Environmentalists call for enforced population control
By Anna Arco
13 June 2008

Barry Gardiner has praised China's one-child policy

A Labour backbencher has praised China's controversial one-child policy during a debate in Parliament, suggesting that population control should be considered in order to counteract global warming.

The remarks by Barry Gardiner came only days after a key Government adviser on the environment attacked the Catholic Church for its "malign" teaching on contraception while arguing that the only way to stop global warming was to limit the world's population. Jonathon Porritt said he believed the Church was "undermining the future prospects for humankind".

Speaking in the Commons, Mr Gardiner, MP for Brent North, said that population control was one of three ways to face climate change.

He suggested the need to "reduce population - something that politicians in developed countries are very reluctant to discuss but which governments in developing countries have already taken on board".

He said: "People are very keen to accuse China, as we have heard in this debate, over their coal-fired power stations. Such people fail to commend the political initiative that has seen 400 million people not being born to create a carbon footprint in the first place. We need to take the issue of population seriously... it should be incorporated into this Bill."

Mr Gardiner's comments stunned pro-life activists and human rights campaigners. China's one-child policy has meant that couples who have more than one-child are penalised both financially and socially. Putting the policy into practice has also led to forced abortions and sterilisation.

Lord Alton, a crossbench peer and human rights campaigner, said that Mr Gardiner's remarks were "an endorsement of the one child policy pursued relentlessly by the Communist authorities".

He said: "That cruel policy has led to unspeakable violations of human rights and to the barbaric treatment of those who have dared question it. The blind human rights activist Chen Guancheng is still in jail for exposing the forced abortion or sterilisation of 130,000 women in the Shandong Province.

"China is the only country in the world where it is illegal to have a brother or a sister - a policy aided and abetted by our own Government who channel taxpayers money to agencies who in turn fund the Chinese Population Association. I am appalled that anyone should suggest that the answer to global warming is to pursue policies like this."

Josephine Quintavalle of Comment on Reproductive Ethics said conservation was important and that rich countries must learn to "share resources with those less fortunate" and not rely on "policies which involve coercive population control or discrimination against desperate immigrants". She said that it was "particularly unpalatable" to "admire China as Barry Gardiner does".

She said: "This is the country where millions of unborn female babies have been aborted in acts of blatant gender discrimination, in order to further the country's ruthless one-child policy."

John Smeaton, director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, said that he was appalled by Mr Gardiner's remarks in Parliament and accused him of not caring about the women who were being forcibly sterilised as a result of China's population control policy.

"These are well-publicised incidents," said Mr Smeaton. "People in public life are surely aware of them. But politicians and not just Barry Gardiner don't seem to care. Forced abortion was deemed a crime against humanity at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, and yet they happen in the name of population control in China. We should demand our politicians be confronted on these matters."

Mr Gardiner, a father of four, made his remarks less than a week after Mr Porritt attacked the Catholic Church during a speech on population control at the Cheltenham Science Festival. Mr Porritt, who has been involved with Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace and heads the Government's Sustainable Development Commission, argued that the only way to save the Earth was to have fewer children.

In a talk at the Science Festival entitled "Too many people?" the Cheltenham-based father of two suggested that a larger investment into "fertility management" could reduce global warming.