Earlier this month, the co-founder of one of the country’s first legal abortion facilities, Horace Hale Harvey III, died. Harvey had founded the Women’s Medical Group (later renamed Women’s Services) in 1970 in Manhattan; at that time it was the largest freestanding abortion facility in the world.
But it is Harvey’s co-founder in the abortion business — staunch environmentalist Barbara Pyle — who, while only briefly mentioned in tributes to Harvey, ideologically influenced an entire generation of children.
Barbara Pyle
As Live Action News previously reported, Pyle told the New York Times in a 1971 interview that the abortion facility was her idea. “When abortion became legal here, I wrote to Hale and said, ‘Why don’t we start a clinic?’ I knew all about it from the research I’d done in England,” she said. “He sent me $30,000 and that’s what it took—two months’ supplies and everything, drugs, medications, pumps and everything. I figured we would make Hale’s money back in six weeks and we did.” Once it opened, Pyle served as the facility administrator, while Harvey was the medical director.
But Pyle’s abortion advocacy appears to be overshadowed by her advocacy for environmentalist causes. Also a filmmaker and the recipient of numerous awards, the work she is most known for is a cartoon beloved by millennials: Captain Planet.
Working with population control advocate Ted Turner (the founder of TNT, TBS, and CNN), Pyle co-created and was executive producer of “Captain Planet and the Planeteers,” using it as a way of indoctrinating children into environmentalism. She told the New Yorker in 2021 that she specifically created the characters on the show to be multicultural as a means of influencing as many people as possible, including pushing for an international audience.
“When an episode is set in India, it’s set in India, and it’s not some white person’s perspective of India. When it’s in Zimbabwe, that’s Zimbabwe. People can recognize themselves, which is the first key to get people to relate to characters. Television is the best medium to use. Now, perhaps, and maybe in the future, it will be TikTok. I don’t know,” she said, adding, “Basically, the trick is, how do you change the way people think? That’s what I had to do….”
And it worked: “Captain Planet” was massively successful, ranking #1 in the ratings for five straight years, with over 100 episodes airing in over 100 countries. But what were children being taught in those episodes? It was far from the generic “don’t litter” or “recycle your plastics.” Children were also being indoctrinated with a pro-population control agenda.
Population Bomb
At least two episodes involved combatting overpopulation.
The first, titled “Population Bomb,” aired in the first season of the show. In it, Captain Planet warns the Planeteers that the world has too many people, and family planning is needed to combat the problem, with New York City used as an example of the dangers of an overpopulated society. It is described as dirty, crowded, and noisy.
A building even crumbles because there are too many people in it, which further drives home the need to stop people from having too many children. The episode even notes, with a positive spin, how some countries put mandatory limits on how many children couples can have.
One of the Planeteers, Wheeler, fights back against this idea; he argued that no one can dictate to him how many children he does or doesn’t have.
Angry, Wheeler goes windsurfing during a storm and is knocked unconscious. He dreams of an island called “Miceland” filled with anthropomorphic mice, who lecture him about how the mouse population grew out of control, depleting the island’s natural resources and destroying the island.
Wheeler recounted his nightmare to the other Planeteers, as well as a warning given to him by one of the mice: “My people and I are doomed. But yours can still be saved. Don’t let this happen to you. Don’t let there be more people than your world can hold.”
At the end, a Planeteer alert airs, telling children not to have “too many” kids of their own when they grow up.
Captain Planet: Did you know the population of the world is now more than 5 billion?
Ma-Ti: Wow. That is a lot of people!
Gi: And it’s increasing by 90 million people each year.
Kwame: But the earth is not getting any bigger.
Linka: So when it is your turn to have a family…
Wheeler: Keep it small.
Captain Planet: The more people there are, the more pressure we put on our planet. So take it easy on our earth and conserve what you can. The power is yours!
Numbers Game
The second episode dealing with overpopulation, “The Numbers Game,” aired in the fifth season.
Again, it involves Wheeler dreaming of a large family — this time, after having fallen asleep during a “Tunnel of Love” ride with Linka. In the dream, he and Linka are married and have eight children, with another on the way. There is also a mudslide crisis in South America, caused by — once again — too many people living in one area, destroying the local vegetation and replacing them with countless small, rickety shacks.
The Planeteers also discuss how difficult it is to support a family, which forces people to take dangerous jobs and live in the shacks.
Despite clearly being attracted to Linka, and potentially even being in a romantic relationship with her, Wheeler is horrified by the thought of marrying her.
In the dream, he flashes forward to the two of them in middle age. His children are misbehaving, and some are still in diapers despite being too old; the eco-villains from the series are running the world, while Captain Planet doesn’t care about saving anyone or anything.
Two of the Planeteers, also middle-aged, lecture Wheeler about having too many children; none of them care about solving eco-emergencies anymore, leading the world to be in poor shape… all because there are “too many” people.
When he wakes up, Wheeler is relieved to be young and unmarried again, and vehemently assures Linka that, if they ever do get married, he doesn’t want to have more than two children.
The Planeteer alert again urges viewers to keep their families small.
Gaia: Every 10 years, our planet’s population grows by nearly a billion people.
Linka: Soon, there will be more than 6 billion of us sharing Earth’s limited resources.
Gi: So not only do we need to make thoughtful choices about family size, but we must start conserving now.
Ma-Ti: Get together with your friends and family and think of ways to reduce your consumption, as well as reuse and recycle.
Wheeler: And start doing them.
Kwame: So we can all have a green tomorrow.
All: The power is yours!
In Part Two of this series, we will discuss why overpopulation is a myth, modern-day efforts to resurrect Captain Planet for a new generation of children, and how abortion connects to the environmentalist agenda.
