News

By John-Henry Westen

TORONTO, December 9, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In a column published yesterday in one of the major Canadian national newspapers, Diane Francis, the Editor-at-Large of the National Post, has called for a globally enforced one-child policy taken after the example of China.  “A planetary law, such as China's one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently of one million births every four days,” writes Francis.

Commenting on the ongoing climate talks in Copenhagen, where world leaders are deliberating on possible solutions to hypothetical environmental catastrophes, Francis says, “None will work unless a China one-child policy is imposed.”

In an attempt to forestall criticism of her proposal Francis stated, “For those who balk at the notion that governments should control family sizes, just wait until the growing human population turns twice as much pasture land into desert as is now the case or when the Amazon is gone, the elephants disappear for good and wars erupt over water, scarce resources and spatial needs.”

Don Feder, a free-lance journalist and former media consultant for the documentary films Demographic Winter and the Demographic Bomb responded to Francis' assertions in an interview with LifeSiteNews.com.

The films document scientific evidence that, rather than overpopulation, civilization will soon be feeling the effects of the collapse of demographic growth, with most nations not achieving even a replacement birthrate of 2.1 children per woman.

Questioning Francis' proposal to impose a one-child policy, Feder asked: “Did she say how she wants to enforce this, if she wants to enforce it with fines, or imprisonment, or execution, or castration?”  Feder added, “It's amazing that someone can look at China, with forced abortions, forced sterilizations and female infanticide, and can see that as a model and say 'we need that on a planetary scale.' It's mind boggling.”

Francis' comments, he said, “expose these neo-Malthusians as the coercive utopians that they are. They actually want to punish people for having large families, and I think they would if they had the means to do so.”

While Francis is well known for her fiscally conservative stance, she is also radically pro-abortion.  In a 2002 column she exclaimed: “Any law that would force someone to have a child she did not want, or could not look after or have to put up for adoption, would be an act of state-sanctioned violence.”

Francis has a particular animosity towards religion.  Lamenting the inability to enforce a one-child policy, she said, “Unfortunately, there are powerful opponents. Leaders of the world's big fundamentalist religions preach in favor of procreation and fiercely oppose birth control.”