During a recent discussion about population control, a UK House of Lords member seemed to suggest that people with large families — including sports stars, celebrities, and politicians — undergo vasectomies in order to save the planet.
According to GBN, Liberal Democrat Lord Jones of Cheltenham argued that overpopulation is harming the planet. “Leading environmentalists including Sir David Attenborough say the world’s greatest problem is an ever-increasing human population,” said Jones. “Does the government believe that vasectomies provide part of the answer and do they think that male sports stars, celebrities and politicians with six, seven or eight children should have a vasectomy to set an example and help save the planet?”
It is unclear whether or not Jones was actually advocating for the government to pressure or encourage men into undergoing vasectomies, or whether his words were a swipe at Prime Minister Boris Johnson who has “at least seven children,” according to GBN.
“There’s a question. A rather cutting one if I may say,” joked work and pensions minister Baroness Stedman-Scott.
Lord Bird chimed in, “I also have to say that my snip came too late as I have five children.”
Is overpopulation really an issue?
But in reality, the Western world is facing the concern of population collapse, as Elon Musk has noted multiple times. “Most people think we have too many people on the planet,” he said in 2019, “but actually this is an outdated view.” He added, “I think the biggest problem the world will face in 20 years is population collapse. Collapse: I want to emphasize this. The biggest issue in 20 years will be population collapse, not explosion, collapse.”
In fact, multiple nations have begun offering incentives for couples to have more children, including Hungary, which offers tax breaks — including lifetime income tax breaks for women having more than four children. The country also offers state support for the purchasing of seven-seat vehicles and favorable mortgage rates to large families. Poland, Italy, and Singapore have created similar incentives in an effort to boost the population.
READ: Prince William claims Africa’s ‘human population presents a huge challenge’
Overpopulation alarmism ‘incorrect and deeply racist’
In 2020, Brittney Bush Bollay of the Washington State Sierra Club admitted that the idea of global overpopulation is “both factually incorrect and deeply racist.” As previously reported by Live Action News:
Bollay goes on to state, “The mainstream environmental movement has an uncomfortable history regarding race and equity.” She’s correct — the early conservationists were also eugenicists and/or racists, almost without exception. Madison Grant, for example, penned “The Passing of the Great Race,” a book Hitler referred to as “my Bible.” Theodore Roosevelt, another early conservationist, also praised the book. And John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, was known to denigrate minorities, complaining about their alleged “laziness.” In his 1901 essay collection, “Our National Parks,” he wrote, “As to the Indians, most of them are dead or civilized into useless innocence.”
Likewise, the United Nations and Amnesty International have promoted abortion and birth control in pro-life African nations for decades. “Most of the African communities actually believe by their traditions and their cultural standards that abortion is a direct attack on human life,” said Culture of Life Africa founder Obianuju Ekeocha. She said the push by Europeans to expand abortion in Africa is the equivalent of telling an African woman “what her parents, her grandparents, her ancestors taught her is actually wrong. You’re going to have to tell her that they have always been wrong, and that… is colonization.”
Coercive population control methods have deep roots in the eugenics movement with governments and organizations working to reduce certain ethnic and economic groups. For example, Planned Parenthood has long targeted the Black community and in 1909, California passed the third sterilization bill in the U.S., which allowed the coercive sterilization of over 20,000 people.
Whether Lord Jones would encourage the idea of vasectomies for men with multiple children remains to be seen. But as history has shown, when the government turns its attention to its citizens’ fertility, it is never with good intent or moral reason.
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