Father of population control movement supports sex-selective abortion, mass sterilization

by Kathleen Gilbert

Author of "The Population Bomb," Paul Ehrlich.

June 27, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Even when confronted with the deaths of 160 million children in the womb simply because they were girls, the father of the modern population control movement doesn’t bat an eyelash.

The problem of sex-selective abortion has been receiving increased scrutiny in the media recently, following the release of Maria Hvistendahl’s book “Unnatural Selection,” which was reviewed last week in the Wall Street Journal.

In that book the author documents the devastation wrought by widespread female gendercide in countries that favor sons over daughters.  She also records a discussion about prenatal gendercide with Paul Ehrlich, the author of the 1977 book “The Population Bomb,” a seminal work in the modern population control movement.

In “The Population Bomb,” Ehrlich had mentioned sex selection as a potentially effective tool for reducing population, although effective prenatal gender determinators such as ultrasound had not yet been invented.

When recently confronted with his support for sex-selective abortion by Hvistendahl, Ehrlich reportedly expressed his continued support for the practice. Ehlich told Hvistendahl, “it would be a good idea to let people have their choice so that they could have fewer children and could have what they wanted.”

“You can be aborted as a conceptus, you can be killed at birth, or you can be sold into slavery and die in a slum someplace,” he said.

Hvistendahl writes that after she pointed out that the prenatal killing of girls has forced surviving women into even greater suffering, brought about by higher rates of kidnapping, sex trafficking and marriage brokering, Ehrlich agreed but dismissed the statistics as “the old unintended consequences problem.”

Ehrlich also defended the principle behind mass forced sterilization, a concept mentioned in a 1977 book he co-authored entitled “Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment,” but dismissed as impracticable.

While Ehrlich says critics have taken much of that book out of context, he told Hvistendahl that the idea of reversing fertility - that is, requiring potential parents to petition the government for permission to override the sterilant - would “solve a lot of the things that disturb people the most.” He also suggested that mass sterilization working in tandem with sex-selection technology would be particularly effective for population control interests.

Notably, the 1977 text was co-authored by the head of President Obama’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, John Holdren, who has faced widespread criticism for the pro-population control content found in the text.