Funded population targets invite bribery, deceit, also violence and coercion: when hired hands fill their quota of sterilizations, or IUD's inserted, or measured out Pills and condoms, they qualify for pay; if they do not meet targets they may lose their pay or their job. Human rights and humanitarian considerations are out of the field of vision when eyes focus on targets. I spoke with a young man in India who barely escaped a sterilization team; when he caught sight of the team turning into his street, he was almost frozen on the spot, but with newly found energy dashed in and out of doors until they lost him. His quick action saved him from a forced vasectomy, and so deprived the team of one more statistic to claim a fee. Others accepted fees to be vasectomized; since the pay was good, many came for a second, or third, or more repeat vasectomies. Willing workers repeated the now useless operation to collect their own fees, and to reward the cheaters - all at the expense of distant tax payers in the USA and elsewhere.
Pills which may be prescribed under controlled conditions in the USA, are likely to be dispensed without adequate care in India, Bangladesh - in all developing countries. And, not surprisingly, some acceptors of Pills play games with our generosity. Not all acceptors use the their freely received Pills. One researcher wondered why people in this village in India were having babies like before, though they all accepted Pills. He learned their secret: they accepted the Pills with a smile, then stored them safely under the sills of the roofs in their houses. They sheepishly showed them to the investigator.
Targets must be met, so program implementors become cogs in the wheel of a human bureaucracy run amuck. In China local districts are held hostage to the success of meeting the target quotas. Unapproved pregnancies are torn out of the protesting mothers; other mothers escape alone at night, to melt into a population of strangers, without means and legal rights, there to eventually bear their child without having it killed. Targets likewise are impatient with natural family planning, an unsupervised situation in which parents voluntarily abstain out of love for their spouses and children. Hence programmers concentrate on contraceptives, sterilization, and abortion as the mainstream methods of achieving targeted deceleration of demographic growth. Funds for natural family planning are a minuscular token of the total budget, and they are characteristically granted only on condition that the NFP team declare themselves to be a part of one integrated team of family planning; one part, therefore, of the contraception, sterilization and abortion juggernaut. The Kenya NFP group, for example, rightly and heroically refused funding, rather than to sign such a document which implies cooperation with the promotion of contraception, a document which would also have been used as a public sign of Church approval of contraception programs. (Private correspondence).
As Pope John Paul II wrote in Familiaris Consortio 30, the Church condemns the activities of governments which push sinful methods of birth control to achieve lowered birth targets:
Thus the Church condemns as a grave offence against human dignity and justice all those activities of governments or other public authorities which attempt to limit in any way the freedom of couples in deciding about children. Consequently any violence applied by such authorities in favour of contraception, or still worse, of sterilization and procured abortion, must be altogether condemned and forcefully rejected. Likewise to be denounced as gravely unjust are cases where, in international relations, economic help given for the advancement of peoples is made conditional on programmes of contraception, sterilization and procured abortion.
Yet the UN literature distributed at the 1984 Mexico Conference specifically and insistently recommends targets. one of the papers circulated there, Appendix C, "Nature and Scope of the Recommendations" reads in part: Recommendation 34: "Governments are urged to set their own quantitative targets with respect to fertility levels." A background release, POP/283, dated I August 1984, states that: "governments would be urged to set their own quantitative fertility targets."
The Preparatory Committee of the UN Conference Secretariat, for governments with fertility policies (Document E/CONF.76/5, 6 June 1984, indicated the centrality of targets in their strategy:
Recommendation 27: Governments that have adopted or intend to adopt fertility policies are urged to set up their own quantitative targets in this area. Countries implementing family planning programmes should establish programme targets at the operational level, respecting the basic right of couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children, taking into account the needs of their living and future children and their responsibilities towards the community. [But the Philippine experience indicates "targets" and respect for the right of couples do not coexist. Countries must choose one or the other: targets or respect for the rights of couples.]
