By Alexandra DeSanctis
Thursday, September 05, 2019
During yesterday evening’s lengthy climate-change town
hall, Democratic candidates proposed a variety of increasingly absurd policies
to address environmental issues. California senator Kamala Harris, for
instance, continued her theme of promising to arrogate unconstitutional power
to herself as president, announcing that she would deal with supposed GOP
obstruction on climate change by abolishing the filibuster.
Entirely ignored during the course of the event was the
fact that all seven Democratic senators running for president have signed on as
cosponsors of the Green New Deal in the Senate but, when it came to the floor
this spring, refused to vote for it. So much for an “existential threat.”
The most outrageous comment came from Senator Bernie
Sanders (I., Vt.), who responded to a question about population growth by
expressing support for taxpayer-funded abortion in poor countries. Here’s the
full exchange:
Audience member: Good
evening. Human population growth has more than doubled in the past 50 years.
The planet cannot sustain this growth. I realize this is a poisonous topic for
politicians, but it’s crucial to face. Empowering women and educating everyone
on the need to curb population growth seems a reasonable campaign to enact.
Would you be courageous enough to discuss this issue and make it a key feature
of a plan to address climate catastrophe?
Sanders: The answer is yes.
And the answer has everything to do with the fact that women in the United
States of America, by the way, have a right to control their own bodies and
make reproductive decisions. The Mexico City agreement, which denies American
aid to those organizations around the world that allow women to have abortions
or even get involved in birth control, to me is totally absurd. I think
especially in poor countries around the world where women do not necessarily
want to have large numbers of babies and where they can have the opportunity
through birth control to control the number of kids they have, it’s something I
very, very strongly support.
Sanders isn’t alone in linking abortion rights to
concerns about the climate. Some of the most ardent abortion-rights activists
routinely lament the choice to have children, on the grounds that doing so is
bad for the environment. Pro-abortion organizations, meanwhile, turn that
unwarranted concern into a policy agenda, spending their resources foisting
abortion and contraception on women in Africa, most of whom want no part of it.
Pushing birth control and abortion as a means of lowering
population growth, and specifically of eliminating “undesirable” populations,
is not a new tactic on the part of progressives. Planned Parenthood founder
Margaret Sanger, for instance, was a pioneer in the eugenics movement’s effort
to provide contraception to minority communities, largely to limit the
continued growth of what she deemed unwanted populations. Sanger put a fine
point on this in her writings: “The feebleminded are notoriously prolific in
reproduction.”
In the early 20th century, many medical experts,
lawmakers, and activists in the U.S. even went so far as to advocate forced
sterilization, which came to fruition in the widespread use of
government-sanctioned, federally funded sterilizations targeted at thousands of
disabled and mentally ill people, immigrants, minority women, and the poor.
This regime was sanctioned by the Supreme Court’s decision in Buck v. Bell
(1927). Referring to the defendant, who had been sterilized at birth, Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote that “three generations of imbeciles are
enough.” That horrific decision has never been overturned.
In his 1968 manifesto The Population Bomb,
Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich turned the concern about minority
overpopulation into a broader movement concerned that human reproduction in
general would contribute to the apocalypse. Ehrlich swore that the end was
nigh, predicting “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support
humanity” within the following 15 years.
Adherents of Ehrlich’s group Zero Population Growth
embraced the notion that childbearing ought to be forbidden, and Ehrlich argued
that compulsion would be acceptable. “There’s too many people, and we’d like to
see people have fewer children and better ones,” Ehrlich’s disciple Stewart
Brand said at the time. “Maybe anybody who’s thinking of having a third child
ought to go hungry a week.”
Ehrlich favored creating a blacklist of anyone who
impeded population control, imposing taxes on those who had children, and
awarding responsibility prizes to childless couples. The worldwide fear about
his predictions was acted on most aggressively in India, where the government
conducted 8 million sterilizations over a period of two years in the 1970s.
But Ehrlich has been proven obviously and dramatically
wrong — and not because citizens of the world listened to his cries and ceased
reproducing. “I was recently criticized because I had said many years ago that
I would bet that England wouldn’t exist in the year 2000,” he said in a 2014
interview. “Well, England did exist in the year 2000, but that was only 14
years ago.”
Even so, today’s progressives evidently have internalized
Ehrlich’s theories, despite no longer advocating methods as aggressive as
forced sterilization. By advocating taxpayer-funded abortion in “poor
countries,” Sanders not only exaggerates the environmental threat of
overpopulation but also displays grotesque chauvinism in his demand that the
world comply with the West’s determination to exterminate our future.
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