Two of the most notorious advocates of population control and unrestricted abortion —Ted Turner and Timothy E. Wirth—are chairing a UN-sponsored event in honor of Argentinian Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, who chairs a critical advisory panel in the Vatican.
The cocktail party and dinner will be held on September 25 at the Harvard Club in New York City. Also, Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and a major advocate for population-control, will be featured.
The event organizers credit Bishop Sánchez for environmental advocacy. He is the Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and supposedly helped develop the the recent papal encyclical letter — titled Laudato Si — that urges political leaders care for the environment.
But top-ranking environment advocates have long insisted that their environmental cause demands a sharp reduction in the world’s growing population.
Ted Turner, a long-time advocate of drastic population control, famously said that he would like to institute a “one-child policy” for 100 years in order to reduce the world population by five billion people. Asked what his goal would be for world population, Turner replied: “I think two billion is about right.”
The world’s populations is five billion greater than preferred by Turner, who owns a vast ranch in Montana.
Guest-speaker Christiana Figueres is also an outspoken advocate of population control. Humanity “really should make every effort” to reduce global population trends to protect the environment and fight global warming, Figueres said earlier this year in an interview with Climate One. “I mean we all know that we expect nine billion, right, by 2050,” Figueres said. “So, yes, obviously less people would exert less pressure on the natural resources.”
Similarly, Timothy Wirth has repeatedly worked with Cecile Richards, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. For example, Richards and Wirth jointly criticized the U.S. Bishops’ healthcare plan because of the absence of a provision for abortion. “Does anyone else see the irony in the U.S. bishops wanting to define universal health care as covering everything except for what they don’t support?” the two wrote.
When President Obama reversed federal policy by reinstating funding for the UN Population Fund, he was applauded by Wirth. “Universal access to reproductive health services, including family planning, is an agreed global goal, supported by the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), because it is central to economic development, health, gender equality, human rights and environmental security around the world,” Wirth said.
Bishop Sánchez’s activities have earned him much criticism from conservatives worried about elite support for abortion and population control.
In May, Stefano Gennarini of the Center for Family and Human Rights, publicly criticized Sánchez’ decision to team with“arguably the most powerful proponents of abortion and population control in the world” and offer them a platform at the Vatican during a conference on climate change. The two people cited by Gennarini are Jeffrey Sachs and Ban Ki-moon.
Gennarini spoke with Bishop Sánchez and described his remarks as “a surprising mixture of indictments of the tea party, the oil industry and the small pro-life organization I work for.”
Gennarini further noted that the bishop’s work on “climate change” and “sustainable development” clashes with Catholic ideas. “When the logic of these theories is carried out to their full extent they inevitably collide with the Church’s teaching on abortion and population control,” he said.
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter @tdwilliamsrome
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