National delegations to the 1984 Conference stood up to wave flag of targets: "We believe that all nations should participate in setting goals and programs for population stabilization... Attention should be given to setting realistic goals and timetables" reads a statement signed by delegates from seventeen nations.
This prevalent clamor for targets must have a reason; and the reason is not hard to find. UNFPA and various agencies which promote contraception are funded to no small extent by the United States Agency for International Development. Recipients of US AID funding are in a weak position - like chick birds stretching out hungry beaks to Uncle Sam for cash. And the one-track mind, of US AID people is locked unrelentingly on "targets" as the Gulf War missiles locked onto their computer displayed objects. What US AID dispensers have in mind becomes a no-nonsense condition for aid recipients. Jacqueline Kasun gives details about the role of US AID in calling the tune for recipients of contraception projects around the globe.
"No one who follows the congressional hearings on foreign aid," she writes, "can fail to be startled by the depth of the official U.S. commitment to population control abroad" (The War against Population, Ignatius Press, 1988, p.79). Since 1965 the United States has contributed more to population programs of countries outside of the USA than all other countries combined and has pressured these as well as international agencies to back the programs (Kasun, ibid). AID cornucopia influences the decisions of people in governments, of course, especially those in the health and welfare ministries. I once asked a vice minister of Welfare in a developing country how it is possible that his government accepts funding for contraception, whereas he knows well that it really spawns abortion. He took me aside and then explained about as follows: "Our Welfare Ministry is very poor, always short of funds. But when we make a population proposal to the USA, funding arrives almost 100 percent as we ask. We all know that." His frank admission is an example of the powerful leverage US dollars exert on the minds of fund recipients. We should not feign surprise, then, even if they goose-step in tight ranks to the drum-beat of US AID people. Kasun continues:
In addition to more than 2 billion dollars in explicit AID "population assistance" appropriations to various countries and international organizations such as the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, the United States has made donations to the World Bank and to United Nations organizations - including the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, UNESCO, UNICEF, and the International Labor Organization - that have been used for population control with a degree of enthusiasm and dedication equal to that of the AID bureaucracy.
Early in the 1970's the United States' foreign aid bureaucracy spelled out its plan to bring world population growth to a halt. In a classified document prepared in 1974 and not declassified until 1980, the aid planners voiced their intent to bring about a "two-child family on the average" throughout the world by the year 2000 (U.S. Government Document, NSSM 200, p. 14) ...
In its Section 102 on "Development Assistance Policy", the 1978 act said that U.S. aid would be "concentrated" in countries that demonstrate their "commitment and progress" by their "control of population growth", along with other indications of serious intent (Kasun, pp. 79-82).
When private citizens use bribery or blackmail, we put them jail. When US AID people do it on a grand scale, we call it a policy. It is time to call a halt to the charade. All population funding of US AID ought to be stopped, because administrators use the funds to bribe and blackmail poor nations.
Does the Church agree to the promotion of contraception among non-Christian peoples, excusing the action because it is not realistic to expect that the masses will practice natural family planning? Some years ago a priest, an economist by education and a president of a Catholic University, stated that Humanae Vitae is not practical in real life today, because whereas the developing countries MUST necessarily decelerate population growth to foster economic development, the masses will not adopt natural family planning to achieve that purpose. He was wrong, of course, but he was convinced; he has since departed into the next world, where he can try this kind of false logic, if so wishes, with the Lord. We trust that he now sees light in God's light, and knows better. RIP.
Natural family planning IS within the reach of non-Christian as well as Christian families. The actuality of its practice refutes theories that it will not be done. Of approximately one million couples in Japan who practice the periodic abstinence method of family planning, only a minority are Catholics. Of late the number is growing, as more than 4000 couples per month are purchasing L Sophia, a sophisticated thermometer which enters data automatically into a mini-computer and then displays the fertile days of the cycle. Few of the 40,000 couples in Calcutta's slums to whom the Sisters of Mother Theresa taught NFP successfully are Catholics. And so on around the globe. I venture to guess that right now, more non-Catholics than Catholics practice natural family planning. God's laws for family life are equally good for all peoples. NFP is for all couples, not just Catholics.
