President Trump has cut funding to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), a group that promotes abortion and coercive population control. The Stream’s Anika Smith highlighted some of the reasons why we should applaud this decision:

The U.N. agency has been linked with human rights abuses around the world, including forced sterilizations and abortions in China.

Forced abortions and sterilizations were uncovered by pro-life journalists in China as recently as 2009. Since Reagan, only the Obama administration has funded the population control group.

Remember that China still imposes a strict legal maximum on the number of children each couple can have. The One Child policy caused the rapid aging of its population and a yawning shortage of girls. So China’s autocrats raised that limit from one child to two. (How generous of them.) Women who exceed their quota face crippling fines or prison. See human rights activist Reggie Littlejohn’s organization for details of the ongoing oppression of China’s women.

During China’s “One-Child Policy,” Planned Parenthood helped the Communist government hunt down and punish women who had a second child.

During the height of the even more brutal “One-Child Policy,” Planned Parenthood’s Chinese branch helped the Communist government hunt down and punish women who had a second child. Now women who have a third child face similar penalties.  

Socialists Want to Plan Your Parenthood

Just think about that. Imagine the U.S. government deciding people’s family size. How would we react to that? We know how Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger reacted. She introduced the idea, writing in 1934 that as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, he should impose a National Baby Code. Its provisions would include:

Article 4. No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child, and no man shall have the right to become a father, without a permit …

Article 6. No permit for parenthood shall be valid for more than one birth.

When Hillary Clinton accepted the Margaret Sanger Award from Planned Parenthood, maybe some journalists should have asked her to comment on Sanger’s plan. Certainly if Donald Trump had accepted an award named for someone with a track record of racist eugenics, reporters would have hounded him — as they did when he got an unwanted endorsement from race crank David Duke. (David Duke, like Margaret Sanger, called on the government to sterilize the poor.)

David Duke, like Margaret Sanger, called on the government to sterilize the poor.

Totalitarian Libertines

The left is schizophrenic on many topics, but on no issue more than on this one. On the one hand, in the 1960s and 70s liberals embraced sexual libertinism as part of their program. The New Left had taught them that this was clever politics, since it would attract the young. More importantly, it undermined one of the key institutions on which middle-class Christian society — and hence, the free market — rested: the traditional family.

But leftists dream of perfection. Hence their weakness for utopias. They want to tame what they view as the wilderness of wayward, free human choices. They’d remake human society if they could as a savagely formal, geometric garden. The great Christian freedom advocate Frederic Bastiat wrote that socialists see other people as bushes in need of pruning. They imagine themselves as the gardeners.  

But if what you want is a sparse little garden full of tiny bonsai trees, how can you allow them to breed willy-nilly? Jeff Tucker has written here at The Stream that socialists and other statists (like fascists) can’t really allow people to freely plan their families. That throws dirt in the gears of their social engineering. Tucker noted:

Under conditions of freedom, people can procreate as they choose. They can fall in love, marry, raise families and make their own decisions. No true socialist society can permit this. People use resources. If the state leaves procreation to free people’s decisions, it cannot plan the economy — as socialists insist on doing. The only way that such planning is possible is to end the freedom to procreate without permission. For this reason, China’s one-child-per-household rule was not an aberration; it was the fulfillment of the desire to plan the social order.

Imagine Other People as Little Bonsai Trees

If you believe that other human beings, like you yourself, are the image and likeness of God, of course you won’t even think to try this. You will be humble enough to realize that you are not a gardener. You’re just one of the plants, like everyone else.

You wouldn’t dream of imposing on every person in a nation some abstract scheme that intellectuals concocted “for their own good.” Apart from protecting people’s rights and keeping order, you wouldn’t grow the government to the point where it dominated people. You certainly wouldn’t try to equalize the wealth, or the number of children, or any other aspect of life. You’d see that this was hubris. And that’s why Christians in the main have rejected both socialism and eugenics, both fascism and population control. We believe in a God, and we know we’re not Him.

Without God, Tyrants Run Wild

But if you abandon the idea that man is the image of God, then all bets are off. You can grab one materialist conception of man or another. You can treat people as the building blocks for a man-made utopia. You can cobble together Darwin and Nietzsche as Hitler did, or Marx and Machiavelli, as Stalin did. Or you can mix Progressive politics with the sexual ethics of the Marquis de Sade — as Margaret Sanger did.

Then maybe you’d found an organization like Planned Parenthood that would help an evil government like China’s to commit virtual genocide against its own people. Best of all if you could snooker the U.S. government into funding the slaughter abroad, while it underwrites your own abortion mills in America’s ghettos — which harvest those disproportionately black and Latino babies’ organs for profit.

And all through it you’d pose as a “liberal,” a word that used to mean someone who favored freedom.