Should China’s One Child Policy Go Global?

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.

(Read more about
China’s One Child Policy in our recent article titled “Fighting China’s 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.”