Obama Science Advisor Denies He Backs Forced Abortion, Population Control
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
July 21, 2009
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — The office of John Holdren, whom Obama appointed to become Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, is denying charges that Holdren backs forced abortions. Holdren has been accused of backing population control given comments that appear in a book he co-wrote.
With little fanfare, Holdren was confirmed by the Senate in March as the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
In a book Holdren co-authored in 1977, Obama’s science czar wrote that women could be forced to have abortions whether they wanted them or not.
Holdren also said the population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs put into the nation’s food or water, advocated the taking of babies from single mothers and giving them to couples, and said that people who “contribute to social deterioration,” such as minorities or other so-called undesirables, should be forced to have abortions.
In a statement released to Fox News today, Holdren’s office says that’s not so.
"Dr. Holdren has stated flatly that he does not now support and has never supported compulsory abortions, compulsory sterilization, or other coercive approaches to limiting population growth," the statement said.
"Straining to conclude otherwise from passages treating controversies of the day in a three-author, 30-year-old textbook is a mistake," it added.
However, Holdren, who wrote the book Ecoscience with well-known population control advocates Paul and Anne Ehrlich, said as much.
They suggest "coercive," "involuntary fertility control," including "a program of sterilizing women after their second or third child," shortly after birth. "Unfortunately," Holdren wrote with the Ehrlichs, "such a program therefore is not practical for most less developed countries."
Sen. David Vitter, a pro-life Republican from Louisiana who served on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation that approved Holdren’s nomination, said lawmakers should have spent more time on him.
"I was and continue to be very critical of Dr. Holdren’s positions — specifically his countless doomsday science publications and predictions that have been near universally wrong," Vitter told Fox News.
"I wish that the Commerce Committee had taken more time to evaluate his record during his nomination hearing, but like with everything else in this new Washington environment, the Democratic majority and the White House were pushing to speed his nomination along," Vitter said.
Holdren also called for a “Planetary Regime” that would rely on an international police force to force people in nations across the globe to submit to these forced abortion and other political policies.
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