We are the cancer: An abortion doctor’s views on humanity
Timothy P. Carney
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You might remember during COVID-19 when some people saw the lockdowns as a chance for Mother Nature to reassert her dominance over us and “we are the virus” became the tag line.
Humanity as a virus wasn’t an original idea in 2020. In fact, you could go back to the 1990s and find a prominent doctor and researcher arguing that humans are a cancer.
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Late-term abortionist Warren Hern, the subject of a recent incisive profile at the Atlantic, repeatedly argued that human population growth was the greatest scourge of the planet and that humanity ought to be considered a cancer.
“The human species as a whole now displays all four major characteristics of a malignant process,” Hern wrote in a 1993 article for the journal Current World Leaders. The piece, titled “Has the human species become a cancer on the planet?”, described humanity’s “rapid, uncontrolled growth” and other traits that caused him to conclude: “We have become a malignant ecopathologic process.”
Overpopulation, Hern promised us, was a dire threat: “The overwhelming problem facing all of human society is the sheer numbers of people on the planet and the fact that the most severe challenges we face can be traced to the increase in these numbers.”
Hern was clearly wrong in his worry about overpopulation. He wrote that the doubling time of the human population was about 39 or 37 years, and he argued that the doubling time was shortening.
This led him to agree with the argument that by 2027, “the population doubling time would approach zero, and at which the time the population would be expanding at the speed of light.”
This obviously is not happening. In fact, the most recent doubling of the world population happened from 1975 to 2023, which is 48 years, much longer than what Hern wrote about in the 1990s. And this trend was already underway when Hern published: Population growth in 1993 was at the lowest recorded level, and it was 15% below the average population growth for the 1980s.
Lots of people were wrong about overpopulation, though. It’s Hern’s characterization of the human population as a malignant, “uncontrolled” presence on Earth that’s most telling.
“There is no evidence that overall growth of the human species is regulated at this time,” Hern lamented. People, he argued, are a cancer to the extent that they resist the regulation of their reproduction. “One of the main characteristics of a cancerous growth is that it resists regulation,” he wrote.
In his section lamenting that we humans are not adequately controlling our own fertility, the first example of “fertility control” he gave was abortion. He also critiqued Pope John Paul II for his visits to poor countries and said, “Pronatalist forces are, for the most part, in control of human institutions.”
Hern wrote about humanity as a cancer again in 1999 for the journal Population and the Environment. Atlantic journalist Elaine Godfrey mentioned that Hern even wrote a book arguing that humans are a cancer.
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Godfrey, in her magazine piece, hinted at the uncomfortable implication of the abortionist’s analogy: “To view human beings as a scourge seems a rather ominous perspective for a man who ends pregnancies for a living. Could he see his work as, even subliminally, a form of population control? When I asked about that, Hern shook his head vigorously, waving my question away, as if he’d been ready for it. ‘Being concerned about population growth is consistent with the idea of helping women and families control their fertility on a voluntary basis,’ he said.”
Even if Hern supports only voluntary population control, it’s obvious that he sees his job as being a cancer surgeon: Every living human he removes from its mother, even a perfectly healthy third-trimester baby, is a cancer cell removed from the Earth.