60 Minutes Guest Supported Forced Sterilization for Indians
'Coercion? Perhaps, but coercion in a good cause,' Paul Ehrlich wrote in The Population Bomb.
I’ve long been aware of India’s effort to sterilize citizens as part of an effort to control population, a practice that was featured in Salman Rushdie's great novel Midnight's Children.
For those unaware, the BBC offered a brief overview of the policy several years ago,
“The drive to sterilise began in the 1970s when, encouraged by loans amounting to tens of millions of dollars from the World Bank, the Swedish International Development Authority and the UN Population Fund, India embarked on an ambitious population control programme.
During the 1975 Emergency - when civil liberties were suspended - Sanjay Gandhi, son of the former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, began what was described by many as a ‘gruesome campaign’ to sterilise poor men. There were reports of police cordoning off villages and virtually dragging the men to surgery.”
While I was aware of the campaign, I had no idea how huge the effort was. According to the BBC, “an astonishing 6.2 million Indian men were sterilised in just a year, which was ‘15 times the number of people sterilised by the Nazis’, according to science journalist Mara Hvistendahl. Two thousand men died from botched operations.”
Nor did I realize how the policy was shaped by the international “community.” As the BBC notes, the UN, the World Bank, and the Swedish International Development Authority all helped finance the sterilization effort. Additionally, the effort was supported by Paul Ehrlich, doomsayer and author of The Population Bomb.
I only knew this last part because I read a very fine article on Ehrlich, who on Sunday appeared on Sixty Minutes, written by my colleague Peter Jacobsen.
Jacobsen quotes from the chapter “What Needs to Be Done?” in The Population Bomb. In the passage, Ehrlich makes it clear he doesn’t just support sterilization; he argues the US government should be funding and supporting coerced sterilization.
“A good example of how we might have acted can be built around the [Dr.] Chandrasekhar incident I mentioned earlier. When we suggested sterilizing all Indian males with three or more children, he should have encouraged the Indian government to go ahead with the plan. We [the United States] should have volunteered logistic support in the form of helicopters, vehicles, and surgical instruments. We should have sent doctors to aid in the program by setting up centers for training para-medical personnel to do vasectomies. Coercion? Perhaps, but coercion in a good cause.
Why 60 Minutes would invite Ehrlich on is beyond me. He’s been wrong more times and more badly than any public intellectual I can think of with the possible exception of Paul Krugman.
It’s of course no business of mine who 60 Minutes chooses to invite on its program. That said, it’s embarrassing for a reputable news organization to have on someone like Ehrlich on and not challenge him even a little.
Scott Pelley has an obligation to viewers to ask some serious questions, and he failed miserably. He could have started with this: “Why should viewers take you seriously when you have been so wrong so many times, and when you’ve supported such vile and coercive policies?”
Platforming someone like Ehrlich without challenging him isn’t just bad journalism; it’s potentially dangerous.. As Jacobsen notes, Ehrlich’s policy “solutions” are nothing short of tyrannical. And it’s important to understand why.
Like so many collectivist policies, forced sterilization places ends before means. This has been the mistake of countless collectivists who’ve sought to create a utopia by using whatever means necessary—even force—to achieve their ideal society.
FEE founder Leonard Read wrote about this folly in Let Freedom Reign, pointing out why means are far more important than ends.
Ends, goals, aims are but the hope for things to come, in a word, aspirations. They are not a part of the reality—not yet, at least—from which may safely be taken the standards for right conduct. They are no more to be trusted as bench marks than are day dreams or flights of fancy. Many of the most monstrous deeds in human history have been perpetrated in the name of doing good—in pursuit of some “noble” goal. They illustrate the fallacy that the end justifies the means.
Means, on the other hand, partake of reality; they are of the here and now; they are tangible, concrete forms of action or conduct that can be weighed on the scale of cause and consequence. Examine carefully the means employed, judging them in terms of right and wrong, and the end will take care of itself. A rose blooms from a rose planting.
The Wall Street Journal was right to compare Pelley’s performance to that of Ron Burgundy. It’s a shame, because 60 Minutes could be so much more.
