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“Choice” — Abortion Behind Worldwide Demographic Spiral

Urban Overcrowding Doesn't Mean the World is Overpopulated: 2+ minute video — http://www.lifenews.com/2012/11/28/urban-overcrowding-doesnt-mean-the-world-is-overpopulated/

United States Faces Demographic Bomb, Coming Underpopulation Problems

Japan Proposes Robots to Help Elderly as Population Implodes

Demographics as the Grim Reaper: The Death Knell of Low Birth Rates

Asian Population Conference Laments Aging, But Touts Abortion and Contraception

Iran’s Islamicists Orchestrate a Baby Bust: Who Would Have Imagined?

Major Children’s Charity SAVE THE CHILDREN Criticized for Pushing Population Control Agenda

Muslim World Faces Devastating Fertility Decline

Architect of Reproductive Rights Joan Dunlop Dies as Her Legacy Unravels

Commentary — Funding Barbarity: the West’s Love Affair with Coercive Population Control

UNFPA Promotes Population Control at Rio+20 Conference

UK Government Is Funding Forced Sterilizations in India

Uzbekistan Forcibly Sterilizing Women for Population Control: BBC Report

Population Decline Causing Political Upheaval in Asia

Abortion, Underpopulation Could Cripple Singapore’s Economy…

“Choice,” Abortion Behind Worldwide Demographic Spiral

Whatever your political persuasion, chances are that you believe in choice. Those who favor the right to kill unborn human beings in the womb, of course, characterize their position with the appealing vocabulary of “choice”—but ignoring the fact that the child has no choice in the matter.

Of course, even pro-lifers often assert the true importance of choice—the choice by women of whether or not to engage in sex, the choice of how many kids are right for one’s family, and so on.

As morally responsible beings made in God’s image, we’re all for choice—but as Christians, we recognize the need to temper our choices with the virtues of justice, temperance, prudence and so on.

My friend Os Guinness has talked about a Golden Triangle of freedom, virtue, and faith. But we need all of them. Because freedom, or choice, by itself, is frightening. Would we really feel safe in a world where individual choice stood like a colossus on a barren moral landscape?

Well, as you might have sensed, we’re almost there.

As New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote recently, “At some point over the past generation, people around the world entered what you might call the age of possibility. They became intolerant of any arrangement that might close off their personal options”—in other words, their choice.

As you might suspect, this pro-choice “age of possibility” has room for almost anything—except children. Brooks notes: “The number of Americans who are living alone has shot up from 9 percent in 1950 to 28 percent today. In 1990, 65 percent of Americans said that children are very important to a successful marriage. Now, only 41 percent of Americans say they believe that.

And here’s the kicker: “There are now more American houses with dogs than with children.”

As Chuck Colson always said, worldview matters. And post-familialism, as it’s called, is a growing worldwide trend. “In Scandinavia,” Brooks writes, “40 percent to 45 percent of the people live alone. Thirty percent of German women say they do not intend to have children.”

So “choice” is behind the West’s well-known demographic death-spiral. The Age of Possibility is a one-way street to nowhere.

Why might so many people be choosing to ignore the Genesis command to be fruitful and multiply? One researcher puts it baldly: “Under the social and economic systems of developed countries, the cost of a child outweighs the child’s usefulness.”

I, for one, shudder to think we live in a world where people are valued only if they are deemed “useful”!

And what a small vision of human happiness we are embracing, which is no bigger than the shriveled, individualistic self. As Brooks recognizes, “the age of possibility is based on a misconception. People are not better off when they are given maximum personal freedom to do what they want. They’re better off when they are enshrouded in commitments that transcend personal choice—commitments to family, God, craft and country.”

Amen. No wonder Chuck liked to read David Brooks so much! Look, friends, all the studies show that people who are committed to something beyond themselves—to marriage, children, and, ultimately, to God—are happier, healthier, and better adjusted.

But amid a sinking culture that’s clinging to “choice” like an anchor, quoting statistics just won’t cut it. We must not just tell people the right way to live the good life, but we must show it. A happy home where Christ is exalted and the world is engaged may well be the best apologetic of all.

LifeNews Note:  Eric Metaxas is best known for two biographies: Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery about William Wilberforce.
[Eric Metaxas | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 11/27/12,  http://www.lifenews.com/2012/11/27/choice-abortion-behind-worldwide-demographic-spiral/]
 

Urban Overcrowding Doesn't Mean the World is Overpopulated

2+ minute video — http://www.lifenews.com/2012/11/28/urban-overcrowding-doesnt-mean-the-world-is-overpopulated/

We at PRI are proud to announce the sixth episode of our highly popular YouTube cartoon series. Called “Urbanization: Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad City?” it talks about why people are crowding in

to cities in increasing numbers.

Over the past hundred years, half the world’s population has moved country to city.
Megacities with ten million or more people have sprung up as countrysides have emptied out…

To view this video cartoon, visit — http://www.lifenews.com/2012/11/28/urban-overcrowding-doesnt-mean-the-world-is-overpopulated/

United States Faces Demographic Bomb, Coming Underpopulation Problems

In view of the many public efforts to increase access to contraception and sterilization, it is reasonable to suppose that we face a baby-boom crisis of epic proportions. An impending critical situation would make the proposed economic stimulus plans in 2008 more reasonable. The proposed plans included tens of billions of dollars for contraception and sterilization.

