By Peter J. Smith
Although President Obama's choice for science czar received unanimous approval from the US Senate in March, little mention has been made of Harvard professor John Holdren's career as a self-avowed "neo-Malthusian." In that capacity Holdren has advocated compulsory population control in America, including forced abortion and the addition of sterilizing agents to drinking water, and the creation of what he literally called a "Planetary Regime" that would enforce such a program worldwide.
"It's about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it's inconvenient - especially when it's inconvenient," announced Obama.
As "Science Czar," Holdren holds the position of the President's assistant for Science and Technology, Director of OSTP, and Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Holdren has accrued an impressive list of credentials to his name: a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a former Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, winner of the Volvo Environment Prize of 1993 (along with population control advocate Paul Ehrlich), and others.
However nothing better reveals the scientific and global policy views of Obama's Science Advisor than his writings on environmental issues, which help provide a picture of the man at the helm of the President's most inner circle of scientific advisors.
Earlier in February, FrontPage magazine had first revealed that Holdren had proposed a number of dispassionate prescriptions for a ruthless population control program that could be applied to the United States in a 1977 published book entitled, "Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment." Holdren co-authored the work with population control advocates Paul and Anne Ehrlich with the central premise that governments may curtail individual human rights "where society has a 'compelling, subordinating interest' in regulating population size."
"Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society," wrote Holdren on page 837.
Holdren defends that assertion on the next page by stating that "neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution mentions a right to reproduce" and that for the survival of society, a government could both coerce women to have children as well as force them to abort.
Large families are a particular target of Holdren and the Ehrlichs, who write that parents of such families "contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children" and "can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility."
Holdren advances several ideas for coercive fertility control. He states (pp. 786-7) that "sterilizing women after their second or third child" may be more practicable than sterilizing men, proposes a "long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin" at puberty and then "might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births."
"Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control," says Holdren.
"Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock."
Holdren proposes on pages 942-3, an ultimate enforcement mechanism in the form of "a Planetary Regime - sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment" that would control and distribute all natural resources and determine as well the "optimum population for the world."
"Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits," Holdren states. Earlier Holdren had mentioned the creation of "an armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force" (p. 917) as one method of achieving international security.
Read quotations and excerpts from "Ecoscience" with photographs and scans of original text via blogger ZombieTime here.
