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Fr. John after mass in Bawa chapel.

An African Catholic priest is baffled as to why his country has been inundated with chemical abortion pills for the last 15 years, making it easy for countless women to end their pregnancies, despite abortion being illegal in his country.

“This kind of situation is going on [behind the scenes] in the country, in the state, in the diocese, and we take it as a big pastoral issue,” Fr. John Ngbapia Bakiri Tomburo of the Catholic diocese of Tombura-Yambio in South Sudan told LifeSiteNews during an exclusive video interview in Toronto during an August visit to Canada.

South Sudan, the majority of which is Christian, gained independence from former Sudan in 2011 following a referendum. The country’s constitution protects every person’s “inherent right to life,” stating that “no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his or her life.” The constitution states, moreover, that “every child has the right to life, survival and development.”

While abortion is illegal in the newly formed landlocked country, Fr. John said that does not stop clinics, private health centers, and pharmacies from handing out chemical abortion pills to any women seeking abortion. The priest, who heads the diocese’s pro-life work and who is also the rector of the John Paul II Philosophicum Seminary, is doing everything in his power to educate women on the dangers of chemical abortion and to spread the pro-life message, despite a complete lack of resources.

Is the population control cartel targeting South Sudan?

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The country of about 11.5 million has a history of valuing family, despite many families living in absolute poverty. It ranks in the top 15 countries of the world for number of births per 1,000 people (37.7 births/1,000 population) and has a total fertility rate of about 5.5, healthily above the 2.1 children per woman required to replace the population. In comparison, the US has a birthrate of 13 births per 1,000 people and a total fertility rate of about 2.01, a little below the replacement level.

Fr. John said it is not uncommon for a South Sudanese mother to have as many as 8 to 9 children, a fact that apparently concerns the international population control lobby.

In 2013 the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) partnered with abortion and population control giant Planned Parenthood to increase aid in the form of “modern family planning” to war-torn and disaster-ravaged countries, including South Sudan.

But blanketing Africa with condoms, contraception, and abortion — wrapped up as ‘reproductive health services’ and ‘women’s rights’ — did not happen overnight. It is part of a plan by the progressive international development industry to keep the developed nations wealthy.

“This corruption entered the United States’ official foreign policy in 1972 with NSSM-200, a classified security memo from Henry Kissinger and the Nixon administration, that set out the program to hold down the populations of developing nations,” Dr. Brian Clowes, Human Life International’s director of education and research, told LifeSiteNews.

Titled “The Kissinger Report,” the document declassified in 1989 lays out a radical population control strategy for developing nations with the ultimate goal of securing for the US the natural resources of those nations.

“The U.S. economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries. That fact gives the U.S. enhanced interest in the political, economic, and social stability of the supplying countries. Wherever a lessening of population pressures through reduced birth rates can increase the prospects for such stability, population policy becomes relevant to resource supplies and to the economic interests of the United States,” states the document.

The document states that controlling a nation’s population can be achieved through the legalization of abortion and by providing financial incentives to countries that increase their abortion, sterilization, and contraception-use rates.

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Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, told LifeSiteNews that colonialism continues in Africa under the guise of such ‘aid.’ 

“These days, instead of governing African countries, Western aid agencies are content to simply take over the country's health ministry. Using the power of the purse, they force it to focus on population control. Instead of providing antibiotics and vaccinations, or clean water and septic systems, the donors push chemical abortions and sterilizations.”

“It's almost as if they were saying, ‘the only good African baby is a dead African baby,’” he said.

Fr. John confirmed that South Sudanese health clinics and hospitals push contraception and chemical abortions on uninformed women under the umbrella of “family planning.” Foreigners come to the country “strongly” talking about contraception and abortion, he said.

“When they convince the population, who are of course poor, they will pick up these [practices] and start doing them even in a big scale,” he said.

Fr. John said that while there are many reasons a woman will seek abortion, poverty is a key factor.

“There is a lot of poverty in South Sudan. And when girls become pregnant, they want abort[ion]. Why? Because they don’t know how to take care of the baby if they give birth to the baby.” 

