Was VP Kamala Harris’ ‘Freudian slip’ about ‘reducing population’ really a slip?

Last week, Vice President Kamala Harris made a startling comment during her speech about climate change at Coppin State University in Baltimore, Maryland. Her slip up so quickly became controversial that the White House officially changed the transcript of her speech.

Harris said, “When we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce population, more of our children can breathe clean air and drink clean water.” The altered transcript replaces “population” with “pollution.” It is unclear which children Harris believes would be breathing clean air and drinking clean water if such population control is successful versus which children would be ‘reduced.’

Myth of overpopulation

Harris’ comments received backlash on social media, with criticism coming even from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who said, “Reducing population is nuts. We need to increase population.”

In the past, Musk has said that there are not enough people and that “[o]ne of biggest risks to civilization is the low birth rate and the rapidly declining birth rate.”

“So many people, including smart people, think that there are too many people in the world and the population is growing out of control,” Musk said. “If people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble. Mark my words.”

More recently, he spoke with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, saying, “I’m sort of worried that hey, civilization, if we don’t make enough people to at least sustain our numbers, perhaps increase a little bit, then civilization’s going to crumble. The old question of like, will civilization end with a bang or a whimper? Well, it’s currently trying to end with a whimper in adult diapers, which is depressing as hell.”

Birth rates have been declining in the U.S. as well as around the globe. There were almost 600,000 fewer annual births in the U.S. in 2019 compared to 2007 and the U.S. birth rate has fallen 20% since 2007 despite a slight uptick during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The replacement birth rate is 2.1 children per woman, but the 2022 U.S. fertility rate was just 1.7 children per woman.

According to the Population Reference Bureau, “Low fertility produces an age structure that creates a momentum for future population decline, a situation that must be stopped at some point if the population is to be demographically sustainable. Also, populations with low fertility can fall in size at an extremely rapid rate. The longer low fertility is maintained, the harder it becomes to reverse population decline.”

The Pro Life Reply to: "Abortion Will Stop Overpopulation"

Government-funded abortions

The Biden administration seems ready to reduce the population even further and has not been quiet about its pro-abortion stance, which includes the creation of a website geared towards pointing women and minors towards abortion. The site appears to be part of the administration’s plan to expand abortion in any way possible, as discussed by HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, who said “all options are on the table” when it comes to protecting abortion accessibility.

But the women these policies seem to affect the most are women who are underprivileged. Biden became the first president to exclude the Hyde Amendment — a pro-life rider preventing federal taxpayers from funding most abortions — from his proposed budget back in 2021. This amendment protected women on Medicaid from being pressured into aborting their babies for “free” rather than be faced with the costs of raising a child. The Hyde Amendment has saved an estimated 2.4 million lives from abortion — about 60,000 per year. Without it, certain babies are targeted for abortion based solely on their mother’s income. In fact, statistics show that government funding of abortion actually increases the number of abortions committed. The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute found that women who undergo government-funded abortions tend to have more abortions.

“[The Hyde Amendment] may be the pro-life movement’s single greatest achievement,” notes Kelsey Hazzard, founder of Secular Pro-life. “[…] The Hyde Amendment matters both because it saves lives and because it sends a message about our national values. It says we don’t believe people are better off dead than poor. It says we don’t believe Medicaid kids should be targeted for destruction. And it says we won’t force people of conscience to be complicit in killing children in the womb just by paying their taxes.”

Wider access to the abortion pill

In April of 2021, under the guise of the COVID-19 pandemic, Biden’s U.S. Food and Drug Administration loosened its safety regulations known as REMS to allow for limited mail-order pharmacy distribution of the deadly drug regimen. By December of 2021, the Biden FDA had further weakened the REMS by eliminating the in-person dispensing requirement and enabling the abortion pill to be permanently shipped by mail, without a single test to verify pregnancy, gestational age, or life-threatening ectopic pregnancy.

By January 2023, the FDA had further gutted the FDA’s safety protocols on the abortion pill, allowing and even attempting to force retail pharmacies to dispense it. And it’s all to ensure there is easy access to the abortion pill despite studies showing that six percent of the women who took it required emergency or urgent care for complications.

1st Trimester Abortion | The Abortion Pill | What Is Abortion?

Now, all anyone needs to sell the abortion pill is a computer, phone, and the ability to write a prescription and use of the abortion pill is quickly rising. As Live Action researcher Carole Novielli reported, “A June 2023 issue brief published by the pro-abortion group Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), ‘Availability of Telehealth Services for Medication in the U.S., 2020-2022,’ found that ‘The number of facilities offering medication abortion increased from 733 in 2020 to 773 in 2021 to 789 in 2022.'”

This means women and girls are taking the abortion pill at home and suffering the physical and emotional consequences of that. Some women have even been tricked into taking the abortion pill by their significant others. But the Biden administration shows no plan of slowing down its intent to make the abortion pill as widely available as possible.

So did Harris really slip up when she said the Biden administration supports population control?

Next on the Biden administration agenda is to fulfill its promise to codify Roe v. Wade and force legalized abortion upon every state. In the six months following the fall of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, there were 32,260 fewer abortions. Codifying Roe will undo the work the pro-life movement has done and lead to increased abortions.