Paul Ehrlich is Dead, but His Anti-life Legacy Lives

On Friday, March 13, Paul Ehrlich – Stanford biologist, celebrity doomsayer, and author of the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb – died at 93 in Palo Alto, California.

In their obituary, the New York Times described Ehrlich as “an eminent ecologist and population scientist” whose predictions were merely “premature.” Which is surely one of the gentlest ways imaginable of saying that Ehrlich was so utterly wrong on everything, that it’s impossible to think of a single thing he got right.

The Conversation hailed Ehrlich as a visionary who “believed scientists had a responsibility to speak out.” William Kovarik, the author of the piece, goes on to describe Ehrlich’s death as “a loss for a world that needs visionaries and public scientists now more than ever.”

The record tells a different story.

Ehrlich built a career on terrifying the world with predictions of imminent mass starvation, civilizational collapse, and resource depletion – not one of which came true. However, while his prophecies failed, the policies they inspired succeeded in doing enormous damage to real human beings, particularly the poorest and most vulnerable.

Wrong About Everything

The opening line of The Population Bomb is one of the most famous lines of the 20^th century: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

Ehrlich predicted that by 1980 all important animal life in the sea would be extinct. He predicted that the United States would “be dying of thirst” by 1984. In a 1969 article, he declared that “by 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.” Visiting Britain, he announced that he would take “even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

Instead, the world’s population more than doubled, from 3.5 billion when his book was published to over 8 billion today, and humanity became vastly wealthier, healthier, and better fed. Extreme poverty plummeted. Life expectancy soared.

In 1980, economist Julian Simon famously challenged Ehrlich to a wager: Ehrlich could choose any five commodity metals, and if their real prices rose over the next decade – as Ehrlich’s scarcity theory predicted – Simon would pay the difference. If prices fell, Ehrlich would pay. Ehrlich chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. By 1990, every single one had fallen in price. Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07. The basket had dropped by more than 50 percent.

Yet Ehrlich never admitted error. When pressed, he insisted he had not made a single major error in his published works. His failed predictions, he and his defenders argued, had been prevented by the very alarm he had raised. In other words, even when he was wrong, Ehrlich was right.

So arrogant was Ehrlich that in 2008, decades after all of his worst predictions had failed to materialize, he claimed that The Population Bomb was probably “way too optimistic.”

“Coercion in a Good Cause”

If Ehrlich’s predictions had remained the idle musings of an eccentric academic, they would be merely embarrassing. But the tragic reality is that they exerted enormous influence on global policy. They shaped culture. And they caused enormous suffering.

In The Population Bomb, Ehrlich was remarkably candid about the kind of measures he believed were necessary. “Coercion?” he wrote. “Perhaps, but coercion in a good cause.”

He bemoaned the fact that adding “temporary sterilants” to the water supply was not yet technically feasible. He argued that when Indian government minister Sripati Chandrasekhar proposed the compulsory sterilization of all Indian men with three or more children, the United States should have supported the plan by sending “helicopters, vehicles, and surgical instruments” and dispatching “doctors to aid in the program.”

This was not abstract theorizing.

As I detailed in a previous column on NSSM-200, the overpopulation panic that Ehrlich did more than anyone to ignite what was woven directly into Henry Kissinger’s 1974 National Security Study Memorandum 200, which made population reduction in developing nations an explicit goal of American foreign policy. What followed were decades of internationally funded campaigns to push abortion, contraception, and sterilization on vulnerable populations around the world.

During India’s Emergency period from 1975 to 1977, a mass sterilization campaign unfolded with shocking brutality. Some 6.2 million Indian men were sterilized in a single year – fifteen times the number sterilized by the Nazis, according to science journalist Mara Hvistendahl. Thousands of men died from botched surgeries. Citizens were denied water, electricity, ration cards, and medical care unless they submitted. The campaign was funded in part by the United Nations, the World Bank, and the Swedish International Development Authority.

China’s one-child policy, enforced with forced abortions and compulsory sterilization for decades, was animated by the same Ehrlich-fueled panic. The human cost – in coerced abortions, sex-selective infanticide, broken families, and a catastrophically skewed demographic structure – is incalculable.

One Wall Street Journal letter that has circulated widely since Ehrlich’s death puts a personal face on the damage. A Minnesota man named Kenneth Emde wrote that he took Ehrlich’s warnings seriously and chose not to have a large family. He now has no grandchildren. Looking back, Emde described himself as “stupid and gullible.” How many millions of others – persuaded by the same propaganda – made the same irreversible choice?

As Elon Musk has bluntly observed, Ehrlich’s book may be “the most damaging anti-human thing ever written.”

The Real Crisis: A World Without Children

Here is the supreme irony of Paul Ehrlich’s legacy: he spent his career warning that the world had too many people. He died in a world that is rapidly running out of them.

As I have documented in numerous columns in recent years, the real crisis facing humanity today is not overpopulation. It is depopulation, i.e. the “demographic winter” that the Church and pro-life advocates have been warning about for decades.

