(LifeSiteNews) — On the 50th anniversary of the pro-abortion Rockefeller Commission report, pro-life leaders issued a joint statement, Declaration on a New American Future, calling on the U.S. government to overturn Roe v. Wade and end all funding of abortion at home and abroad.
On March 27, 1972, the Rockefeller Commission on Population Growth and American Future issued a report at President Richard Nixon’s request that called for the legalization of abortion and a population growth of zero.
“Among other recommendations,” pro-life leaders decried in their statement this week, “the Commission called for the legalization of abortion through the second trimester of pregnancy, public funding of abortion and abortion-providing organizations, universal private insurance coverage of abortion, and distribution of anti-population propaganda to teenagers.”
Not all voices on the Commission, however, stood behind the abortion agenda. As noted this week by pro-life leaders, when the Rockefeller report was published, “Vice Chairman of the Rockefeller Commission Graciela Olivarez issued a dissenting statement warning of this threat for our own country: ‘The poor cry out for justice and equality and we respond with legalized abortion. […] I believe that, in a society that permits the life of even one individual (born or unborn) to be dependent on whether that life is ‘wanted’ or not, all its citizens stand in danger.’”
Joining their voices to Olivarez, signatories of the Declaration on a New American Future called for the reversal of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade, which they lamented has “wreaked so much havoc on America and deprived our nation of the blessings of millions of young people of both sexes and all religions, ethnicities and races.”
They also called for “the end of domestic funding at all levels of government to organizations that have embraced abortion, eugenics and population control as legitimate aims of health care programming, as these aims subvert respect for the equality of every human being under the law.” Finally, signatories extended their petition to foreign aid policy, calling on “the United States to readopt similar policies in its programs of international aid to exclude abortion provision and advocacy.”