The Real-Life Handmaid’s Tale Happening Around the World Today
This week, viewers will get another chance to submerge themselves in the dystopian future created by Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid’s Tale, based on the novel about the government forcing women to bear children to counter a declining population, resonated with audiences across the world.
However, the reverse situation — government coercing people to have fewer or no children — has been happening around the world for decades, and it ought to generate just as much outrage.
Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 best-seller The Population Bomb incited global panic with claims that out-of-control population growth would deplete resources, bringing about widespread starvation.
Ehrlich’s jeremiad led to human rights abuses around the world, including millions of forced sterilizations in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia, Bangladesh and India — as well as China’s draconian “one child” policy.
In 1975, officials sterilized 8 million men and women in India alone, and In 2012, India’s Supreme Court found that “unrealistic targets have been set for sterilization procedures with the result that non-consensual and forced sterilizations are taking place.”
The sheer scale of this authoritarian nightmare is difficult to imagine, but tyrannical population-control measures are not only repugnant but also senseless.
Since Ehrlich began preaching about overpopulation-induced Armageddon, the number of people on the planet has more than doubled. Yet yearly, famine deaths have declined by millions. Recent famines are caused by war, not exhaustion of natural resources. As production increased, prices fell, and calorie consumption rose. Hunger is in retreat.
The evidence isn’t on the overpopulation alarmists’ side. More people can mean more prosperity. Human ingenuity, it turns out, is the ultimate resource.
And, interestingly, many people now worry that the world will produce too few, rather than too many, children — echoing the situation in the dystopian Gilead.
So while you’re watching season 2 of , keep in mind that the reverse of The Handmaid’s Tale is just as horrifying — and it has supporters trying to make it a reality.
