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| Peter Singer: supports infanticide |
One of the speakers was infanticide advocate Peter Singer who suggested that rising population might make it necessary to forcibly prevent families from having children. (See here for consideration of the origins of the over-population myth.)
‘It is possible of course’ Singer told the conference ‘that we give women reproductive choices, that we meet the unmet need for contraception but that we find that the number of children that women choose to have is still such that population continues to rise in a way that causes environmental problems.’ He also suggested that it was “appropriate to consider whether women’s reproductive rights are 'fundamental' and unalterable or whether… there can be imaginable circumstances in which you may be justified in overriding them.” In other words, if abortion and contraception fail to reduce human population growth it would, in Singer’s view, be morally acceptable to forcibly prevent men and women from having children. The reality however is that population growth is already on the verge of collapsing in many parts of the world, with all the economic and social dangers which that entails, precisely because of the widespread legitimisation of abortion and contraception.
Kavita Ramdas, an Indian representative of the Ford Foundation, made similar points arguing that “you can force women to have less children [sic], you can force people to consume less”. Reversing the racism often shown by the population control movement she asserted that the United States and Europe ‘are truly putting an unsustainable load on the planet for all of us’ and suggested that ‘if Americans consume more than Africans, they should be forced into a one child policy’.
I wonder how the delegates attending the conference would have responded if a speaker had suggested that the so-called 'right' to abortion had to be overriden to deal with declining population growth? The right to kill seems to be unchallengeable but a woman's right to truly control her own fertility by conceiving children within the self-giving supportive union of marriage can be overriden to suit the political agenda of ideologues such as Singer and Ramdas.
These calls were addressed to representatives of the UN, national governments, and some of the largest NGOs in the world. The forces arrayed against the family, and especially against it’s most vulnerable member, the unborn child, are very powerful, very wealthy and very determined.
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