The American Drive to Export Contraception

Anthony Zimmerman
EWTN News
Opinion/analysis
October 8, 1996
Adjusted, April 17, 2000
Reproduced with Permission

In light of the debate in the US Congress, on whether to fund or defund the $410 for population-control activities, it is instructive to review the original ideology which conceived the movement and gave it birth.

The American Establishment which launched an anti-population movement in the 1960s did not stop to ask whether it was better for additional humans to be or not to be. Their concern was that vigorous population growth in the developing world might threaten the welfare of Americans who were losing the battle of the cradle. It was not primarily Margaret Sanger nor Marie Stopes who mobilized the funds to feed the birth control colossus. Ideologues in academe teamed up with the Ford, Rockefeller, and other foundations, and eventually tapped into tax funds, most notably through the US Agency for International Development (AID), to launch a worldwide birth-control drive.

Academe and the media have so conditioned us to consider that "world population growth" is a threat to our welfare, that we tend to forget the novelty of this worry. Our grandparents lived in the same world as we do, but no Ford nor Rockefeller Foundation had yet conjured up alarming news about alleged overpopulation.

The population movement (so writes an insider who is a member of the Rockefeller Foundation), started in the 1960s. It "had its origins in the twenty square blocks around the Rockefeller Center as well as on the campuses of Princeton, Harvard, Berkeley, and Chicago." Steven Sinding so identifies the American Establishment which fathered this ghost of "overpopulation" in the latter part of our century (see Population and Development Review, March 1996, 159-161-- a review of Oscar Harkavy's book Curbing Population Growth.)

Ford Foundation funding kept a semblance of balance between funds for "family planning" and "development." The "family planning funding" should suppress demographic growth directly, whereas "development" funding should facilitate the unfolding of economies to shift cultural bias away from family life and toward consumerism.

The Ford Foundation trained and supported thousands of scholars and government officials from developing countries who would return to their native lands to "act to modify the population trends in their countries" (Sinding, ibid.). The Population Council of New York also grew and flourished with the help of the Ford Foundation. This Foundation was also instrumental in creating and supporting the group of pre-eminent university-based population centers which have for years been serving as "the training ground for virtually every subsequent significant contribution to the field" (Sinding, ibid.). In other words, when you read about an "overpopulation problem" you read about a deception, a lie, originally sold under a glittering garb of academic dressing by salesmen in the pay of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations.

Academe was already well financed, but it was the power generated in Washington which rocketed the population movement into orbit, where it now circles the globe. Washington fixers of global demographic politics now tapped into funds from US taxpayers to promote their agenda.

The US AID leadership focused its funding, sharp as a laser beam, on family planning. Their's was and is a frontal attack against the birth of babies. Ships loaded with Pills, IUD's, condoms, sterilization knives, and suction pumps are dispatched to the ports of developing countries. Field workers, with enormous supplies, eagerly fan out into cities and rural areas to put dampers on the springs of life. Their wages, coming from abroad, tend to nudge them upward in local society, like a coterie of jack pot winners.

For example, containers with 49 million condoms, courtesy of US AID, lay in the harbor of Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania when I visited there in 1993. Administrators moved quickly to make accessibility to condoms mandatory in all restaurants and sleeping quarters frequented by truck drivers on Tanzania's trunk roads. Failure to provide condoms meant closure of the restaurant.

Never before in the history of the human race, I believe, has one nation seduced so many sister nations voluntarily or semi-voluntarily to encourage practices of sexual perversion. US AID administrators make it their unblushing business to entice recipient nations into increasing the unhealthy and immoral practices of contraception, abortion, and sterilization.

History abounds with smaller-scale examples of one group luring rival parties into orgies of sexual sins, of course. War lords in Japan, for

example, were reputed to have sent prostitutes into the army camps of the enemy until their enervated troops were open to assault and defeat. Moabite women invited Israelite men to indulge with them, and by the time Moses put an end to the play, 24,000 Israelites lay dead, victims of a plague (cf.Num 25). Jacob's sons used another ruse: they deceitfully induced Hamar and his son Shechem to have all the male townspeople be circumcised. Three days later, while the deceived opponents were still in pain, the sons of Jacob "took their swords and attacked the unsuspecting city, killing every male" (Gen 34:25).

The intentions of US AID in spreading birth control abroad may not be so clearly defined and focused as in the above examples, but there is nonetheless a clear, set, and officially articulated purpose in doing this, for the alleged benefit of the United States. The tactic of serving America first by spreading birth control in developing countries is revealed in a U.S. State Department document created under the direction of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the early 1970s.

The now de-classified document proposes massive population-control programs in developing countries for the purpose of achieving supposed long-range advantages for the USA. As described by the Population Research Institute (P.O. Box 2024, Baltimore MD 21298), the National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200) argued that rapid population growth in less developed countries jeopardized future US access to minerals and other raw materials and therefore threatened our economic and political security. The proposed solution? Massive population-control funds in the first place. In addition, other US aid and development loans should be tied directly to each country's willingness to implement population-control measures under the tutelage of the US: "Do you want our dollars? Then do our thing: spread contraception and abortion."

The same NSSM 200 document cautions that its agenda should remain hidden. Leaders in the target countries should not suspect that foreign pressure for family planning is "a form of economic or racial imperialism; this could create quite a serious backlash" (No. 106). The meaning of that phrase, jargon aside, is that recipient nations should not discover that the emperor who struts in their territory, though he is greatly acclaimed by all, is stark naked. Such a discovery must be avoided. Consequently, continues NSSM 200, "It is vital that the effort to develop and strengthen a commitment on the part of the Less Developed Country leaders not be seen by them as an industrialized country policy to keep their strength down or to reserve resources for use by the `rich' countries" (114). Appearances of good will should be cultivated with care. Birth-control programs must wear the trappings of "concern for the right of individuals to freely determine the number and spacing of children, as well as concern for the development of poor countries (cf. 115). Thus "choice" and "development" should be camouflage slogans behind which birth-control tanks can overrun the countries with impunity. Sweet-talk should open doors to deceivers who carry knives.

Congress has been asked again to allocate $410 million for AID this year. Such funding now obviously plays into the hands of ideologues who intend to spread sex perversion abroad, in order to serve imaginary national purposes. Is that what American citizens really want to do?


(Used with permission) (c) Copyright EWTN 1996. Presented by EWTN News Service under exclusive agreement with CWN. For permission to redistribute electronically, contact sysop@ewtn.com. For permission to redistribute in print media, contact cwnews@pcix.com.


Philip F. Lawler Editor:

- Catholic World Report: an international monthly news magazine

- Catholic World News: an Internet news syndicate.

Reprinted in the January 1977 issue of a new magazine, AGAINST THE GRAIN,3894 Nantasket St., Pittsburgh PA 15207. Sorry to say, Congress approved the funding in February at the request of President Clinton.

Top