Photo courtesy Dano and licensed by Creative Commons.

After the infamous Roe vs. Wade case in 1973, women across the United States gained the right to choose whether their unborn child would live or die. In what has become the corner stone of women’s rights, pro-choice advocates across the country have petitioned and protested any hint of legislation or candidate that posed a potential risk to this precious “right”.

Today, with the push by governments across the globe to enact any legislation and taxes to curb greenhouse gas emissions to stop global warming, the rights of those seeking to have children are being infringed. Gone are the days when women could freely have as many children as they could support. In today’s world, children are seen as carbon-emitting beings detrimental to the environment.

Don’t believe me? As early as this week, a member of Britain’s government said that couples should be limited to two children to save the planet from global warming. While the government in the United Kingdom doesn’t have the power yet to force limited births per couple, Jonathon Porritt, chairman of the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, said, “I think we will work our way toward a position that says that having more than two children is irresponsible.” Porritt favors contraception and abortion to as a means to curb population growth.

And it’s not just Britain.

Around this time last year, I reported on an effort in Australia to tax live births. An Australian medical expert proposed a plan to charge couples that have more than two children a one-time and annual fee to offset the effect of their greenhouse gas emissions. However, contraception and sterilization would be eligible for carbon credits under the plan, suggested by Professor Barry Walters at the King Edward Memorial Hospital in Perth. Professor Garry Egger, director of the New South Wales Centre for Health Promotion and Research, said, “Population remains crucial to all environmental considerations,” he wrote. “The debate (around population control) needs to be reopened as part of a second ecological revolution.”

Is this simply discriminatory, or a morality judgement call from the environmentalists? After all, the United States received the “right” to choose 36 years ago. For those that choose to move forward with pregnancies and raise more than two children, the fundamentalists in the environmental movement have imposed a value on life and, in the case of Britain, there’s no choice at all if legislation that supports the two-child limit is enacted. The right to life is being phased out while the right to stop global warming takes its place, even as the planet’s temperature remains flat and ice refreezes at record rates in the Arctic.

It’s almost like genocide wrapped in a green flag.