The Church rejects categorically the promotion of contraception among any and all peoples, because God Himself rejects contraception as unworthy of His human creatures. No reason or excuse whatsoever can justify the use of contraception, much less its promotion. "Every marital act must be open to the transmission of life," said Pope John Paul II to a million people gathered at the esplanade of the Catholic University of Caracas, Venezuela on 27 January 1985. He continued, indicating the objective gravity of contraception and sterilization for contraceptive purposes: "For this reason contraception and sterilization for contraceptive purposes are always gravely illicit." If they are gravely illicit, even unsuspecting users and nations will be harmed by their practice. On another occasion the Pope said: 11 ... Contraception is to be judged objectively, so profoundly unlawful as never to be, for any reason, justified" (Discourse "Heroism in Marriage, 17 September 1983).
More recently the Pope spoke to Austrian Bishops: "It is ever more clear that it is absurd, for instance, to want to overcome abortion through the promotion of contraception. The invitation to contraception as a supposedly 'harmless' manner of the relation between the sexes is not only an insidious denial of man's moral freedom. It fosters a depersonalized understanding of sexuality which is directed merely to the moment and promotes in the last analysis that mentality out of which abortion arises and from which it is continually nourished" (19 June 1987).
At the World Population Conference in Bucharest in 1974, and again in Mexico City in 1984, the Vatican Delegation distanced itself from the sections of the adopted plans of action which proposed promotion of contraception. And on 20 April 1990 Archbishop Renato R. Martino, Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations, acceded to the adopted Convention on Rights of the Child, but with some stated reservations. One of the reservations: that the Holy See "interprets the phrase "Family planning education and services' in Article 24.2, to mean those methods of family planning which it considers morally acceptable, that is, the natural methods of family planning." it is clear, then, from these and other declarations, that the Church does not approve the promotion of contraception to any peoples whosoever, as all humans are created by God in His image, and are therefore bound by virtue of creaturehood to be holy as God is holy.
Empirical data indicates beyond reasonable doubt that abortion follows contraception; it means that those who promote contraception actually open a Pandora's box of horrible and pandemic abortion. Such is the import of an open letter directed to the Honorable Rafael Salas (RIP), then Executive Director, United Nations Fund for Population Activities, during the 1974 World Population Congress in Bucharest. A group of thirteen members of the Coalition for Life, including the present writer, wrote the following open letter to him, to try to derail the contraception-abortion train which was then gathering steam:
Dear Mr. Salas: We, members and friends of the Coalition for Life, are confident that you will always be the first to prevent use of your Fund for purposes which are inhumanitarian, unhealthy, and immoral. We refer to the financing of programs launched under the banner of contraception, whose end results are abortions on a large scale.
As you know, abortion has spread to almost every country which has undertaken the promotion of contraception. It has become evident that one follows the other. Mothers in these countries resort to abortion, in one sense voluntary, but in another not without coercion imposed by the pressure of public opinion and newly-formed socio-economic patterns. But abortion is, for many mothers, a brutal experience in the light of their traditional humanitarian sentiments and moral values...
We, participants in the population deliberations at Bucharest, ask you, therefore, not to allocate funds to programs which would tend to spread the practice of abortion. We suggest that you aim to motivate countries to control this inhumanitarian, unhealthy and evil practice. We urge that you disqualify countries from use of the Fund, if they intend to use its resources, whether directly or indirectly, to promote abortion. Signed: (13 members of the Coalition in attendance)."