Surely a looming demographic explosion justifies the Affordable Care Act, and its oft-critiqued HHS mandate that offers contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs with no out of pocket costs. Supporters of the stimulus plans stated that fewer births would lead to cost savings for financially strapped states, and the HHS mandate was justified by the Institute of Medicine because “cost savings due to contraceptive use [are] estimated to be 19.3 billion.”

These initiatives might be indicative of a society that is having way too many babies, a burdensome road that cannot be continued. Economic crash, poverty, and a loss of freedom must be averted, so turn on the lights, use “protection,” but whatever you do, stop having babies, America!

Unfortunately, this perception is far from reality. There is no baby-boom – there is a birth-dearth. And, yes, there is economic stagnation and looming long-term economic decline, but this is exacerbated (or perhaps caused by) the decline in birth rates.

We have witnessed this in the disastrous economic situation throughout Europe, which is due in part to extremely low birth rates. Europe’s fate appears increasingly likely for the United States. We are not having enough babies to replace our current population levels. More specifically, married couples are having too few children, and increasingly, babies are being born outside of the stable environment of a home with a mother and father.

This is made clear by the Centers for Disease Control’s gloomy numbers from a recent report on preliminary data of births for 2011. Comprehensive analysis of the entire report is beyond the scope of this article, but we should note two troubling trends that merit greater discussion and response from society.

Total Drop in Births

Preliminary numbers indicate that 3,953,593 babies were born in the United States in 2011. This is a drop of 1% from 2010 and nearly a 10% drop since 2007. Last year, the general fertility rate was 63.2 births per 1000 women, which is the lowest rate ever reported for the United States.

The total fertility rate (estimated number of lifetime births per woman) was 1,894.5 births per 1,000 women. This drop in total fertility rate is critical because for a population to replace itself, a minimum of 2.1 children must be born for every woman. Additionally, this past year women gave birth to a first child at the lowest recorded rate in the history of the United States.

These numbers are suggestive of troubling trends that indicate that we are moving further toward European birth rates and away from the level necessary to avoid having an upside down family tree that cannot support the elderly.

A nation with a burgeoning number of social assistance programs (Social Security, Medicare, Affordable Care Act, etc) simply cannot survive economically if there are too few of “the next generation” working to support prior generations. Josh Sanburn recently notes in Time Magazine that “we’re becoming Europe. At least, that’s what a long line of U.S. birth-rate figures seems to be telling us. And that’s bad news for the future of the country.” That bad news is the collapse of the social safety net and perhaps even, the economy itself. The birth dearth is simply unsustainable.

Unmarried Women

A staggering 40.7% of all births to women in the United States were to unmarried women. While this is a slight decline (1%) in the percentage of births by unmarried women, the number remains historically high. For the sake of comparison, 33% of children in 2000 and 18.4% of children in 1980 were born out of wedlock.

While these are unsettling numbers as a whole, they are even more startling when broken down by race: 17.2% of all births by Asians/Pacific Islanders and 29.1% of all births by non-Hispanic whites are outside of marriage. Additionally, 53.3% of all births by Hispanics are outside of marriage, and 72.3% of Non-Hispanic Black children born in the United States last year were born to unmarried women.

These numbers point to a number of distressing trends in American society.

First, cohabiting non-married couples are on the rise and are bringing children into unstable relationships. Of the non-marital births noted above, 58% were from cohabiting couples from 2006-2010. Societal embrace of cohabitation has led to children being raised in unstable home settings in which there is a greater incidence of substance abuse, depression, delinquency, and poverty, among other social ills.

As Mark Regnerus’ recent study concludes, “children appear most apt to succeed well as adults on multiple counts and across a variety of domains – when they spend their entire childhood with their married mother and father and especially when their parents remain married to the present day.”

Second, premarital sex continues to be a cause of moral, social, and economic decline in Western societies. The culture of death’s focus on abortion and contraception inadequately responds to the symptoms arising from the breakdown of the family as a school of virtue and moral decay in general.

Finally, Black and Hispanic communities are in a precarious position in which the cycle of poverty and the breakdown of the family are perpetuated. Add to this the fact that black children are being disproportionately targeted by government programs that seek to reduce “unplanned pregnancies” by unmarried women. It is primarily the “unplanned births” of blacks that are prevented by the government’s free provision of contraceptives and ready access to abortion.

Undoubtedly the current economic recession has contributed to the decline in births as economic stress portends drops in fertility rates. While this seems clear, economic decline is not the sole or even primary cause of this decades-long decline in births in the United States.

Rather, the decline in births, to borrow a phrase from Blessed John Paul II, “bears the stamp of the culture of death.” Infected by a culture of death, American society increasingly perceives children as an “accident,” or as a “burden” or “drain on society.”

This mentality has deeply impacted the way the American people approach their relationships and decisions to give birth to the next generation. The married are discouraged from being generous with the gift of life and the “unplanned children” of the unmarried are targets for contraception and abortion.

