If you’re an old pro-lifer like me, you remember the many battles over China’s one-child policy. Mao actually encouraged large families. He thought population problems would be solved by communist economic planning, a large population would make China stronger—and the 60 million he murdered needed to be replaced.

After he died in 1976, his successor, Deng Xiaoping, instituted market reforms, which (along with bad U.S. trade deals) spurred China’s remarkable economic growth. But Deng also imposed the one-child policy, partly to make happy evil UN/Western aid agencies that insisted on it before they doled out U.S. taxpayers’ cash.

In the 1980s, great pro-lifers like Stephen Mosher exposed that China was maintaining its policy through forced abortions and infanticide. Mosher says that’s still happening.

China now reportedly is replacing its one-child policy with a two-child policy. The reason is the much-reported demographic crunch from the one-child policy, with not enough babies to support retirees. Who knows what’s really going on? If this is a real relaxation, it could (or perhaps I’m just too hopeful) lead to widespread cheating by Moms and Pops and winking by officials.

One result of more Chinese babies will be an increase in the country’s power. By the time these new, non-aborted kids enter the workforce beginning in 22 years, China already will have become the world’s greatest economic power, outdistancing the United States. Most of the new, non-aborted adults will join the vast Chinese middle class. Others will be the tech and business geniuses that make China even more powerful. It’s a reality to think about.

But America also has a “one-child” policy. Our birthrate has been hammered down from 4 per woman in the 1950s at the height of the Baby Boom to just 1.86 per woman in 2014, the lowest ever. Of course, 1.86 > 1. But this is a time of economic growth. Yet the number is below the replacement level of 2.1.

Our government policies also militate against more babies and for hammering even that 1.86 number down to 1. The government bars almost all limits to abortion, and even allows Planned Parenthood ghouls to harvest baby parts, while subsidizing it with pro-lifers’ tax dollars. Obamacare, as we’ve seen with numerous legal battles, mandates contraceptive coverage, even for Catholic nuns. Of course, Catholic nuns are celibate, but the point is the government is obsessed with forcing everybody to pay for limiting children.

The message from the culture masters also is that children are evil polluters who are causing climate change/global warming, so the fewer the people the better. Environmental extremism dominates the thinking of the Obama administration, the administration of Gov. Jerry Brown in California and the big shot tech billionaires in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. Demographer Joel Kotkin wrote recently, “The green movement’s real agenda, however, is far more radical than generally presumed, and one that former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach said is defined by a form of ‘misanthropic nostalgia.’ This notion extends to an essential dislike for mankind and its creations.”

The utopia such people are imposing on us is one in which the oligarchs live large and even sire large families. Bill Gates, the world’s richest man, has three children with wife Melinda. Despite that, they are obsessed with population control. Time reported, “Melinda Gates came to TIME’s offices to talk about her new focus on women and children and especially on contraceptives. . . . Although Gates was raised Catholic, she is heading up an initiative to get family planning information, contraceptives and services to 120 million more women by the year 2020. That includes new technology, better delivery system and a lot of education, including for men.”

Some of these people also want to live forever—here. “Oracle founder Larry Ellison has proclaimed his wish to live forever and donated more than $430 million to anti-aging research,” reported the Washington Post. “‘Death has never made any sense to me,’ he told his biographer, Mike Wilson. ‘How can a person be there and then just vanish, just not be there?’” (He’s ruling out a real heaven.)

So, the idea is the oligarchs get kids, but middle-class and the poor don’t. Ultimately, they want the overall population to drop sharply, maybe to a couple hundred thousand, with what the rest of us do for work replaced by computer programs and cyborgs. Then the oligarchs, and their allies in the government and the NGOs, can frolic in a non-climate-changed earth that’s become a depopulated environmental utopia, while seeking to extend their material existence to infinity.