Quick Fact: Beck falsely claims Holdren supported "force[d] abortions"
Glenn Beck again falsely claimed that White House science and technology adviser John Holdren proposed "steriliz[ing] the drinking water to stop overpopulation" and "forc[ing] abortions so we don't have too many kids."
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From the November 18 edition of Fox News' Glenn Beck:
BECK: Does this sound familiar? It should. One of the spookiest guys in the administration is John Holdren. He's the "Hey, let's sterilize the drinking water to stop overpopulation. Let's force abortions so we don't have too many kids." He says now he didn't really believe in those things.
Fact: PolitiFact.com previously gave Beck's Holdren claims "pants on fire" status
Responding to Beck's July 22 claim that Holdren "proposed forced abortions and putting sterilants in the drinking water to control population," the website PolitiFact.com concluded that "the text of the book clearly does not support that. We think a thorough reading shows that these were ideas presented as approaches that had been discussed. They were not posed as suggestions or proposals. In fact, the authors make clear that they did not support coercive means of population control. Certainly, nowhere in the book do the authors advocate for forced abortions." PolitiFact gave Beck's claim "pants on fire" status. Indeed, Holdren and his co-authors advocated for noncoercive means of population control.
Plus, the radical idea of forced sterilization was only even considered in the context of an imminent Malthusian Catastrophe which entails mass starvation, disease, war, political unrest on massive scales, ecological collapse etc, and even then Holdren and his co-authors held reservations in his book Ecoscience. We have been lucky that innovation and scientific advancements have prevented a "Malthusian Catastrophe", but it's not unthinkable we could ever experience something like that (although not this century in my view) and academic musings on the matter in an unthinkable crisis are not equitable with endorsement for a policy when we are about as far away from the situation Holdren pondered that we could be.