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Melinda Gates has issued a new cartoon video seeking to justify her campaign to “help” the poor in Africa and Asia by injecting women with Depo-Provera and other dangerous abortion-inducing contraceptive drugs.  It shows brown and black women, whose bodies all have the shape of potatoes, smiling and frolicking with their progressively fewer children. Presumably, they’re overjoyed at the thought that a rich white lady has prevented them from propagating.

Fathers, and men in general, are completely absent from the video—Gates’ “families” consist by the end of the video of one woman with one child. The omission is in keeping with her liberationist theme pitting wives against their husbands, portrayed as oppressors. According to her statements to the TEDxChange conference in Berlin earlier this year, she particularly favors Depo-Provera shots because they enable women to receive them behind their husbands’ backs.

Her latest promo begins with the rhetorical question: “Where’s the controversy in saving lives?”, without the slightest hint of irony at the fact that the entire video is about ensuring that millions of people never live. Gates’s frantic insistence that contraceptives aren’t controversial, repeated in all of her propaganda materials, is particularly rich. Apparently it has never struck her that her “no controversy” slogan does nothing more than testify to the controversial nature of her schemes. Pro-lifers should thank her, in fact, for reminding everyone.

And what is the Gates Foundation’s response to uppity dark-skinned people who object to its “family planning” campaign?  When a woman named “Leela” from Southern India commented negatively on Gates’s video on the Gates Foundation website, she got a patronizing (and dishonest) response about “choice.”

Leela writes:

I am a Indian woman mother of five beautiful children living in the southern tip of India. I really don’t know what is rich and what is poor. Rich or poor must be relative to something. If you compare my family to average American household, you would declare me to be poor. But If I compare myself to my ancestors lived hundred years back, I would declare myself to be extremely rich. It all depends on what you compare with.

Only lifestyles are expensive, life is not expensive at all.

Don’t mistake me. I am all for people deciding what they want to do with their life including when to have children. What I feel sad about this piece of news is “Bill Melinda Gates Foundation” making this issue overblown.

School education and noon meal is provided by School here in Tamilnadu state where I live. Money spent on education brings lot more return on dollar than money invested in family planning. If I have to make a prediction return on family planning has big negative expectation in the
long run.

I am not christian. I really don’t have any idea about what is christian beliefs about family planning. My opinion is purely based on my own experience and my ancestor’s history.

Personally I would rather be poor with my five children than rich like Bill gates with three children.

Here’s the response posted by Amie Newman, a Gates Foundation “communications officer”:

I think this is the crux of the foundation’s position, Leela. You write, “Personally, I would rather be poor with my five children than rich like Bill Gates…” This is the point: it’s your personal decision to do this. No one would compel you otherwise. But for women and families who want to make their own personal decision, it’s their right to do so. Providing the option to access voluntary contraception is what the foundation’s family planning is all about. While you chose to have 5 children, some women may chose to have none, one, two, or 10 children. Thanks for the comment!

Newman’s response, apart from its offensive condescension, repeats the same misleading rhetoric that Melinda Gates has been dishing out in her interviews on the topic. She just wants to give women a “choice”—is that so wrong?  However, women in impoverished situations are always in a vulnerable position in the face of the wealthy and powerful. Does anyone really believe that Gates is offering a “choice” to women who are faced with desperate economic situations, and are offered nothing more than contraceptive drugs as a solution? Does anyone believe that Gates is going to tell these women: “I’d like you to have as many children as you want. If you choose to have more, instead of taking my contraceptives, I’ll give you the resources to care for them”?

For all of Melinda Gates’s blustering, her “Family Planning” summit is nothing but warmed-over Margret Sangeresque population control with cheap slogans and a slick advertising campaign to justify it. The leading population control organizations, such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the United Nations Population Fund are participating and even helping to lead the event. It shouldn’t be surprising—Gates has donated tens of millions of dollars to them over the last decade.

According to one commenter at the Gates Foundation site, even Melinda Gates’s allies feel uncomfortable with her new video, noting that it is “condescending, inaccurate, and racist to imply that only dark-skinned people need our (white-skinned people’s) help,” and “loses all credibility the way it is.”

If you’d like to let Melinda Gates and her employees know what you think about her “family planning” campaign, you can do so here, on the video’s comments section at the Gates Foundation website.