The Carbon Footprint - the New Abortion Debate?

A recent and troublesome trend by environmentalists is to attach an environmental cost, in the form of a carbon footprint, to both born and unborn children.

The carbon footprint, according to CarbonFootprint.com, is "a measure of the impact human activities have on the environment in terms of the amount of greenhouse gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide."

While this may not seem too urgent of a trend, consider that this line of reasoning has already cost at least one unborn child their life - Toni Vernelli, as a result of her concern for the planet, aborted her unborn child ten years ago. (A few years later after having her child aborted and in an effort to protect the planet, Mrs. Vernelli was sterilized. )

Ironically, her very own child could have been the one to solve the problem of carbon emissions sometime in the not too distant future.

Then there is the University of Western Australia's Professor Barry Walters, a clinical associate professor of obstetrics, who in the December edition of the Medical Journal of Australia, proposed that couples who have more than two children should pay an annual carbon tax. The purpose of the tax, which could amount to $800 annually, would be to offset the carbon emissions of each child over a lifetime.

Interestingly enough, Professor Walter's doesn't appear to call for a tax on adults or families that have only two children. He also doesn't call for a tax upon himself - after all, Professor Walter has his own carbon footprint. Why shouldn't he pay a carbon tax, and one that's retroactive at that to cover the span of his own life?

It's interesting how these two want others to pay the price for their ideology - for Mrs. Vernelli, she made her child pay the price, and Professor Walters wants everybody else to pay the price. It seems that the golden rule here is "to do unto others as you would not do unto yourself." (Don't get me wrong, I'm not asking for either to follow their own ideology to a consistent end - I'm basically pointing out their flawed reasoning here...)

Both Professor Walter and Mrs. Vernilli advocate contraception as a solution to protecting the environment. But the production and distribution of contraceptives is not carbron free - the vehicles and machinery involved create their own greenhouse gases. Even Mrs. Vernilli's sterilization wasn't emission free, as she probably took her car to get to and from the facility where it was performed.

Additionally, some forms of contraceptives are may actually be harming the environment in other ways. Consider the situation in a mountain stream near Boulder, Colorado, where contraceptives are suspected in the mutation of the White sucker fish.

Don't get me wrong, protecting the environment is a good cause, but these people have carried it to the extreme. Unfortunately, I suspect their ideology will catch on among fellow environmentalists.

It may well be that the abortion debate is shifting from "choice/religion" versus personhood, to the environment versus personhood. If so, we had better be prepared to engage in this debate.