During the Democrats’ marathon town hall on climate change Wednesday, an audience member asked Bernie Sanders if he was “courageous enough” to address the issue of curbing global population and if he would make it a “feature” of his plan for addressing the “climate catastrophe.” This question comes straight out of Paul Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb, the 1968 junk-science screed that peddled the global overpopulation myth. Yet this debunked ideology still captivates the minds of many ecofascists.

Sanders responded with an answer that would make Planned Parenthood founder and eugenicist Margaret Sanger proud. “The answer is yes,” he stated. “And the answer has everything to do with the fact that women in the United States of America, by the way, have a right to control their own bodies and make reproductive decisions. The Mexico City agreement, which denies American aid to those organizations around the world that allow women to have abortions or even get involved in birth control, to me is totally absurd. I think especially in poor countries around the world where women do not necessarily want to have large numbers of babies and where they can have the opportunity through birth control to control the number of kids they have, it’s something I very, very strongly support.”

Beyond Sanders affirming the myth of global overpopulation, he plays that old political game of mischaracterization. When Sanders talks of the Mexico City agreement, the 1984 rule that forbids U.S. funding of foreign nongovernmental organizations that “perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning,” he expands this ban against abortion to include all forms birth control, something the agreement does not do. Evidently for Sanders, abortion is the only form of birth control.

Secondly, Sanders exposed himself as a population-control extremist who is literally calling for the killing of preborn babies, especially in poorer countries, because he thinks this will help the climate. This kind of extremist talk coming from one of the leading Democrat presidential candidates should be unnerving to every American.

As The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh notes, “[Sanders] sees a world populated by normal people, on one hand, and surplus people on the other hand. His simple, if genocidal, solution is to throw away the surplus. This raises an obvious question: Why doesn’t Sanders include himself in the surplus? As G.K. Chesterton once observed: ‘The answer to anyone who talks about the surplus population is to ask him whether he is the surplus population, or if he is not, how he knows he is not.’” Walsh also observes, “The funny thing about people who advocate reducing the population to save the planet is that they always want to start by killing babies.” The defenseless make easy targets.