By Tim Waggoner
OTTAWA, July 15, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The US-led World Bank released a statement last week promoting the need in developing counties for “contraception and family planning” measures, which includes abortion.
In the statement, Joy Phumaphi, the World Bank’s Vice President for Human Development, said that there are “population issues” and that the answer is to provide women in developing nations with “access to modern contraception and family planning.”
This latest move reaffirms the World Bank’s long-standing goal to flood developing countries with abortions and contraceptives. It has been documented that the Bank has required countries to implement these measures as a pre-condition to receiving development loans.
The pro-abortion initiative was accelerated during the Clinton era in the 1990s as the Bank more openly insisted countries wishing to receive funding institute “family planning” programs, meaning that they must permit abortion.
In 2007, however, the Bush Administration sought to insert language in the health policy update which would distance the Bank from forcing abortion on recipient countries. The language would have asked countries to provide “age appropriate access to sexual and reproductive healthcare,” rather than the currently worded “reproductive health services,” which include abortion.
Yet, Bank directors from Belgium, Switzerland, France, Germany and Norway successfully demanded that the bank continue its coercive population control policy. (see the letter here: https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007_docs/worldbankmemo.pdf)
Prominent researchers have condemned the World Bank’s initiatives in the past because the organization’s initiatives encourage promiscuity and infidelity and show complete disregard for the moral convictions and real needs of the people in developing nations.
In 2007, population control expert Stephen Mosher, the founder and director of the Population Research Institute, referred to a “dozen Latin American countries” whose citizens were “very offended by these programs for multiple reasons, and yet we continue to run roughshod over their values, over their traditions, over their moral convictions.”
“We need to be standing up for the women in developing countries who say ‘we need clean drinking water, we need penicillin, we need antibiotics for our children when they become stricken with infectious disease, we need inoculations, we need vitamin tablets’,” he said. “‘We don’t need your family planning programs, we don’t need your so-called reproductive health care, we don’t need your population stabilization programs.’”
Mosher explained that the World Bank is controlled by the US, since the US is by far the largest contributor to the Bank. “If we are about promoting democracy how can we allow the World Bank to run roughshod over the democratic values of small nations?”
To express concerns:
President George W. Bush: [email protected]
World Bank:
Phil Hay (202) 473 1796
cell (202) 409 2909
[email protected]
Magda Garcia (202) 473-5875
[email protected]
Please see related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
World Bank to Continue Promoting Abortion in Developing Nations After US Drops Opposition
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/may/07050205.html
World’s Most Successful AIDS Prevention Programme in Uganda “Sabotaged” by Western “Experts”
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008