Paul Ehrlich has died at the old age of 93. I am grateful he lived long enough to witness how many of his doomsday predictions were wrong. But he does not seem to have recognized his faults. As late as 2018, Ehrlich predicted (once again) that the collapse of civilization would happen in decades. How could a person who is consistently wrong about everything maintain his status as a public intellectual? I think the short answer is that Ehrlich told progressives what they wanted to hear and reaffirmed their world view. When a progressive uses the phrase "trust the science" or "evidence based," especially about the climate, think of Paul Ehrlich.
There is much to say on Ehrlich's death, but it may be most useful to connect his writings on population control with Roe v. Wade. The Population Bomb was published in 1968. The book opens, "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death." Ehrlich endorsed mandatory sterilization to remedy overpopulation. But he also favored abortion as a way to promote, shall we say, swinging tricks, without the consequences of reproducing.
Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. There is a sentence in Justice Blackmun's majority opinion that is edited out of most ConLaw casebooks, but that Randy and I include:
