Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Democratic presidential hopeful, thinks the U.S. should fund efforts in third-world countries to decrease the population.
His comments came at Wednesday’s seven-hour CNN program featuring Democratic candidates talking about global warming.
The question was from Martha Readyoff, a Connecticut woman.
“Human population growth has more than doubled in the past 50 years,” she began. “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?”
Yes, replied Sanders.
He then inserted a promotion for abortion, saying, “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.”
Sanders said 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.”
“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,” he said.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J–NTyVYm_o
Becket Adams wrote in an opinion piece for the Washington Examiner that Sanders’ description of the Mexico City policy wasn’t accurate.
He explained that “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.”
But he noted the bigger dispute that Sanders was raising.
“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?'”
Adams, with sarcasm, pointed to the long history of racial targeting of minorities. After all, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger is on the record saying she wanted to expand the abortion industry to target the black population.
Adams said 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.”
Ebenezer Scrooge, in fact, in Charles Dickens’ 1843 “A Christmas Carol,” when told the masses had little food in his literary England, threatened, “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