The depressing and startling numbers from the Centers for Disease Control are one more harbinger that if we do not embrace life and love in Truth, the United States is sure to go head-long into further economic and moral chaos.

LifeNews.com Note: Arland K. Nichols is Director of Education and Evangelization at Human Life International, and Execu

tive Editor of the Truth and Charity Forum. Article originally published at HLI America’s Truth and Charity Forum.
[Arland Nichols | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 11/28/12, http://www.lifenews.com/2012/11/28/united-states-faces-demographic-bomb-coming-underpopulation-problems/]

 

 

 

Japan Proposes Robots to Help Elderly as Population Implodes

I have previously highlighted Japan’s huge demographic time bomb and the fact that virtually all Western countries now suffer from this same problem to a greater or lesser degree.
http://www.lifenews.com/2012/11/12/japan-proposes-robots-to-help-elderly-as-population-implodes/

 

 

 

Demographics as the Grim Reaper: The Death Knell of Low Birth Rates…
More and more countries are hearing the death knell of low birth rates

We live in an age unique in human history. Per capita incomes have never been higher, lifespans have never been longer, and people are better fed and educated than ever before. At the same time, birth rates have fallen to historically low levels. In fact, they have fallen to levels so low that they will extinguish whole populations unless something is done.

The developed countries are suffering a severe birth dearth and, as a result, an enormous shift in global power will soon be upon us. Europe will recede demographically, while America will be hard-pressed to hold its own against younger and more populous countries. More and more countries are undertaking programs to raise their birth rates, although none of these policies has as yet made much of a difference.

Let’s take a quick tour around the world, thanks to the research of our own Elizabeth Crnkovich:

Asia

In Japan, the headlines are increasingly strident: “The Asian Tiger – Japan – is in Danger of Extinction,” “Number of Children in Japan Falls for 31st Consecutive Year,” “Japan’s Population Marks Sharpest Drop Since 1950,” and “Japan Underpopulation So Bad Families Resort to “Rental Relatives.” Even The Economist, normally staid, has noted that “Japan is ageing faster than any country in history.”

The bare facts are shocking enough: Japan’s fertility rate, at 1.1 children per woman, has never been lower, and it is still falling from year to year. Japan already has the oldest population in the world and, with virtually no immigration, there appears to be no way out of the looming democide. The elderly will die, and there will be fewer people and far fewer workers in the Home Islands in the years to come. The solution is obvious, but the Japanese people have to want more children for there to be more children.

China’s lower birth rates have a different cause. The Chinese people want more children, but the government for the past three decades has said no. The one-child policy has decimated China’s younger generations, and created a society where the young are not replacing the old.

While China currently has the world’s second largest economy, all bets are off if the birth rate remains depressed for another generation. The economy will follow the falling numbers of young workers downward.

Taiwan’s birthrate is “dropping like a stone…” says an editorial in the Taipei Times. The majority of people realize there is a demographic problem. It could hardly be otherwise, since the total fertility rate—the number of children per woman—is an anemic 0.9. Few are motivated to do anything about it, however. Taiwan is now heavily urbanized, and city folk tend to have very small families.

When asked, younger Taiwanese say that they are not interested in having children because they cost too much money, or take too much time. Women are more motivated to get a college degree and seek professional employment than to marry and have children. In this highly secularized society, children are not seen not as a blessing, but as a burden tying down the women who bear them. Goodbye, Taiwan.

Singapore, whose fertility rate stands at an anemic 1.1, is a dying city-state. The average Singaporean is now 39 years of age and climbing. While the city’s economy appears to be doing quite well, and the city itself is replete with new buildings, offers top-notch health care, and enjoys low crime rates, its population is aging fast. In order to keep everything running smoothly, Singapore must rely on immigration, the last resort of a once-reproductive population.

Hong Kong has a birth-rate of 1.09, slightly lower than that of Singapore. As a result, its government has reversed its policy on family planning. Instead of promoting smaller families, as it once did, the government now urges its citizens to have more children to help offset population aging.

It may be a matter of “too little, too late,” however. People already have ingrained in their heads that small families are better, or they just don’t think they have the means to support bigger families. Governments telling people to have more children is not going to change an anti-child mentality at this point. One might call this a voluntary one-child policy.

To illustrate this point, consider that the South Korean government beginning in 2010 has spent billions of dollars in an attempt to raise the country’s birth rate. The jury is still out on this effort, but the latest total fertility rate of 1.15 is still way below the replacement level. Seoul is spending money that it hopes will make it easier for young couples to make ends meet, and to support pregnant women. We at PRI are not sanguine that this belated effort will make much of a difference, since the birth rate was so low to begin with. The economy of this “Asian tiger” is hurting for lack of “cubs.”

Europe

The situation in Europe is no better. In Italy the dawn of the sexual revolution has meant the death of the family. Young people are now not as eager to start families, and the TFR is hovering at 1.4. Young people are happy living the single life and only marry, if at all, after they have reached their thirties and forties. Adult children see no shame in living in their parents’ homes well into middle age.

Venice, famous as a destination for honeymooners, is a dying city. It is losing inhabitants and becoming more and more just a tourist attraction. The city even held a mock funeral for itself when its population dropped below 60,000. Will holding a mock funeral boost the birth rate? It seems unlikely.

