News

Thursday July 8, 2010


Buffett Billions Padding “Charitable” Abortion Advocacy

By Peter J. Smith

OMAHA, Nebraska, July 8, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – For the last number of years American billionaire Warren Buffett, 79, has gradually been giving away his estimated $47 billion fortune – and much of it is going to support the work of abortion activists worldwide.

The Bloomberg news agency reports that Buffett’s annual gift this year to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – which supports population control efforts around the globe – was figured at $1.6 billion in Class B stock of Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett’s Omaha-based company. The amount is a 28% increase from last year, due to the fact that the value of Buffett’s Berkshire holdings have improved overall while the rest of the economy has tanked. Berkshire’s stock value rose 35% on the New York Stock Exchange over the past 12 months, and Berkshire profits rose 61% in 2009.

In 2006, Buffett endowed the Gates Foundation with 10 million Berkshire Class B shares, valued at approximately $37 billion dollars. Buffett’s 2010 donation constitutes part of the annual installment plan of 5% of pledged stocks to the foundation’s trust fund. The stock gives the Gates Foundation a steady source of income (the pay-out target over the coming decade is $3 billion a year) from which it can fund various other charities – which have included population control groups such as Planned Parenthood and others.

Just last month, the Gates Foundation announced they would be investing $1.5 billion in the cause of maternal health over the next 5 years – with a special emphasis on spreading “family planning” in the third world.

Bloomberg reports that other abortion advocacy groups also received tens of millions for their work promoting abortion at home and abroad through the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, a charity Buffet set up in honor of his first wife, who died in 2005. That foundation distributed more than $2 million to the Abortion Access Project Inc., over $2 million to Catholics for Choice, a group dedicated to undermining the Catholic Church’s teaching on the sanctity of life, and more than $40 million to Ipas, a group that promotes the expansion of legal abortion in Latin and Central America, and in third world countries.

In fact, Ipas was implicated in 2007 as a participant in the alleged cover-up of the rape of a nine-year-old girl named “Rosita,” by her step-father. Marta Maria Blandon, then Ipas Director for Central America, was accused of helping Francisco Fletes flee Costa Rica with his wife and “Rosita” in 2003, knowing full well that the Fletes was a suspect in the investigation. However, Blandon’s priority and that of her accomplices in the international abortion movement, was using the nine-year old’s pregnancy as a “hard case” by which they could undermine the region’s pro-life laws.

Ipas also intervened in the battle over legalizing abortion in Mexico City with false statistics, claiming that 1527 women had died from complications due to illegal abortions between the years 1990 and 2005. However, pro-life advocates pointed out that the health department’s own statistics, as well as those of other agencies, contradicted that number.

Bloomberg reports that Buffett intends to give away 99% of his personal fortune before his death. He has pledged 85% of his holdings in Berkshire to the Gates Foundation, the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, the Sherwood Foundation and the NoVo Foundation.


See related coverage by LifeSiteNews.com:

Gates Foundation Pledges $1.5 Billion for Maternal Health

https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/jun/10060813.html

Warren Buffett Gives $31 Billion to Gates Foundation

https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/jun/06062607.html

Buffett, Other Foundations Are Huge Donors to Pro-Abortion Cause

https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2003/aug/03080106.html