Lileks is on a Roll

James Lileks takes on some official Brit dandy who thinks that the government should be more actively involved in aborting more British babies. The whole thing is good, but this part is exceptional:

Porritt, a former chairman of the Green party, says the government must improve family planning, even if it means shifting money from curing illness to increasing contraception and abortion.

You thought I was exaggerating by saying that curing disease only prolongs the problem, eh? I’d like to know which diseases he prefers to underfund so the state can shower the land with more condoms. I can’t imagine price is what keeps people from using a French letter, after all. It’s the lack of education, perhaps where does this go? Or the fact that scientists have not yet invented spring-loaded knickers that shoot out condoms the moment you tug on the elastic.

He said: “We still have one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancies in Europe and we still have relatively high levels of pregnancies going to birth, often among women who are not convinced they want to become mothers.”

So the role of the state should be to convince ambivalent mothers to abort, then. Possibly by showing them cartoons of polar bears marooned on ice floes and letting them draw the obvious conclusion. But why are two kids okay? Perhaps because the fellow speaking has two of his own, and couldn’t bear to think of choosing which one he’d have culled for Gaia’s sake. Well, I say the limit should be one, and that this fellow is to be roundly pilloried for the metaphorical Forest of Trafalgar Square his excess kin will immolate. He might argue that two are necessary to keep the population going and the economy intact, but of course population and the economy are the twin engines of our destruction, and people seem mulishly unwilling to part with either. If you’re really concerned - if you are a good person - then your heart cannot help but sink when you hear the phrase “There’ll always be an England.” That’s the problem.

Not to say there won’t always be an England - the physical place, which no doubt is called something else by native fauna in a language made of barks and spoor-scattering - will always be there, if we act now. There’s only one kind of sea-level rise that’s acceptable, and that’s because everyone jumped en masse into the water to drown themselves.