Ted, Teddy, and the Natalist Impulse

A couple days ago, Ted Turner jumped on the one-child bandwagon at the Cancun climate change farce, lecturing the audience about the planetary virtues of sub-replacement fertility. Among the creepy untermensch solutions Turner proposed to solving the world’s population “problem” was the selling of fertility rights, so that poor people could make some bucks by letting their betters reproduce for them. (Where are the people worried about “disparate impact” when you need them?)

As an antidote to Turner’s foolishness, it’s worth looking at an essay posted over the weekend by David Stokes. It’s about one of Teddy Roosevelt’s more famous speeches—his April 23, 1910 address to the Sorbonne, “Citizenship in a Republic.”