planning = climate game changer. Do you support reproductive rights? Share your story: http://t.co/EhDROLmgSX #WhyWeCare
— Sierra Club (@sierraclub) June 30, 2015
The Universal Access Project is partnered with groups like Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club to promote “family planning” as a healthy and environmentally-friendly way to promote sustainable development. The project lists “providing access to safe and legal abortions” as one of its post-2015 development goals. Both are methods of population control often pushed by environmentalists as a way to prevent overpopulation.
Population and a sustainable environment go hand in hand. Tell us why you support family planning! http://t.co/EhDROLmgSX #WhyWeCare — Sierra Club (@sierraclub) July 1, 2015
Abortion and other methods of population control, however, are explicitly rejected by Pope Francis in his encyclical.
“Since everything is interrelated, concern for the protection of nature is also incompatible with the justification of abortion,” Francis wrote in his encyclical. “How can we genuinely teach the importance of concern for other vulnerable beings, however troublesome or inconvenient they may be, if we fail to protect a human embryo, even when its presence is uncomfortable and creates difficulties?”
The pope also argued that population growth is perfectly compatible with the notion of sustainable development. Francis said it was a consumerist culture, not overpopulation, that’s the root of ecological problems.
“At times, developing countries face forms of international pressure which make economic assistance contingent on certain policies of ‘reproductive health.’ Yet ‘while it is true that an unequal distribution of the population and of available resources creates obstacles to development and a sustainable use of the environment, it must nonetheless be recognized that demographic growth is fully compatible with an integral and shared development,’” Francis added.
“To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues,” the pope argued. “It is an attempt to legitimize the present model of distribution, where a minority believes that it has the right to consume in a way which can never be universalized, since the planet could not even contain the waste products of such consumption.”
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