Speaking at a luncheon during the 2010 World Climate Summit in Cancun earlier this month, medial mogul Ted Turner called on world leaders to institute an international one-child policy similar to the one enforced in China. Turner argued that radical solutions are needed due to the environmental crisis that the world is currently facing. Pro-Lifers are appalled by Turner’s outrageous comment, and even family planning advocates are disturbed that Turner would use China’s draconian policy as a model.
Turner, the founder of CNN, is worried that unless extreme steps are taken to control the population that the human species will not exist in 5,000 years from now. Under Turner’s plan, poor women would be able to sell their fertility rights for money, clothing, or food. Women who did not follow the one-child policy would be subject to forced abortion, imprisonment, and fines many times greater than their annual income if China’s policy is the example that is followed. While Turner has admitted that he is not “intimately familiar with everything” about China’s policy, he refused to retract his comments when confronted with examples of some of the atrocities that have occurred due to their one-child policy.
Turner faced a barrage of criticism for his comments from both sides of the abortion debate. Human rights advocates, including pro-abortion Amnesty International, have strongly criticized and fought against China’s One Child Policy for years, and are shocked that Tuner would call for the expansion of this vicious policy across the globe. Turner claims that coercion would not be necessary if women could profit from voluntarily selling their fertility, but experts note that with a policy of this nature coercion is inevitable. Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, explained that all population control programs are voluntary “until someone refuses to submit to the knife, at which time the pretense of ‘voluntarism’ is abandoned, threats start being made, and forced sterilizations follow.”
Pro-Lifers have long known that Turner is an avid supporter of abortion, but with five children of his own, his position on population control appears hypocritical. Pro-Life organizations and advocates must continue to spread the truth about the horrors that have occurred under China’s One Child Policy, and fight population control solutions to environmental concerns.