The numbers are truly alarming. More than two-thirds of humanity now live in countries where fertility has dropped below the replacement threshold of 2.1 children per woman. The global fertility rate has plummeted from 5 children per woman in 1960 to roughly 2.1 today, and it is still falling. In the developed world, the situation is far more dire.

South Korea’s total fertility rate stands at 0.80 – the lowest in the world. Japan recorded fewer than 670,000 births in 2025, the lowest since records began in 1899, with the decline arriving sixteen years earlier than demographers had projected. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has called the crisis Japan’s “biggest problem.” Italy, Spain, and much of Eastern Europe are on a similar trajectory. In the United States, the total fertility rate has fallen to a historic low of 1.6. China’s population is now actively shrinking, with projections of a loss of 155 million people by 2050.

Thirty-eight nations of more than one million people are expected to experience population declines over the coming quarter century. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), “population loss in the coming quarter century will be largest in China with a drop of 155.8 million, Japan with 18 million, Russia with 7.9 million, Italy with 7.3 million, Ukraine with 7 million, and South Korea with 6.5 million.”

The result? Far fewer workers will support more retirees. Economies will contract. And – as we have seen with the relentless push for legalized euthanasia – the temptation to discard the “expensive” elderly and vulnerable will only grow.

Reactions: “One of the Most Evil Men in History”

The responses to Ehrlich’s death have been revealing. Especially revealing is the way that even many liberal media, who spent decades lauding Ehrlich and the population control agenda, have been forced to admit just how wrong Ehrlich was.

True, as noted above, some mainstream outlets opted for the soft-focus obituary, treating him as a well-meaning scientist who simply got the timeline wrong. But others were far more candid. A Washington Post editorial acknowledged that Ehrlich’s theories are “thoroughly discredited” and warned that his ideas are still “doing damage” through the modern degrowth movement.

Jonah Goldberg, writing in the Los Angeles Times, was blunt, but entirely correct: “Paul Ehrlich was wrong about everything.” Goldberg called Ehrlich “the most influential Chicken Little of the last century” and noted that his defenders’ claim that his warnings averted disaster is “more nonsense.”

Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire went further, calling Ehrlich “one of the most evil men in history” and tracing the direct line between his ideology and the coercive population control programs that destroyed millions of lives.

Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, drew a connection between Ehrlich’s 1968 demand to “cut the birth rate immediately” and the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision just five years later. The ideology of population control and the ideology of abortion on demand, Mohler noted, have always been intimately linked.

The Church Was Right

As I have written many times in this column, the overpopulation scare was never grounded in reality. It was grounded in a profound contempt for human life – a contempt that the Catholic Church has consistently warned against, and that history has thoroughly vindicated the Church for opposing.

Throughout the decades of population hysteria, the Catholic Church stood nearly alone in insisting that the overpopulation narrative was both factually wrong and morally dangerous. While governments and international organizations poured billions into contraception, sterilization, and abortion, the Church taught – as she always has – that every human life is a gift, and that the proper response to new life is welcome, not fear.

In Familiaris consortio, Pope St. John Paul II warned against the “anti-life mentality” driven by those who “exaggerate the danger of demographic increase to the quality of life.” He continued:

The Church firmly believes that human life, even if weak and suffering, is always a splendid gift of God’s goodness. Against the pessimism and selfishness which cast a shadow over the world, the Church stands for life: in each human life she sees the splendor of that ‘Yes,’ that ‘Amen,’ who is Christ Himself. To the ‘No’ which assails and afflicts the world, she replies with this living ‘Yes,’ thus defending the human person and the world from all who plot against and harm life (no. 30).

History has vindicated that teaching. The predicted catastrophe of overpopulation never arrived. What arrived instead is exactly what the Church warned about: a world that has lost its reverence for life, that treats children as burdens rather than blessings, and that is now reaping the bitter fruits of that anti-life mentality in collapsing birth rates, aging populations, and a culture of death that sees euthanasia as a solution to the problems created by too few young people.

A Lesson for Our Time

Paul Ehrlich lived to 93. This was a long life, in a world that proved far more resilient, creative, and abundant than he ever imagined. He lived long enough to see the global population more than double from the number he found so terrifying, even as humanity grew richer, healthier, and more capable than at any point in history.

He also lived long enough to see the crisis he helped create: not a crisis of too many people, but of too few. The nations that listened most eagerly to his warnings are now scrambling to persuade their citizens to welcome children again, discovering that it is far easier to destroy a culture of life than to rebuild one.

As I wrote when the world reached 8 billion, the proper response to every human life is not panic, it is gratitude. The earth is not overcrowded. It is, if anything, increasingly empty of the one thing that gives it meaning: human beings made in the image of God, called into existence by a love that sees every life as unrepeatable and infinitely precious.

At the risk of sounding arrogant: Paul Ehrlich got everything wrong. The Church got everything right.

Such is the wisdom of the Church. She is not easily fooled by the newest, latest trends of thought. She has a long memory. And she is deeply rooted in immovable, fundamental, morally upright first principles. One of which is: human beings are made in the image and likeness of God and ought never to be treated with the disdain that the population controllers have treated the human race.

Let that be the lesson we carry forward, as we work to build the Culture of Life and the Civilization of Love that our world so desperately needs.