News

By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D.

(See Part I: New Book Exposes Eugenics Mandate in Reproductive Rights Agenda https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/jul/08071007.html)

NEW YORK, July 17, 2008 (C-FAM) – In the new book ” Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population,” Columbia University historian Matthew Connelly shows how the population control movement created “future projections as evidence” of overpopulation, then justified “casualties” in the war on population caused by coercive methods. These included such “shock attacks” as quotas for millions of shoddy vasectomies and IUD insertions without follow-up care, public humiliation of poor families with three or more children, bulldozing entire neighborhoods that displaced countless thousands of the poor, and knowingly unloading defective IUDs that crippled poor women.
    
According to Connelly, when Malthusian theories used to justify eugenics fell out of favor, population controllers invented new theories. Founding members of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) returning from the Vietnam War, transferred the counterinsurgency tactic of “population control” to USAID’s strategy. Chinese missile scientist Jian Song used computer generated modeling to create the appearance of “precise forecast” of disaster for China if the government did not limit women to bearing one child.
   
  Africa, along with India, was the target of many such contrived scenarios, even though according to Connelly “the continent was a net food exporter and featured some of the lowest rates of growth in the world.” What’s more, he says family planning advocates ignored the fact that fertility was already falling in China and in other target countries, and ignored the “accumulating body of evidence showing that high fertility was not, after all, correlated with poverty.” He demonstrates that fertility rates fell in developing countries between 1950 and 2000, whether or not they were subjected to population assistance programs.
   
  Despite the facts, the movement’s tactics became increasingly coercive in the late 1960s, due to the zeal and connections of people like U.S. Army general William Draper. Working with John D. Rockefeller, Draper helped convince President Johnson to include population control in the 1965 “war on poverty.” Johnson tied humanitarian aid to developing nations’ achieving fertility benchmarks set by the UN and USAID, even vetoing food aid shipments to India in the midst of its dire famines.

Draper founded the Population Crisis Committee, today’s Population Action International, with the goal of creating an American public sense of urgency by tapping into the fears of the day, such as drawing a causative link between the lack of family planning in the slums with the chaos caused by youth in the late 1960s and calling for a “crash program for population stabilization.”
   
  Along with former Secretary of Defense and World Bank President Robert McNamara, Draper convinced Congress to earmark unprecedented levels of funding for USAID population programs between 1967 and 1971. So much money flooded into the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) that officials did not know how to spend it. This, along with growing skepticism in the third world of U.S. backing – then 90 percent of the total – led Draper to call for the creation of a fund centered at the UN which would “sanitize” U.S. funding, give the appearance of international consensus, and circumvent national governments. The initiative became the UN Population Fund (UNFPA).