Another Catholic country with an anemic birth rate is Spain, whose TFR is 1.48. The Spanish parliament reacted to the problem by promoting births and instituting pro-natal policies. But the relatively small bonuses and benefits offered seem insufficient to resurrect population growth. The problem is exacerbated by that fact that many Spaniards, unable to find employment at home, seek it abroad in countries such as Germany. When the young flee, this hardly helps Spain’s declining birth rate and decreasing population.

We’ve told you before about Russia, whose women average 1.2 children. The nation is hemorrhaging people, a bleeding wound which a huge baby bonus has failed to staunch. The countryside is full of ghost villages as the remaining Russians move to a few large cities.

Germany’s fix for falling fertility, now standing at 1.4 children per woman, is to rely on immigrants, immigrants drawn in by the strong German economy. Spaniards a

nd other Europeans help to bolster the German economy, to be sure, but that is not going to help their native countries.

Other countries with very, very low birth rates include, but are not limited to, England, Greece, Portugal, Holland, Belgium, and France. As the Telegraph put it: “We are not so much living in an age of crisis as facing a crisis of age.”

Where is the population bomb when you need it?

This article was originally published as the August 28 Population Research Institute Weekly Briefing.
[29 Aug 12, Steven Mosher, pop.org, http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/demographics-as-the-grim-reaper-the-death-knell-of-low-birth-rates?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=e45a846679-LifeSiteNews_com_US_Headlines_08_29_2012&utm_medium=email]

Asian Population Conference Laments Aging But Touts Abortion and Contraception

Top Asian demographers, population experts, and UN staff gathered in Bangkok this week to address the region's aging crisis. Despite the severity of the low fertility predicament, abortion, contraception, and "reproductive and sexual health" were the subject of one out of every four papers presented.

Due to sustained, extremely low fertility, Asia is home to the world's oldest country, its fastest rates of aging, and its highest ratios of sex imbalance owing to the selective abortion of baby girls, leading to some 100 million "missing" women in Asia. Panel sessions included such questions as "how low can Asian fertility go," how to improve data quality and accessibility, the effects of migration and urbanization, and labor force and employment.

Nonetheless, "reproductive and sexual health" accounted for 22 papers, nearly a quarter, pondering topics such as "determinants of contraceptive choice," "risky behaviors in reproductive health," "sexual health perspectives," and "women's reproductive rights and empowerment." Half as many papers addressed poverty, and four considered infant and child health.
For remainder of article — http://www.c-fam.org/fridayfax/volume-15/asian-population-conference-laments-aging-but-touts-abortion-and-contraception.html
[30 Aug 12, New York, Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D., & Lisa Correnti, c-fam.org]

 

 

 

 

Iran’s Islamicists Orchestrate a Baby Bust: Who Would Have Imagined?

For those who still imagine the world is overpopulated, comes a sobering story out of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Iran’s fertility rate has crashed over the past few decades of Islamicist rule. So much so that the mullahs who run the country are now calling for more babies to be born.

How did things come to such a pass?

After all, the Koran, like the Torah and the Bible, strongly endorses the idea that babies are blessings and encourages strong families. Most mullahs originally opposed not just abortion, but sterilization and contraception as well. And there was a brief flourishing of fertility following the Islamic Revolution, in which the early eighties saw women averaging over six children.

So what happened?

The mullahs, who had nothing but disdain for the free market and foreign trade, led the country into a recession soon after taking power. Western investors took flight. As the economy went into a downward spiral, they, along with the Iranian people, began to rethink their commitment to the family.

The population controllers, who were waiting in the wings, scented an opportunity.

The population control movement has long sought out and cultivated liberal Muslim clerics, encouraging them to rethink Islam’s traditional encouragement of childbearing. They know that Islam lacks a central religious authority, and that any imam can issue a fatwa—an Islamic religious opinion.

This strategy was successfully implemented in Egypt in the 1970s with a series of projects on “Population in the Context of Islam.” By the late 1980s, Egypt had accepted and affirmed family planning. The Egyptian birthrate soon plummeted.

Similar efforts in Iran in the early 1980s, combined with the deepening recession, induced the Iranian government to make a similar about face. Departing from the traditional Islamic understanding of children as a blessing, the government began a foreign-inspired and supported campaign against the large family.

The principal architect of Iran’s population control program was Hossein Malek-Afzali, a physician who was, like most population controllers, trained in the United States, in his case at the University of California at Los Angeles.

First of all, the ayatollahs themselves began speaking out in favor of contraception and sterilization at their televised religious services. Many a village mullah followed suit, devoting part of his Friday sermon to encouraging his followers to visit the local birth control center.

The government—controlled by the ayatollahs, of course—followed suit. Television programs were produced and broadcast that openly promoted family planning. A network of volunteers was set up to go house to house and urge women to limit their childbearing. At the same time, the government began offering free contraceptive services—including pills, condoms, IUDs and the contraceptive patch—and free sterilization.

This national campaign, in conjunction with Iran’s continuing economic turmoil, quickly made inroads into the fertility of the population. The fertility rate shrank dramatically, until by 2010 it stood at 1.6 children and falling.

