By Gudrun Schultz
LONDON, United Kingdom, February 1, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A new report warning of the crucial need for international population control was produced by a UK Parliamentary committee that is funded by the largest abortion providers in the international abortion industry.
The All Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development and Reproductive Health is funded by the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which pushes for international abortion access, and abortion-supporting Marie Stopes International. The steering committee of the Group includes representatives from IPPF and MSI.
As well as providing funding to the Group, the three organizations contributed substantial evidence to the inquiry, acknowledged MP Richard Ottaway, inquiry chairman, in the introduction to the report. All three groups are repeatedly cited as sources throughout the document .
Entitled Return of the Population Growth Factor: Its impact upon the Millennium Development Goals, the report repeats familiar warnings of population growth outstripping available resources and causing world poverty. At the center of the document is a call for increased foreign aid to fund even more population control programs in developing countries.
“We recommend that donor agencies, governments, the World Bank and the development banks increase their support for family planning,” the authors state, adding that developed nations’ investment in family planning is currently only at 10 percent of the projected necessary funding from the 2005 International Conference on Population and Development.
“In Africa, 97 percent of the population cannot afford the full cost of contraception without subsidies,” the report stated.
The authors blame “conservative religious and political forces” for withdrawing attention from increasing world population by conspiring to shift attention towards the need to support aging citizens in western nations experiencing radical population decline. As well, the authors blame “religious opposition” to family planning as among the factors blocking family planning initiatives.
Dr Tiziana Leone, a population studies lecturer at the London School of Economics who submitted evidence to the All Party Group, blamed abstinence programs for taking funds away from contraception, BBC News reported.
“[We] are also seeing an impact of the ABC rule (Abstinence, Be faithful, Condoms) for funding health programmes which has shifted a lot of funds into the A and the B, and you’re seeing the price of condoms in Uganda for instance going really high.”
(In fact, Uganda’s abstinence program has been highly successful in significantly lowering the rate of HIV infection rates in the country, the only African nation to do so.)
The negative social impact of dramatically falling birth rates in the West was not addressed by the report.
The report directly links economic success to reduction in population, lauding China for lifting “150 million people out of abject poverty” through “a combination of lowered birth rates and economic reform.” The authors follow that statement with a reminder that family planning is not about coercion, an apparent reference to China’s extreme human rights violations under the country’s one-child policy, including forced abortion and sterilizations.
Interestingly, the report admitted that high population density was not a factor in rising pollution levels world-wide, since countries with low birth rates and unrestricted abortion access show the highest levels of carbon dioxide per individual. In 2002 the United States had double the emissions of the nearest contender, Russia, and more than three times the rate of India.
As well, the report carries an inadvertent message of hope for pro-life organizations—the authors point out that contraception use has stalled in many developing nations over the past ten years, with little to no increase in the use of modern contraceptive methods.
As well as profound concerns over conflict of interest by the document’s backers, the legitimacy of the material in the report was further undermined by evidence that it was taken entirely from population-control activist organizations. A statement from Catholics for a Free Choice, a small radical organization with little following, was included in the report.
Information contributions included eight reports from UN departments and commissions, eight reports from population control advocate groups in Asia and Africa, the World Health Organization, and one lengthy statement from the pro-abortion group Catholics for a Free Choice, among others.
While the report authors acknowledge the Group was funded by leaders in the abortion industry, media coverage has uniformly failed to mention that fact.
Read full report from the UK Parliamentary Group:
https://www.appg-popdevrh.org.uk/Publications/Population%20Hearings/APPG%20Report%20-%20Return%20of%20the%20Population%20Factor.pdf
See LifeSiteNews.com Extra Special Report:
The Inherent Racism of Population Control
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2004/may/040518a.html
To see numerous other LifeSiteNews reports on population control enter the word “population” into the LifeSiteNews search at https://www.lifesitenews.com/