Chemical abortions: ‘the hope of the population controllers’

Clowes told LifeSiteNews that chemical abortions are the trend in African countries where the procedure is illegal.

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“Chemical abortions are the hope of the population controllers because they are so much more difficult to detect than a surgical abortion clinic. The risk is much lower for the abortionists, who pass the risk on to the women who will be harmed.”

Most chemical abortion methods, such as RU-486, generally involve a two-drug combination and are usually offered to women in the first trimester. A drug such as methotrexate or mifepristone is first used to block the hormone progesterone. This shuts down the woman’s pregnancy-sustaining mechanism with the result that the pre-born baby, deprived of necessary life-support, starves to death and detaches from the uterine wall. Misoprostol given a few days later initiates powerful uterine contractions that cause the woman to expel her dead baby.

Chemical abortion is not only deadly for the pre-born baby, but it is often dangerous for the mother. A 2011 US Food and Drug Administration report found that 14 U.S. women died as a result of chemical abortion, 612 women required hospitalizations, 339 experienced blood loss significant enough to require a transfusion, 256 experienced infections, and 48 women experienced “severe infections.” A 2011 Australian study found that chemical abortions have a far higher rate of serious complications than surgical abortion, with 5.7 percent of women using the drug being re-admitted to hospital for post-abortion treatment compared to 0.4 percent of women who had surgical abortions.

Clowes said many abortion organizations like Marie Stopes International openly admit to performing illegal abortions all over Africa. “They seek to radically upend local customs, culture and laws. They believe that they are in the right and will let nothing get in their way.”

Marie Stopes International has a clinic in South Sudan’s capital Juba, another in Nimule, and four outreach teams, all offering a “range of quality family planning services.” One of the outreach teams is directly funded by UNFPA to fly into remote areas and offer “family planning services.”

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Clowes said the chemical abortion pills are generally developed in the US and UK and then distributed by subsidiary companies in the developing world. The pills then pass to non-government organizations like Planned Parenthood or Marie Stopes, which then pass them on to health department officials, who then let them be passed on to women seeking abortion.

“We have seen this in the past. The Health Ministry is almost always the first department that is bribed. In Africa, corruption is simply the way business is done,” he said.

Taking a stand

Pro-life leaders such as National Right to Life’s Randall K. O’Bannon highlight ways in which the advancement of chemical abortion can be halted, beginning with emphasizing to people that from the moment of conception, the pre-born baby is not some ‘blob of tissue’ to be flushed out with pills, but a “marvel of purposeful complexity.” Following this, people must be told that chemical abortions are not “some nearly magic pill that practically makes the baby disappear” but a process that is “complicated, tedious, painful, and risky.”

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Fr. John said the diocese is combatting the chemical abortion problem with the establishment of an “Office of Family,” which has branches in all the parishes. Here women are taught about the dangers associated with contraception and abortion. They also hear the Gospel message that “life is precious and that God created the human being and he wants life to be protected,” he said.

But the work of spreading the message of life in the poor country is crippled by a total lack of resources. Fr. John would like to have the pro-life message spread on the airwaves through FM radio, but cannot afford the airtime. It is even difficult to buy fuel for their motorcycle to travel to different parishes and teach people about respecting life.

Despite having so many odds against him, Fr. John is committed to counteracting the physical, emotional, and spiritual damages inflicted on his people by “family planning services.” He cannot stand idly by while his people are hurting. While Fr. John’s position in the diocese helps to make his pro-life initiatives bear fruit, when compared to what is needed, they seem but a few drops in the ocean. 

One of Fr. John’s reasons for traveling to Canada is to ask for help. 

“My appeal to you is we need your support. And with your support we will be able to change the kind of culture of using contraceptives and abortion which is encroaching slowly into South Sudan. The rate for sure is high. … With your support I believe we can change the culture in South Sudan,” he said.

To find out how you can donate to pro-life efforts in South Sudan directly through the Catholic diocese of Tombura-Yambio, please contact Fr. John:

Office: (011) (211) 912 435 125

Email: [email protected]