The United Nations now projects that Iran’s population will peak in a little more than 10 years, and then begin to shrink. This is the U.N’s low variant projection, historically the most accurate. The medium variant gives Iran 20 years before the population begins imploding. In the long run, it makes little difference.

The ayatollahs, seeing the handwriting on the wall, have now changed their minds again. Confronted with the reality of an aging and dying population with no replacements in sight, they have begun encouraging more children. They have embarked upon a program of government aid, such as creating and funding a bank account for each child born. They have abolished their counterproductive birth control program.

Would that they had left well enough alone.
[6 Aug 2012, PRI Weekly Briefing, Steven W. Mosher and Elizabeth Crnkovich]

 

 

 

Major Children’s Charity SAVE THE CHILDREN Criticized for Pushing Population Control Agenda

A major international aid charity’s claim that more contraception and “family planning” is the solution to maternal deaths in the developing world is “false, illogical and unfounded,” the UK’s leading pro-life group has said.

Save the Children (SCF) has issued a report claiming, “Pregnancy is the biggest killer of teenage girls worldwide.”

“Every year one million teenage girls die or suffer serious injury, infection or disease due to pregnancy or childbirth,” the report said, and went on to recommend fulfilling the “unmet need for family planning” as the solution to maternal morbidity.

The report cited statistics that “girls under 15 are five times more likely to die in pregnancy than women in their 20s. Babies born to younger mums are also at far greater
risk and around one million babies born to adolescent girls die every year – babies are 60% more likely to die if their mother is under 18.”

But Paul Tully, general secretary of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, responded to the claims, saying that they are “simply not backed by the studies [SCF] references in its report.”

“It is misleading to say that pregnancy or childbirth are in general causes of death. Haemorrhage, sepsis and infection may cause death. In most cases, death and serious injury can be averted by good maternity care, such as trained birth attendants, blood transfusion [and] antibiotics,” Tully said.

The same applies to child mortality, he observed. “Babies in the developing world die because of lack of good maternity and newborn care. This will continue whether young women use contraception or not.”

With this report, SCF appears to be positioning itself as a player in the population control lobby, saying they are “urging world leaders to increase the global availability of contraceptives” and to ensure that “women are empowered to decide when to have children through education and the law.”

Anthony Ozimic, SPUC’s communications manager, said that the “unmet need for family planning,” which for leftist organization typically includes artificial contraceptives, as well as abortion and sterilizations, is a myth invented by the international abortion/contraception lobby. Groups like the UNFPA, International Planned Parenthood Federation, and the World Health Organisation regularly use the concept to push national governments to comply with birth control programs.

The assumption, he said, is that every woman who is not trying to get pregnant but is not using contraception automatically has an “unmet need” for it. The reality, he said, is that rich and powerful ideologues are pushing “a decadent Western ideology of sexual liberation onto poor, vulnerable, culturally conservative societies.”

“Yet even the Save the Children report has a whole chapter entitled ‘Stimulating demand for family planning’. That’s not to deny that there are some cultural practices which should be addressed, such as coercion of teenage girls. But contraception doesn’t address that problem – it may even help to hide the evidence of abuse, help to enable it to continue.”

The report relies heavily upon claims by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the Population Reference Bureau, the Guttmacher Institute – an offshoot of Planned Parenthood – and the Population Council, as well as officials in the relevant sections of WHO, UNICEF and DFID. These groups, Ozimic says, are effectively one: the international abortion-contraception lobby.

While the report names Somalia as an example of a country in which high fertility and population growth are linked to high child mortality, SPUC points out that Somalia is one of the “failed states,” in a constant state of violent crisis, without a central government or infrastructure, let alone a healthcare system. Similar deficiencies exist in governance and healthcare provision in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

“Save the Children should not be exploiting the negative cultural practices which have been linked to those cultures (e.g. coercion of teenage girls) to promote population control,” Ozimic said.

In related news, another major player in the international abortion/population control lobby, Marie Stopes International, has praised the British minister for foreign aid for his comments boosting contraception in poor countries.

The UK government is currently working with another of the leading population control lobbyists, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on a Family Planning Summit to be held in London early next month. In preparation for this, the Secretary of State for International Development, Andrew Mitchell, presented Parliament with the Global Impact Report prepared by Marie Stopes “that clearly demonstrates the benefits of contraception” in the developing world.

“Access to contraception,” the Marie Stopes report claims, is 20 per ent in sub-Saharan Africa.

Mitchell said, “This important report, which comes just two weeks before The London Summit on Family Planning, is a valuable piece of research that clearly demonstrates the benefits of contraception and why we are working to provide access to family planning for an additional 120 million of the world’s poorest women who want it.”

Marie Stopes enjoys massive government contracts to provide abortion and contraceptives in countries with high rates of birth as well as high maternal mortality and morbidity.
[28 June 12, Hilary White, London, http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/major-childrens-charity-criticized-for-pushing-population-control-agenda?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=56028cb5e4-LifeSiteNews_com_US_Headlines_06_28_2012&utm_medium=email]

Muslim World Faces Devastating Fertility Decline

Fertility rates of Muslim populations around the world have almost literally fallen off a cliff, so steep has been their decline. Policy makers at the UN and elsewhere have barely noticed this.

