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Published: July 16, 2009

Compulsory Abortion and Involuntary Fertility Control

Obama’s Science Czar -- in his own words

A San Francisco photojournalist has published a series of excerpts from a book co-authored by Obama Administration appointee John Holdren. Professor Holdren was unanimously confirmed as President Obama‘s Science Czar on March 20, 2009.

The book is Ecoscience: Population, Resources, and Environment, a 1977 work co-authored by Holdren and Paul and Anne Ehrlich. Professor Holdren currently serves as President Obama’s director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

The recommendations made in Ecoscience were first reported in the February 22, 2009 Front Page magazine article: “Obama‘s Biggest Radical.“ The assertions in the article - that Ecoscience recommended compulsory abortion, etc. - struck the San Francisco photojournalist who writes under the name “Zombie” as “too inflammatory to be true.” Zombie procured a copy of Ecoscience and learned that the claims made in the Front Page article were accurate. In fact, the Front Page article underplayed Ecoscience’s anti-life (or, to use the authors’ terminology, anti-natalist) suggestions. On July 10, 2009, Zombie published excerpts from Ecoscience on his website. Aware that the extreme nature of the recommendations made in Ecoscience would invite disbelief, he scanned all pages from which quotations were taken.

Ecoscience is concerned with catastrophic population increase, including in the United States. It contains a number of suggested actions. Under “Changing American Institutions” Holdren and his co-authors contend that compulsory abortion would be legal under the Constitution if “the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.”

“For example, under the United States Constitution, effective population-control programs could be enacted under the clauses that empower Congress to appropriate funds to provide for the general welfare and to regulate commerce, or under the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Such laws constitutionally could be very broad. 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. Few today consider the situation in the United States serious enough to justify compulsion, however.” - Page 837

Other recommendations include mandatory contraception for girls, beginning at puberty. Under the heading “Involuntary fertility control”: “A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men…The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.” - ages 786-787

The authors consider the possibility of sterilizing entire populations, should a perceived need arise. Also from the section “Involuntary Fertility Control”: “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. 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.” - pages 787-788

Although the authors mention in passing that their proposal would “horrify” people, they seem here to be more concerned with its technical feasibility. Other suggestions from Ecoscience include requiring “pregnant single women to marry or have abortions” (page 786), and the necessity for a “Planetary Regime” to enforce population policies (pages 942-943).

The authors also suggest that certain groups, who contribute to “general social deterioration by overproducing children” be required by law to exercise what they call “reproductive responsibility”: “If some individuals contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children, and if the need is compelling, they can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility — just as they can be required to exercise responsibility in their resource-consumption patterns—providing they are not denied equal protection.” (page 838.)

This seems to jibe with the statement made by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her July 12, 2009 interview with the New York Times Magazine. In that interview, excerpted in California Catholic Daily on July 14, Justice Ginsburg said “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

The authors of Ecoscience, writing in 1977, were convinced that the world was on the brink of population-driven environmental catastrophe. That belief led them to suggest totalitarian means to combat a non-existent problem. In 1986, Professor Holdren also predicted 1 billion deaths by carbon-dioxide-induced famines by 2020. That has not happened, either. Today Professor Holdren is very concerned about global warming. In 2006, he predicted a 13-foot sea level rise due to climate change. The most extreme current estimates are less than half that - a fact Holdren admitted at his Senate confirmation hearings.

In July 14 e-mails to Catholic News Agency, Rick Weiss, the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s Director of Strategic Communications, said the material at issue was from “a three-decade-old, three-author textbook used in colleges to teach energy policy.”

He could “easily dismiss” fears that Dr. Holdren favors government control over population growth.

“He made that quite clear in his confirmation hearing,” Weiss said.

He then quoted a section of the confirmation transcript in which Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) asked Holdren whether he thinks “determining optimal population is a proper role of government.”

“No, Senator, I do not,” was Holdren’s reply, according to Weiss and a transcript of the proceedings.

In other remarks at the confirmation hearing, not cited by Weiss, Holdren told Sen. Vitter he no longer thinks it is “productive” to focus on the “optimum population” for the United States. “I don't think any of us know what the right answer is.”

According to Weiss, Holdren “made clear that he did not believe in coercive means of population control” and is not an advocate for measures expressed in the book “and they are certainly not endorsed by this administration in any way.”

Weiss also provided CNA with a statement from the book's other two authors, Paul and Anne Ehrlich.

The Ehrlichs said they had been “shocked” at what they called the “serious misrepresentation” of their and Holdren’s views.

“We were not then, never have been, and are not now 'advocates' of the Draconian measures for population limitation described -- but not recommended -- in the book's 60-plus small-type pages cataloging the full spectrum of population policies that, at the time, had either been tried in some country or analyzed by some commentator.”

Describing Ecoscience as a “textbook,” they said its descriptions can be “misrepresented as endorsement.”

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