A daily roundup of the biggest stories in right-wing media.
Many conservatives spent Thusday piling on liberal writer Jill Filipovic for tweting that those concerned about climate change should consider having fewer children.
“Who among us has the right,” National Review’s Alexandra DeSanctis asked, “to decide when a child is ‘extra’ and how many is too many?”
Of course, there’s a big difference between offing a child standing next to you and saying that people ought to choose not to have that child in the first place. But both presume that human life is valuable only if—and should be brought into the world only if—a certain subset of powerful and wise elites give the okay. Filipovic’s solution doesn’t even meet her own standard of public policy designed for those already alive—she ignores the fact that having children brings joy to parents, one-child policies have disastrous consequences, and lowering birthrates would render her beloved social programs inoperable. (With fewer workers, who would pay for all the benefits?)
If the Left’s view becomes widely accepted as a desirable or necessary course of action, there is no limiting principle to prevent it from becoming a government-enforced mandate against over-reproduction.
At the Federalist, Mollie Hemingway agreed, writing that Filipovic’s tweet evinced an “anti-human attitude.” “Conservatives are accused of wrongly saying that some liberals think as Filipovic does, but her tweet and the larger movement she participates in show that the characterization is fair,” she wrote. “A couple of years ago I noted the problem of what I termed ‘fecundophobia’—an open dislike of children and women’s fertility in general.”
A number of conservative writers also chimed in on Twitter:
In other news:
Conservatives also wearily assessed the prospects of Senate Republicans’ latest iteration of their health care bill. “Increasingly the GOP health-care saga feels like a season of Jets football,” HotAir’s Allahpundit wrote. “Depressing, way too long, utterly predictable in its outcome”:
We may be about to conduct an interesting experiment on what happens in a midterm if the ruling party passes … nothing. Nothing bad, nothing good either. Just nothing. Do voters vote their standard partisan preferences in that scenario or does a “do-nothing” Republican Congress get punished?
The only one of the three no’s who seems set in stone is Rand Paul. That’s the good news for McConnell. The bad news is that there are other potential no’s still out there — Dean Heller, Lisa Murkowski, Shelley Moore Capito, Mike Lee, Ron Johnson, Jeff Flake. Three no’s would put McConnell on the cusp of a nailbiting victory. Six or seven no’s and the game is all but over.
RedState’s Joe Cunningham praised the inclusion of the Cruz-Lee amendment in the revised bill as a “victory for conservatives.” “The Cruz-Lee amendment is a common sense amendment that would ensure men don’t have to pay for mamograms and pap smears, while women don’t have to pay for prostate exams,” he wrote. “The problem for the liberal Republicans is that they want to continue to keep costs down by having people pay for that extra coverage still. So, in order to keep the low income sick insured, they want more money going into the system to keep costs down.”