“There remains a widely perceived notion — still commonly held within intellectual, academic, and policy circles in the West and elsewhere — that ‘Muslim’ societies are especially resistant to embarking upon the path of demographic and familial change that has transformed population profiles in Europe, North America, and other ‘more developed’ areas,” write Nicholas Eberstadt and Apoorva Shah in the June 1 issue of Policy Review.

It is generally thought that Muslim fertility rates are growing by leaps and bounds. This has fed into the panic about growing Muslim influence, especially in Europe. While Eberstadt and Shah do not deal specifically with Muslims in Europe, they do point out that fertility rates have declined all over the Muslim world and that predominantly Muslim countries have taken a steeper dive than any countries in history.

Using data from the UN Population Division, which projects fertility rates for 190 countries, Eberstadt and Shah “appraise the magnitude of fertility declines in 48 of the world’s 49 identified Muslim-majority countries and territories.” The data show that “forty-eight Muslim-majority countries and territories witnessed fertility decline over the past three decades.”

When absolute fertility decline is examined, Eberstadt and Shah show “a drop of an estimated 2.6 births per woman between 1975 and 1980 and 2005 and 2010 — a markedly larger absolute decline than estimated for either the world as a whole (-1.3) or the less developed regions as a whole (-2.2) during those same years.” They point out that “Fully eighteen of these Muslim-majority places saw (total fertility rates) fall by three or more over those 30 years–with nine of them by four births per woman or more.”

Eberstadt and Shah point out that in terms of relative fertility decline, “the estimated population-weighted average for Muslim-majority areas as a whole was -41 percent over these three decades.” They show that “22 Muslim-majority countries and territories were estimated to have undergone fertility declines of 50 percent or more during those three decades–ten of them by 60 percent or more. For both Iran and the Maldives, the declines in total fertility rates over those 30 years were estimated to exceed 70 percent.”

Of the ten biggest declines in total fertility rates in the post-war era “six have occurred in Muslim-majority countries&rdqu

o; say Eberstadt and Shah.

Eberstadt and Shah point out several implications to this reality of rapid fertility reduction in the Muslim world. The UN population projections will have to follow suit. In 2000, the UN projected 102 million Yemenis by the year 2050. This estimate was reduced to 62 million ten years later.

Eberstadt and Shah say there is a “coming decline in working-age (15-64) population.” They say the Muslim world will face increasing and crippling manpower shortages.  They also project rapidly aging populations such as is experienced in the far-richer European countries.

The authors are perplexed that other experts at the UN or even in the Muslim countries themselves do not discuss this galloping problem.
[Jul 05, 2012, Austin Ruse, New York, C-FAM,  http://www.c-fam.org/fridayfax/volume-15/muslim-world-faces-devastating-fertility-decline.html]

Architect of Reproductive Rights Joan Dunlop Dies as Her Legacy Unravels

Feminist Activist Joan Dunlop died last week at 78, just a week after her legacy of recasting international population control efforts as "reproductive rights" began to unravel.  

Dunlop was a protégé of John D. Rockefeller, III, who led the charge for international population control. His vision and large fortune established and set the agenda for institutions still at the tip of the spear of global abortion wars, such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation, Population Council, Rockefeller Foundation, and UN Population Fund.

Dunlop's initiative revived the flailing population control movement after its coercive tactics became widely known in the 1970s and 80s. She thus helped shape international abortion debates for almost three decades.

But just as she was breathing her last, world leaders were quashing attempts to include "reproductive rights" in an important UN document. The document was negotiated two weeks ago at the UN summit on sustainable development in Rio de Janeiro.  

Twenty years after unabashedly championing population control at the first Rio summit, delegates decided that the once-convenient narrative of women's rights was no longer necessary.

The term emerged at the 1994 UN conference on population and development in Cairo, a high level, highly controversial meeting at which abortion advocates and some governments tried and failed to gain recognition of abortion as an international human right. Since then, the term "reproductive rights" and other terms such as "reproductive health" have endured because they have served delegates on both sides of the abortion debate. The official Cairo document allows governments to interpret it as including or excluding abortion, according to national law and policy.  

But in the end, Dunlop's stratagem is proving its own undoing.

Over the last several years high profile figures such as the U.S. Secretary of State have gone on the record insisting reproductive health and rights include abortion. This tipped the scales and gave credulity to pro-life delegates at Rio who called for its rejection.

The term was also rendered unnecessary since links between population control advocates and environmentalists are out in the open again. The pro-woman narrative was less useful, and came with too much baggage, namely the abortion controversy.

Taking feminists at their word that reproductive rights is not about population control but rather women's empowerment, delegates announced from the negotiating floor that it had little to do with the "green economy" which was their priority at the Rio summit.

Feminists assailed these comments as a "rollback" in women's rights. In trying to justify its inclusion over the last week, several have reinforced its ties to population control. Writing in the Huffington Post, environmentalist Diane MacEachern said, "slowing population growth by giving women access to the contraception they already want could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 8 and 15 percent."

The future usefulness of "reproductive rights," a term and a concept that permeate UN development and rights literature, now seems murky.

