The climate change negotiations in Copenhagen last month produced little of note. One worrying aspect was the growing acceptance of, and even praise for, China’s barbaric one child policy, and a suggestion or the West’s own that is just as anti human.
Thirty years ago China began a policy to limit the number of children born, through measures that ranged from the discriminatory (fines for multiple children that only the rich can pay) to the brutally repressive (forced abortions and sterilisation). As well as the sheer cruelty of the law, there are multiple unintended consequences, notably an ageing workforce that will have to be funded in old age, a massive gender imbalance (girls are aborted far more often than boys), and the creative use of fertility drugs.
Western aid organisations, notoriously the UN, have in the past clandestinely aided and abetted the Chinese government in these terrible acts. Nowadays, we are seeing more open support for this absurd and indeed barbaric policy. Jonathan Porritt, for instance, former chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission - presumably, Sustainable Development for the UK rather than China - said that “Had there been no 'one child family' policy in China there would now have been 400 million additional Chinese citizens”. There is even a call for this policy to be extended to the whole world. The notion that commentators and policymakers can celebrate fewer people on this planet shows quite bereft of hope and ideas our opinion formers are.
But in case you thought it was as bad as it could get, think again. Here’s a quite sickening twist on the notion of “carbon offsets” – population offsets. The Optimimum Population Trust (am I the only one a little scared by that name?) suggests that we should make up our Western existence by preventing people in developing countries from existing at all. The Guardian article even obliges us with a picture of some of those (non-white) babies that are causing all the problems. A flight to Sydney can be ‘offset’ by preventing a child in Kenya from being born, we are told. Bargain.
If you want to know more, you don’t need to believe us, you can read first hand testimony:
This is what the much praised one child policy actually looks like.
This report gives a view of how ‘reproductive choice’ looks from a developing country perspective.
For earlier LifeLines perspectives on the excesses, errors and extreme positions of the population controllers, see here, here, and here.