At the time Mr. Salas, who has died in the meantime, had quite the opposite intention in mind: a major expansion of UNFPA funds for more of the same. The fund has in the meantime spawned epidemics of abortion around the globe, which has killed millions of global citizens before they could be born, has brutalized doctors and medical personnel, and has traumatized mothers who consented to the killing of their offspring. The present Executive Director of the Fund, Dr. Nafis Sadik, calls for a further escalation of funding for more and more "family planning" which means contraception, sterilization and abortion.
POPULATION REPORTS whose publication is funded by US AID, asks for more - you guessed it - funding for contraception: "By the year 2000, pontificates the REPORT, as many as 600 million couples in the developing world may be using family planning - about 250 million more than in 1990. Family planning for these users could cost as much as US$11 billion per year." (November 1991). It asks that governments and donor organizations provide. And past head of the World Bank, Robert McNamara, tells anyone who will listen that the Bank sees population growth as the prime evil to be stopped, and calculated that "international donor community could increase its funding from $800 million per year to approximately $3.5 billion by the year 2000" (Development Forum, published by the UN Development of Public Information, November 1991-February 1992, p. 19). Most certainly the Church, "expert in humanity," continues to oppose this massive onslaught against the moral welfare of humanity engineered by the massively funded US AID, UNFPA, the World Bank, and other public agencies.
While the media, cackle day after day about condoms and sex without babies, the Church, lover of humanity and of families, stands erect in the midst of the surrounding chaos, to tell parents of large families that they are specially loved by God and cared for by Him. The words of Pius XII, to which the Fathers of Vatican II referred to in a footnote of GS 50, are the genuine message of the Church, now and through the ages:
Wherever you find large families in great numbers, they point to: the physical and moral health of a Christian people; a living faith in God and trust in His Providence; the fruitful and joyful holiness of Catholic marriage...
Far from being a "social malady," large families are a quarante of the moral and physical health of a nation. Virtues flourish spontaneously in homes where a baby's cries always echo from the crib, and vice is put to flight, as it if has been chased away by the childhood that is renewed there like the fresh and invigorating breath of spring.
So let the weak and selfish take their example from you; let the nation continue to be loving and grateful toward you for all the sacrifices you have taken upon yourselves to raise and educate the citizens (Address to Large Families, 20 January 1959).
Is it psychologically feasible, even realistic, to expect couples to abstain periodically in response to a governmental program to reduce births? The expectation that couples will do this on a large scale is hardly realistic, I believe. If couples do not feel pressures within the family itself to make this sacrifice, they do not possess the convincing motivation which is essential to successful natural family planning. Couples will probably not do period abstinence for a long time, if they do not believe that this is good for the family itself. If governments ask them to do it for solving overpopulation, they will probably want to install a new government rather than go along with a program they do not really believe in.
The Bishop's Commission of the Philippines came to regret its decision to join the Philippine government's Commission on Population in 1969, and withdrew from the program after only one year. One reason was that the "mass media had helped create such a sense of urgency about population control, that the Responsible Parenthood Council itself became oriented towards reducing family size for its main activity" (Handbook, ECLF, p.4). That Handbook now states that the Family Life Apostolate of Natural Family Planning is family oriented, not population oriented. It distances itself from "population programs that offer natural family planning as one of the methods of birth and population control" (p. 23). Let us all learn from the experience in the Philippines, to not prostitute the apostolate of natural family planning to ideological programs for population control.
The Church does not approve government policies which are designed to curb population growth, to reduce the number of babies born to married couples. The choice about the number of children to be born belongs to parents, not to governments. The Church by no means approves "population targets" which are set up by so many governments, under the prodding of international fund providers; and her doctrine rejects the provisions of condoms and other means of contraception. Nor does she promote natural family planning for the achievement of demographic objectives. She does approve natural family planning, however, as an exercise of freedom by parents who use it for the achievement of family welfare. She urges bishops, priests and devoted lay people to provide that all married couples and all young people be given access to knowledge about the fertile times of the cycle, and that they be educated in chastity. She proudly blesses well-ordered large families, and asks parents to be generous to their children by providing them with brothers and sisters.
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