Just as Dunlop's legacy fades, billionaire Melinda Gates is taking center stage with her new global family planning campaign. Next week in London, Gates, like Dunlop, will try to convince governments her initiative has no link with population control or abortion.
Like Dunlop, Gates says it's purely about women's health and rights.

And like Dunlop's career in the same arena demonstrates, the ambiguity that may garner Gate's success may also cause its failure.
[Jul 05, 2012, Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D., New York,, C-Fam,  http://www.c-fam.org/fridayfax/volume-15/architect-of-reproductive-rights-dies-as-her-legacy-unravels.html]

Commentary — Funding Barbarity: the West’s Love Affair with Coercive Population Control

Back in April, India’s Supreme Court heard a case about a surgeon in the state of Bihar. This surgeon performed 53 operations in about two hours in conditions that can only be described as appalling: “assisted by unqualified staff, with no access to running water or equipment to clean the operating equipment.”

The “patients” were left “crying out in pain [and though] they were in desperate need of medical care, no one came to assist them.”

But what’s most appalling is that butchers like him are acting at the behest and with the support of the West.

The operations were sterilizations and, as the U.K.’s Observer has reported, they were paid for, in part, with British aid money.

State and local officials in India used the approximately 250 million dollars to target poor women. Actually, “target” is too benign a term: Poor women were bribed, berated, and threatened if they didn’t undergo sterilization. Then, to add injury to insult, the sterilizations were often performed “with reckless disregard for the lives of poor women.”

The UK’s Department of International Development cited the need to combat climate change as justification for its support of programs like the Indian one. I’m not making this up, folks. It, like other western agencies, sees population control as a key to reducing greenhouses gases.

Needless to say the “population” they are seeking to “control” doesn’t reside in London’s tony Belgravia district. They are the poor living in what used to be called the “Third World.”

It’s important to understand the worldview that makes these outrages possible. It’s not a mere concern for the environment, although it is disguised as such.

It is the product of an anti-human ideology. This ideology is the subject of “Merchants of Despair,” a book by Robert Zubrin. What Zubrin calls “antihumanism” sees “the human race [as] a horde of vermin whose unconstrained aspirations and appetites endanger the natural order.” Given the threat posed by humanity, “tyrannical measures are necessary to constrain humanity.”

Now, this may sound like rhetorical overkill, but that’s because most of those advocating and imposing “tyrannical measures” are too discrete to actually call people “vermin.”

Most, but not all. A few years ago, James Lovelock, the originator of the “Gaia” hypothesis, told New Scientist that, since humanity was already too numerous and too stupid, Gaia herself would
have to “cull the herd.”

Many who sincerely object to Lovelock’s rhetoric still share his anti-human worldview: They agree with his ends — that is a lot fewer people — and the need to take decisive measures. In the end, their squeamishness counts for little, especially to the women in Bihar and others like them.

Again, I’m not being harsh: Abuses like these are well-documented. The UN’s Family Planning Agency is a serial offender, which prompted the Bush administration to cut off its funding. The outcry was predictable, as was the restoration of funding in 2009.

The unwillingness to challenge the whole “too many people are the problem” idea makes what happened in India and countless other places inevitable. The worldview and the incentives all point in this direction: The scope of the abuse is only limited by our ruthlessness.

In other words, it’s not limited at all.

Reprinted with permission from Breakpoint.org
[13 June 12, Eric Mataxas, Breakpoint.org,   http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/funding-barbarity-the-wests-love-affair-with-coercive-population-control?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=8d2f4c26c5-LifeSiteNews_com_US_Headlines_06_13_2012&utm_medium=email

 

 

 

UNFPA Promotes Population Control at Rio+20 Conference
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) is taking advantage of the upcoming Rio+20 conference in June to promote population control and reproductive rights as the backbone of sustainable development and poverty eradication.

http://www.lifenews.com/2012/05/21/unfpa-promotes-population-control-at-rio20-conference/

 

 

UK Government Funds Forced Sterilizations in India

The British government gave $268 million to the government of India for a program that forcibly sterilizes poor women and men, according to the Guardian newspaper. This news comes as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation prepares to co-host a family planning summit with the British government in London this July.

Melinda Gates recently dismissed the link between contraception programs and population control in a speech launching her new initiative. Titled “No Controversy,” her campaign intends to “change the global conversation around family planning” by discounting its association with abortion, coercion and immorality, and focusing on universal access.

Around the same time, India’s supreme court heard evidence of coercive mass sterilizations in filthy conditions.

Men and women are rounded up into makeshift rural camps to be sterilized, many left in pain with little or no care. Some women, sterilized while pregnant, suffered miscarriages. Some were bribed with less than $8 and a sari, others threatened with losing their ration cards. Some died from botched operations.

Uneducated men and women did not discover the true purpose of the operations until too late. In a region targeted by the UK government, a 35-year old wife of a poor laborer, pregnant with twins, bled to death.

Clinics received bonuses for doing more than 30 operations a day. Non-governmental workers were paid for each person they convinced to be operated on. One surgeon working in a school building committed 53 operations in 2 hours with unqualified staff, no running water or means to clean the equipment.

“Obsession” with reaching the United Nations Millennium Development Goals pushed India to institute coercive sterilizations, reported the Global Post in 2010.

