Rachel Lu's 2026 Law & Liberty essay credits Paul Ehrlich with inspiring the anti-natalist anxiety pronatalism now pushes against

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Rachel Lu's "Pronatalism for Freedom-Lovers" (Law & Liberty, 24 March 2026) names Paul Ehrlich as the source of the overpopulation-driven anxiety that made low fertility seem virtuous: "The late Paul Ehrlich amply showed how that kind of anxiety could give rise to a robust anti-natalism that made sterility seem positively virtuous." The essay uses Ehrlich as historical shorthand — the figure whose overpopulation warnings are credited with tipping a generation toward not reproducing — before pivoting to argue for a "libertarian," policy-reform pronatalism as the corrective.

This is the same rhetorical move this vault has already documented for a different demographic panic at the opposite end of the same 50-year arc: Song Jian's cybernetics-of-population argument credits Club of Rome-style overpopulation anxiety with justifying China's coercive one-child policy, and A.E. Clark's 2016 essay — on this same venue, ten years earlier — names both: "The alarm had been spread to a mass audience through the writings of Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome" (verified 2026-09-08 by direct fetch of the Clark essay). The same venue has therefore cast Ehrlich as the source of demographic panic at both ends of the arc — a genuine same-villain repeat, not merely a same-milieu echo; the question held open at observation-lawliberty-ehrlich-cross-time-villain-bridge-unconfirmed is now answerable in the affirmative.