By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
Media mogul and CNN founder Ted Turner called on world leaders this Sunday to institute a global Chinese-style one-child policy in order to ensure the future of the human race.
Steven W. Mosher, founder of the Population Research Council and an expert on China’s one-child policy, is reporting that Turner was speaking at a luncheon on Nov. 5 where economist Brian O’Neill from the U.S.’s National Center for Atmospheric Research unveiled his study on the impact of demographic trends on future greenhouse gas emission.
“If we’re going to be here [as a species] 5,000 years from now, we’re not going to do it with seven billion people,” said Turner, who went on to propose the immediate adoption of a global one-child policy.
Turner, a father of five who has often publicly regretted having so many children, has long been a fan of the draconian Chinese program that forces women to be sterilized or to abort any children they conceive beyond the one-child limit. As Mosher points out, during an appearance on National Public Radio this spring, Turner praised the Chinese government for “wisely institut[ing] … the one-child family policy, … put[ting] in penalties, tax penalties and so forth, for people that have more than one child.”
Turner makes it clear that he doesn’t want unplanned pregnancies to be viewed as a criminal act, however, and says violators should not be forced to have abortions or to be sterilized, as they are in China – even though Turner denies that any such thing happens in China. He claims the policy is enforced “without, as far as I can see, Draconian steps.”
However, the brutal reality of the policy was made clear only last month when the world was horrified by a YouTube video that detailed the traumatic experience of a young Chinese husband whose pregnant wife was picked up and forced to have an abortion even though she was in her eighth month.
“Of course, Turner does not want to resort to violence of the kind common in China,” said Mosher. “Instead, he wants to pursue a less populated world by bribing women into giving up their fertility. Under his scheme the world’s poor could sell their fertility rights and thereby, in his words, profit from avoiding procreation.”
Fortunately for U.S. women, their fertility is protected by the Tiarhrt Amendment, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1998 that forbids the use of bribes and sanctions in government-funded population control programs.
“Paying women to accept contraception, sterilization, or abortion, as Turner proposes, would be a violation of U.S. law,” Mosher writes.
What will Turner do with those couples who refuse to comply? Will they be forced into the government’s “sterilization queue”?
“You bet!” Mosher says. “That is precisely the path population control programs worldwide have often followed. They are entirely ‘voluntary’ until someone refuses to submit to the knife, at which time the pretence of ‘voluntarism’ is abandoned, threats start being made, and forced sterilizations follow.”
Turner, a billionaire, has been supporting population control programs for many years. Back in 1998, at a Zero Population Growth banquet, he spoke about “managing human numbers in a sensible way … I really believe that there are huge forces arrayed against us. The forces of ignorance, lack of education and prejudice and hatred and fear. The forces of darkness in general.”
“In the end,” he concluded. “I’ll put my money on the smart people against the dummies. If the smarts can’t beat the dumbs, we’re really not that smart, are we? And we have a lot more fun than they do, because we’re right and they’re wrong.”
Mosher, who has spent three decades studying China’s one-child policy, questions how smart it is to align oneself with China’s brutal dictatorship, “especially when you admit knowing almost nothing about the subject.”
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