Charles C. Milliken: 2062: Birth control

Last week, I posited the U.S. population would be substantially lower than now. That will be a good thing, according to our experts running the country. But mere declining numbers of people won’t be the whole story in 2062. Progressives, going back to the early 20th century, weren’t just worried about the quantity of people, they were also worried about the quality. Eugenics was a major progressive cause, before World War II put a stop to its public expression. Margaret Sanger, and Planned Parenthood, was the poster child for the movement. Birth control, it was hoped, would lower the numbers born to non-white parents as well as children being born with genetic problems. (As I write this, abortions, so beloved of Planned Parenthood, kill several times as many black babies proportionately as white.) Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing in the 1927 8-1 Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell wrote, “Three generations of idiots is enough.” This ruling has never been expressly overturned.

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Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, an impeccably credentialed scientific institution, founded in 1890 in Long Island, looked at many issues of biology, genetics and medicine. A sister institution, the Carnegie Institution Department of Genetics, contained the Eugenics Record Office, putting out reports and research on, naturally, eugenics, which the researchers were all for. That bit of business shut down in 1939 as the horrors of what was taking place in Nazi Germany cast a pall over the whole subject. (Cold Spring Harbor is still around.)

In 2062, the progressive DNA of eugenics will once again be front and center, for several reasons, as the experts will see it. First, although population is down and falling, there is every reason to speed up the process to enable the achievement of several other goals. Second, many problems in society are caused by thoughtlessly and irresponsibly bearing children. Race, per se, will not be an issue. Crime, however, will be.

Given every other area of our lives is now, and increasingly will be, controlled, there is no reason why child-bearing will be left unregulated. The methodology will be simplicity in itself. Every girl, just before puberty, will be implanted with a birth control device. No exceptions - we have mandatory vaccines now, don’t we?

For those wishing to have children, a state license will be required. Several factors will be considered, not unlike the current procedures for adopting a child. First, the woman must be of mature age — say 20 — before she may become pregnant. Second, she must be in a stable relationship, to include thoroughgoing marriage counseling. Broken, or never-existing — homes correlate with crime and other social pathologies. Our prisons today are overcrowded with fatherless men and women. This will no longer be tolerated. Third, genetic testing will be required to make sure the child-to-be will be healthy. Finally, the number of licenses will be limited in light of the desired decline of population.

You may think that people would never put up with this level of intrusion into their lives. You would be wrong. If I were told, growing up in the 1950s, of the myriad rules and regulations we live under today, I would have said you are nuts — no one would put up with those. But we have. Like all regulatory outrages we endure, this will be done step by step — slowly boiling the proverbial frog.

The benefits are clear. Crime, homelessness and other social pathologies will plummet. Abortion will have been completely eliminated, since every child is a wanted child, and every child is, as it were, certified before he is even conceived.

But what about a woman's “right to control her own body”? When the experts take over, “rights,” by definition, go out the window. The Dr. Faucis of the world must be obeyed for your own good. Two weeks ago, I pointed out that electoral politics will be gone by 2062, and therefore no progressive need pander to aggressive feminism. A nearly perfect society is on offer, and nothing must stand in the way. Nature? Nurture? Control them both.

Charles Milliken is a professor emeritus after 22 years of teaching economics and related subjects at Siena Heights University. He can be reached at milliken.charles@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: Charles Milliken: 2062: Birth control