"There's a great hurry to again set targets from above to be followed by everyone. And that's again creating problems," said A.R. Nanda, India’s former health secretary.

"When you create an incentive system, it privileges one solution over the other and encourages them to cut corners," said Abhijit Das, the head of Healthwatch Forum.

"And we've had very bad experiences with that in the past."

Sterilization is the most common method of family planning used by India’s Reproductive and Child Health Program Phase II, begun in 2005 with UK funding.

Reports in 2006, 2007 and 2009 by the Indian government warned of problems with the program, noted The Guardian.  Yet in 2010 the UK’s Department for International Development recommended continued support. One key reason was to address climate change. Reducing the number of humans would lower greenhouse gases. It conceded there are “complex human rights and ethical issues” involved in population control programs.

Despite the warnings, the UK placed no conditions on its funding.

The UK and Gates Foundation summit aims to collect “unprecedented political commitment and resources . . . to meet the family planning needs of women in the world’s poorest countries by 2020,” stated the Department for International Development, the agency that funded India’s sterilization program.

India’s fertility rate is 2.62.  Pressures to lower fertility and reduce the size of families coincide with a worsening gender imbalance of more boys than girls in the country.
[10 May 12, Wendy Wright, NEW YORK,  http://www.c-fam.org/fridayfax/volume-15/uk-government-funds-forced-sterilizations-in-india.html]

 

 

Uzbekistan Forcibly Sterilizing Women for Population Control: BBC Report

Uzbek government officials said in a written statement to BBC News released last that Uzbekistan’s record in protecting mothers and babies is “excellent and could be considered a model for countries around the world” when questioned about a secret campaign to forcibly sterilize women.

“[T]he Uzbek government said the allegations of a forced sterilisation programme were slanderous and bore no relation to reality,” according to BBC News. “The government also said that surgical contraception was not widespread and was carried out only on a voluntary basis, after consultation with a specialist and with the written consent of both parents.”

BBC News reporter Natalia Antelava interviewed several women in Uzbekistan who were sterilized without their knowledge or consent.

“I was shocked. I cried and asked: ‘But why? How could they do this?’ The doctor said, ‘That’s the law in Uzbekistan,’” one of the victims told Antelava.

Although sterilizing women without their consent is not officially a law of Uzbekistan, Antelava reported that several medical professionals whom she interviewed in the country said government officials are pressuring doctors to perform the procedures.
Uzbekistan President Islam Karizov

“Every year we are presented with a plan. Every doctor is told how many women we are expected to give contraception to; how many women are to be sterilised,” said a gynecologist from the Uzbek capital, Tashkent. “There is a quota. My quota is four women a month.”

Other medical professionals who spoke on a condition of anonymity reported that government officials put strong pressure on doctors in rural areas of Uzbekistan to sterilize women, with some doctors expected to sterilize up to eight women per week.

A BBC News source at the Ministry of Health said the sterilization program is intended to keep Uzbekistan’s populati

on from growing beyond 28 million people. U.S. government reports estimate Uzbekistan’s population to be about 28.3 million.

While human rights organizations, and even the United Nations, have called attention to the Uzbek government’s forced sterilization program in the past, it seems virtually no international pressure is being put on Uzbek President Islam Karimov to end the abusive procedure.

The forced sterilizations may even be on the rise. Antelava’s medical sources reported a dramatic increase in Caesarean section births in the last two years, which provide surgeons with an easy opportunity to sterilize women.

“Rules on Caesareans used to be very strict, but now I believe 80% of women give birth through C-sections. This makes it very easy to perform a sterilisation and tie the fallopian tubes,” a chief surgeon at a hospital near Tashkent said.

“The mark of a totalitarian government is the use of secretive programs, violence and force to manipulate the population. This effort to forcibly sterilize women without their knowledge is an egregious affront to human rights and a crime against humanity,” said Father Peter West, vice president for missions at Human Life International, in response to the story. “Civil and political leaders in Uzbekistan and other nations, including President Obama, need to strongly and very publicly condemn these attacks on the women of Uzbekistan and pressure government officials to bring an end to this human rights crisis.”
[18Apr12, Adam Cassandra, http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/uzbekistan-forcibly-sterilizing-women-for-population-control-bbc-report?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=2b59e65ec8-LifeSiteNews_com_US_Headlines_04_18_2012&utm_medium=email

Population Decline Causing Political Upheaval in Asia
The global fertility freefall is about to cause geopolitical upheaval in Asia, a panel of experts said this week. The experts, all contributors to the new book Population Decline and the Remaking of Great Power Politics, spoke at the world’s largest gathering of international relations specialists meeting in San Diego, California
http://www.lifenews.com/2012/04/05/population-decline-causing-political-upheaval-in-asia/

 

 

 

Abortion, Underpopulation Could Cripple Singapore’s Economy
By almost any measure, Singapore is an impressive city. Actually, it is a city-state, and it is consistently rated as the most law-abiding nation in the world. Singapore has one of the best health care systems, resulting in the lowest infant mortality rate and longest life expectancy in the world. Illegal drug use and violence are almost nonexistent, which is rather shocking for a city of over five million inhabitants.
http://www.lifenews.com/2012/05/10/abortion-underpopulation-could-cripple-singapores-economy/