Cardinal George Pell has attacked Australia's leading medical journal for publishing a letter in which an obstetrician described having children as "greenhouse-unfriendly behaviour", writes Mark Brolly.

The Archbishop of Sydney cited the views of Dr Barry N. J. Walters, the clinical associate professor of obstetric medicine at the University of Western Australia and obstetric physician at Perth's King Edward Memorial Hospital for Women, as an example of "extreme environmental proposals" that were often expressions of modern society's deep confusion about the place and value of the human person in the world.

"They should set off warning bells for us," Cardinal Pell told an audience in Seoul, South Korea, where he was the inaugural recipient of the Mysterium Vitae (Mystery of Life) Grand Prix award for his work in the pro-life cause. Dr Walters, in a letter to The Medical Journal of Australia last month, wrote that child benefits reward "greenhouse-unfriendly behaviour", and families having more than two children should be charged a carbon tax to fund the planting of enough trees to offset the carbon cost of the new baby.

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