Sen. Bernie Sanders this week revealed his administration would push for population control, possibly including abortion, as a means to combat climate change. The moment occurred Wednesday evening during CNN’s seven-hour climate crisis town hall featuring the top-ten 2020 Democratic primary candidates.
A member of the audience, Martha Readyoff of New Milford, Conn., said to Sanders, “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 is 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?”
“Well, Martha, the answer is yes,” Sanders said. “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 CNN town hall audience whooped and clapped at this line, having apparently missed all that Readyoff’s position entails.
“And the Mexico City agreement, which denies American aid to those organizations around the world that are — that allow women to have abortions or even get involved in birth control to me is totally absurd,” Sanders continued.
This is not true — Mexico City only excludes abortion advocacy groups from family-planning funding, in line with federal laws that ban the funding of abortion as a method of family planning. In plainer terms, the Mexico City policy does not prevent funds from going to birth control and other non-abortion means of family planning. So I am not sure what Sanders is on about, unless he is calling specifically for more terminated pregnancies as a means to regulate world populations.
The senator concluded: “So 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.”
Should Americans be telling people in poorer countries that there are too many of them, they need to stop breeding and, as Scrooge once said, “decrease the surplus population?” It is not like population control enthusiasts and their close cousins, the eugenicists, have a long history of racial-targeting or anything like that.
This is well beyond Sanders’ usual rosy-eyed socialist nonsense. This is beyond his laughable romanticism of the Soviet Union. What the senator endorsed Wednesday is not so far off from what maniacal eugenicists pushed during the early decades of the 20th century. There is a reason race-obsessed eugenicists like Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger worked hand-in-hand with population control enthusiasts like Mellon heiress Cordelia Scaife May. That both women were also legendary bigots and racists is not coincidental to the positions they championed.
As white liberals are inclined to think if not say out loud, there are too many of you, and just enough of us with our good intentions.
