Should China’s One Child Policy Go Global?

By Dec 7, 2010

CNN founder Ted Turner called on world leaders Sunday to address the global warming crisis by drastically reducing the number of people on the planet. Turner suggested the future of humanity was at stake and urged swift action.

“If we’re going to be here [as a species] 5,000 years from now, we’re not going to do it with 7 billion people,” Turner said at a luncheon where Brian O’Neill, an economist from the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research unveiled a study on the impact of demographic trends on future greenhouse gas emission.

Turner then proposed a global One Child Policy.

To be clear, Turner was not proposing that an unplanned pregnancy be viewed as a criminal act or that women who violate the One Child Policy should be forced to have abortions and sterilizations. However, Turner also denied that China takes Draconian measures to enforce the policy.

Turner’s suggestion that world leaders police the birth rate has raised concerns among many, including Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute. Mosher, an expert on China, called Turner’s proposal “absurd.”

“In his panic about global warming, Turner apparently hasn’t looked very far, for Draconian is precisely what China’s forced-pace population control is,” Mosher says. “I know. I have spent three decades studying it.

“The Chinese population control police don’t merely ‘encourage people to have one child,’ as Turner says. They arrest women for the crime of being pregnant with an illegal child, they subject them to detention without trial, and they forcibly abort them if they don’t ‘voluntarily consent’ to an abortion.”

Mosher goes on to assert that a so-called “voluntary” population control program simply doesn’t exist. “They are entirely ‘voluntary’ until someone refuses to submit to the knife,” Mosher continues. “At which time the pretence of ‘voluntarism’ is abandoned, threats start being made, and forced sterilizations follow.”