Trisomy 18, also called Edwards syndrome, is caused by an extra copy of chromosome 18. March 18, or 3-18, has been designated Trisomy 18 Awareness Day. Children with Trisomy 18, Down syndrome, and other chromosomal variants too often have been discussed in public life with the language of burden, cost, strain, and inconvenience, as though the first question a society should ask about a child is whether he will be easy, efficient, and cheap. I juxtapose this with the March 13, 2026, death of Paul Ehrlich, the infamous author of The Population Bomb, at age 93. His ideas helped furnish the moral grammar for this entire way of thinking.

The Christian and natural-law vision begins elsewhere. Genesis teaches that man is created in the image of God, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that human dignity is rooted in that divine image. Scripture likewise calls children “a heritage from the Lord” and “a reward” (Ps. 127). In the Christian vision, the worth of a child does not rise or fall with his projected lifespan, predicted ability, social convenience, or actuarial neatness. A child with an extra chromosome possesses the same ontological dignity as the high-school valedictorian, the Olympic athlete, the Nobel laureate, and the finance executive who imagines himself most indispensable. Indeed, the child with Trisomy 18 may carry greater moral significance for society precisely because he exposes whether that society still recognizes human dignity as intrinsic.

Modern prenatal “ethics” has moved steadily in the opposite direction. Iceland, for example, has been widely cited for screening uptake above 85 percent and for terminating close to 100 percent of pregnancies in which Down syndrome is diagnosed. Denmark has reported termination rates around 98 percent after prenatal diagnosis, and earlier reporting on Danish screening showed a dramatic fall in births of children with Down syndrome after national screening protocols expanded. When affluent societies celebrate such outcomes as public-health success, they are announcing, in polished medical language, that certain children are unwelcome before they can even draw a first breath. The child disappears, and the bureaucracy congratulates itself for its efficiency. This is eugenics.

China is an even harsher case study, because demographic engineering there has long been tied to state priorities, preference for sons, and birth-quality concerns. Recent research on China’s birth-defect-prevention regime describes a three-tier strategy centered on carrier screening, prenatal screening, and intervention, while qualitative studies report ethical concerns regarding a policy environment that explicitly prioritizes “preventing and treating birth defects” in the name of improving population health quality. At the same time, UNFPA reporting shows that China still wrestles with a distorted sex ratio at birth and enduring preference for sons in some regions, a legacy shaped by the one-child era and related fertility restrictions. Scholarly work on the two-child transition further found that the older 1.5-child regime intensified sex-ratio imbalance because many families understood the policy to mean that one boy would secure family welfare, whereas one girl would not. In such an atmosphere, a child with a disability faced very little cultural leverage against the combined pressures of state planning, family expectation, and social stigma.

Enter one of the fathers of this paradigm: Paul Ehrlich. He opened The Population Bomb (1968) with this sentence: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” He warned that in the 1970s and 1980s “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Elsewhere, he argued that society “must have population control at home, hopefully through changes in our value system, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.” A slogan on the paperback version of the book summarized his entire creed in six words: “Population control or race to oblivion.” That school of thought did far more than make bad forecasts. It taught elites to see human beings chiefly as hungry mouths, carbon units, waste producers, and ecological threats.

Ehrlich’s intellectual lineage runs through Thomas Malthus and later neo-Malthusian writers such as Fairfield Osborn and William Vogt, whose books helped ignite mid-20th-century panic over population growth and finite resources. The central error in that tradition is philosophical before it is economic. It rejects the Christian conviction that man is made in the image of God, and it rejects the natural-law insight that the human person is an end in himself rather than raw material for collective management. Once those premises are surrendered, every ugly policy begins to look reasonable. Forced sterilization gains a moral gloss, abortion is seen as family planning, disability becomes a preventable waste, and children merely emission-producers.

Worse still, Ehrlich proved spectacularly wrong on the empirical side. And I mean spectacularly. The Green Revolution sharply increased agricultural output. Global food production rose dramatically. Commodity prices in the famous Simon-Ehrlich wager fell rather than surged, and Ehrlich paid Julian Simon after losing the bet over chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Our World in Data’s review of the wager likewise shows that the 1980s outcome favored Simon, while newer work on “superabundance” argues that, over long stretches, growing population can coincide with greater resource accessibility because human creativity changes the supply picture. In other words, people are consumers, yes, though they are also producers, inventors, builders, discoverers, and problem-solvers. A baby eventually becomes a scientist, engineer, nurse, entrepreneur, farmer, teacher, mother, priest, or craftsman. Ehrlich’s model treated the human person as a drain on a closed resource system, when history repeatedly shows mans to be the source of the solution.

Several thinkers exposed that error from different angles. Simon argued in The Ultimate Resource (1981) that the human mind is the decisive resource in economic life, and man’s innovation changes what counts as scarcity. Ester Boserup argued that population pressure can drive agricultural intensification and technological adaptation, steering well away from inevitable collapse. Amartya Sen showed that famines very often arise through political failure and breakdowns of entitlement, even when total food availability is the wrong variable to blame. Modern research is also proving that the problem isn’t limited resources but a breakdown in supply chains. Together, these lines of thought undermined the lazy assumption that more people automatically mean less flourishing. Frequently, a larger, freer, more inventive population means the opposite.

Meanwhile, the developed world now holds the bill for decades of demographic self-harm. Eurostat reports that the European Union’s total fertility rate fell to 1.34 children per woman in 2024, well below replacement level of 2.1. The same statistical system reports 4.2 million immigrants from outside the European Union in 2024, and 30.6 million non-EU citizen residents as of January 1, 2025. Political leaders openly discuss migration as a response to labor shortages and aging populations. Thus, the societies that spent half a century fearing too many babies now fear too few workers, too few taxpayers, too few caregivers, too few parents, and too little intergenerational continuity. That is a grim achievement. The culture of scarcity ended by manufacturing its own scarcity.

A sentimental environmentalism helped carry this disaster forward. My friend Wes Smith of the Discovery Institute talks with me on the air about these topics constantly. The emotional script is familiar: Save the planet, save the forest, save the river, save the species. Each of these can be a legitimate moral concern; after all, man must steward the earth’s resources well. Yet once concern for nature is severed from a hierarchy of goods in which man holds a unique place, activists’ tears generate social aggression. Then the unborn child with a diagnosis is deliberately sacrificed for ecological equilibrium, urban convenience, or personal lifestyle maintenance. Under such a creed, compassion flows lavishly and irrationally toward trees, reefs, and wolves, while human life is disdained or even loathed. That moral inversion is grotesque, and it has become fashionable precisely because modern man enjoys feeling virtuous while avoiding real virtue, sacrifice, and hard work.

The way forward is refreshingly plain. Societies need more children, strong marriages, stable homes, affordable housing, sane taxation, family wages, maternal and paternal support, and a public ethic that welcomes life rather than screening it away. Scripture calls children a gift, and the natural law confirms that a civilization renews itself through large families. Generations of loved children generate labor, culture, invention, caregiving, entrepreneurship, and fresh imagination. The child whom utilitarian logic treats as a burden is, in fact, the very person through whom a future medical breakthrough, economic renewal, or spiritual revival may one day arrive. The child with the extra chromosome is never the crisis; the real crisis is the society that has forgotten how invaluable a child is.