ACI Prensa Staff, Feb 23, 2024 / 07:00 am (CNA).
The Large Families Association of Madrid in Spain has launched an advertising campaign featuring the message “Save the planet, have more children.”
The campaign’s objective is to “turn on its head the prevailing pessimism and invite more people to experience the joy that comes with a large family.”
On billboards and in publicity throughout metropolitan Madrid, the campaign also directly challenges people to consider that “a world without pollution is not worth it if there are no people to enjoy it.”
The association said in a statement that the campaign aims to “challenge passersby to ask themselves what reasons may be leading them to close themselves off from the possibility of expanding their family.”
The campaign tries to make people reflect upon such common attitudes as “Kids? I already have a dog,” “One is enough,” and “Two, but not one more!”
The ads include a QR code that invites readers to watch and share a video that exposes the programs of international institutions that are pressuring governments to enact neo-Malthusian policies to reduce the world population.
This agenda has resulted in a growing reduction in aid to large families. The narrator of the campaign’s video observes: “They tell us that we have to reduce the population… and that’s why they’ll help us with abortion, ideologies, or eliminating aid to large families.”
In addition, the video narration refers to issues such as the manipulation of language, such as: “They call it reproductive health care” or the threat posed by growing depopulation in rural areas by noting: “Do you know where there is room left? In the parks, which are empty, or in the schools, which are closing more and more classrooms.”
The video concludes by pointing out: “They say they have calculated how much each child pollutes… and they have forgotten that a world without pollution is not worth it if there are no people to enjoy it.”
The Large Families Association’s ad campaign is reminiscent of a similar one that ran in New York’s Times Square in January by EveryLife, the leading pro-life diaper company in the U.S., which featured a post by X owner Elon Musk that read: “Having children is saving the world.”
Coinciding with the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., in January, below the Musk quote the billboard touted: “Make more babies.”
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
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Yours truly remembers when the academic Barry Commoner first introduced the notion of “sustainability” (book: “The Closing Circle,” 1971). He argued that the ecological problem was not in human numbers but much more in the Technocracy attached to these numbers. So, with this multiplier in mind, he argued against Paul Ehrlich and his “The Population Bomb.” Also, against the likelihood that draconian measures would be imposed most likely on the poor outside of the halls of power.
So, there’s a new conundrum within a fallen world.
And, a crucial distinction to be made between demographics and the regnant Technocratic paradigm being marketed to all. That in order to go around the block to buy a quart of milk we strap on a 3,000-pound prosthesis fueled by imported oil! Or, some opposite examples, however, are how internet towers have replaced miles of copper wiring, and entire libraries have been miniaturized into a computer chip, and how zoom videoconferencing can replace a whole bunch of troposphere air-miles by CEOs meeting to divvy-up global market share (and even to militate as with one voice for, say, the oxymoron of “gay marriage” in 2015).
Somewhere in the mix is the reality and “transcendent dignity of the human person,” as unpacked into the Catholic Social Teaching (CST)…
Which includes responsible parenthood as the right and responsibility of parents (binary!) to make prudent decisions within moral means—that is, without resorting to Technocracy’s anti-conceptive pill culture, or the backstop Abortion Industry’s retooled Aztec rites (rights?), or now mail-order abortion tablets (Auschwitz miniaturized into a home medicine cabinet).
While somewhat of a leftist himself, Commoner nevertheless rejected the simplistic Malthusian paradigm together with inevitable Statist “solutions.” But he also coined four rules of natural ecology: Everything is connected to everything else (glossy car paints are based on mica mined in India by child slave labor); everything must go somewhere (industrial hazardous waste dumped half way around the globe), nature knows best (or sometimes kicks back as with the Dust Bowl), and there’s no such thing as a free lunch (not even from a paper-money culture that simply kicks the price tag down the road into our children’s future).
No falsely sweeping answers proposed here…from the CST, solidarity and subsidiarity remain inseparable.
It might just be that the future is for real families, while everyone else chemically or deliberately sterilizes themselves into non-existence. In any event, does the illuminating neologism “integral ecology” (Laudato Si) also tend to mask the irreducible distinction between the “natural ecology” and, yes, the interrelated “human ecology” of families and such?
The riddle of Modernity: the irreducible difference between the external and many “Laws of Nature” and the internal and universal “Natural Law.”