John Holdren: The Unreported Story

Imagine if President Bush had appointed as a high adviser, a man who had once advocated eugenic forced abortion and the sterilization of people in developing countries.  Congress would have held angry hearings!  The press would have been at his house every morning demanding answers!  The front page headlines in the New York Times would have been so vivid they would have broken the presses.  But that—and more—is precisely what Obama science adviser John Holdren advocated—and the sound of crickets from the uninterested MSM echoes across the land.

But my colleague Michael Egnor at the Discovery Institute has noticed and written an eloquent open letter to President Obama that demands greater publicity.  From the letter:

In 1977 Dr. Holdren and his colleagues Paul and Anne Ehrlich published the book Ecoscience. In it, Holdren and his co-authors endorse the serious consideration of radical measures to reduce the human population, particularly third world populations, such as India, China and Africa. The measures include:

• People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility”...


• Women — particularly women of insufficient means due to poverty, nationality, marital status, or youth — could be forced to abort their children and undergo sterilization.

• Implementation of a system of “involuntary birth control”...

• Undesirable populations could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into drinking water or in food.

• Single mothers and teen mothers who managed to have their children despite measures to prevent fertility should have their babies seized from them and given away to others to raise.

• A transnational “Planetary Regime” and a transnational police force should be assembled to enforce population control.

Although Dr. Holdren recently has asserted that he does not support coercive measures to reduce population, he has continued to champion population control ‘science’ and he includes his book “Ecoscience” prominently on his CV, without disclaimer. In other words, Dr. Holdren dissembles. He insists, despite the record, that he no longer believes what he ‘didn’t believe’ then. Evidently you accept his denial...No one who holds that view, or has held that view, or who has publicly endorsed serious consideration of that view, should be in a position of influence in our government.

There is a deep and disturbing irony in your appointment of Dr. Holdren as Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The irony, sir, is this: Dr. Holdren endorsed the serious consideration of radical measures — including involuntary sterilization and abortion — to cull mankind. And he was not an equal-opportunity culler. He betrayed a particular animus to children conceived of third world parentage to young mothers of limited means. He asserted that they were a burden that we dare not bear — for the sake of humanity and for the sake of the Earth. He implored us to ensure that these children were never given life.

He meant you.

I am so sick of the double standards in this society. What Holdren advocated was evil.  No Republican would dare appoint such a man to high office regardless of his current beliefs.  We deserve to know precisely, and in detail, what Holdren thinks today. After all, he has the ear of the most powerful man in the world.