PRI at 15
Father Marx founded PRI in 1989, so 2004 marks our 15th anniversary. The passage of such milestones usually invites retrospectives. But I’m less interested in what we’ve accomplished over the last decade and a half (quite a lot, actually), than in where we’re going.
What are the chief challenges that PRI will face in 2004, and how are we likely to fare in meeting them? Here’s a brief survey:
Defund the UNFPA (again)
With the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) still hip-deep in aborted Chinese babies, there is virtually no chance that the Bush administration will decide that it is in compliance with the Kemp-Kasten Amendment, which forbids U.S. funds from going to any organization involved in a program of forced abortion or forced sterilization. This decision will generate howls of distress from abortion advocates like Frances Kissling of the grotesquely misnamed “Catholics for a Free Choice” — which will make no difference at all in Washington’s current climate.
This means that now is the time to go on the offensive. In 2004, PRI will continue its investigations of UNFPA abuses in China (and in Vietnam, North Korea, and other countries) for a larger objective: Defunding the UNFPA internationally. We will educate officials in the top ten countries providing funding to the UNFPA, encouraging them to follow the lead of the Bush administration.
Although it won’t happen this year, this is one U.N. organization (perhaps you can think of others?) that should simply be abolished. UNFPA has got to go.
Enforce the Mexico City Policy
The stated policy of the Bush administration is to withhold USAID family planning funding from organizations that promote or perform abortions. But is this pro-life policy, called the Mexico City Policy, being strictly enforced? It will not surprise you to learn that some at USAID are doing their best to flaunt it, going so far as to fund conferences overseas at which the legalization of abortion is explicitly promoted.
PRI is currently investigating a number of such violations of pro-life policies, and is working with sympathetic members of Congress and the administration to end them. The Mexico City policy must be actively enforced, or it is worse than a dead letter. It is a deception.
Zero-Out Population Control Spending
Back in the late sixties, President Lyndon Johnson tired the opening salvo in the war on people. This brutal campaign is now going into its 35th year. It is time to sign a peace treaty with the families of the world, ending aggressive, abusive U.S. population control programs and transferring the funds to primary health care programs.
In 2004, PRI will continue to investigate abuses as they occur. Also, we will publish a major survey of several African countries showing that women overseas would welcome health care programs, but deeply resent our effort to prevent them from having children. Many in Congress would like to defund population control programs, but a major effort in this regard will probably have to await the election of a new Congress in late 2004.
The Africa HIV/AIDS Initiative
President Bush has promised to spend $15 billion over the next several years to combat and treat AIDS in Africa. This is a laudable initiative, but one that is in danger of becoming merely a cash cow for the population control movement. Many of the major family planning groups, such as the Population Council, are reinventing themselves as HIV/AIDS prevention groups. With friends in the federal bureaucracy, they are we1l-positioned to absorb these new funds for their same old mischief.
In 2004, PRI will work hard to ensure that abstinence-only programs run by the Catholic Church and committed Christian groups are funded. Millions of deaths can be prevented by the life-saving message of abstinence.
The Federal Marriage Amendment
Marriage is the bedrock institution of society, yet in the United States it has a ready been fractured by no-fault divorce, by cohabitation, and by “partners.” Homosexual marriage, if it is permitted, will reduce “marriage” to any consenting sexual relationship between any number of people of any gender. A Utah polygamist has already sued to have his “marriage” to five women recognized.
In Europe, where the traditional family unit has come under even more sustained attack and homosexuals constitute a protected class, the results are sobering. Europeans, as regular readers of the Review know, average about 1.3 children per couple. One of the paramount purposes of marriage is procreation, along with the long-term care and education of the children who result. When the state destroys marriage, you wind up with no children, and no future.
The only way to safeguard marriage at this point is to amend the U.S. Constitution, putting this God-given institution beyond the reach of the “black-robed tyrants,” as Judge Robert Bork called them at our recent conference in Lincoln, Nebraska, who occupy the federal and state court system. The Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA) defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman. But it does not stop there. It forbids the benefits, rights, and privileges of marriage from being awarded by judicial fiat (as in Massachusetts recently), or on the basis of non-marital sexual conduct or relationships. PRI will be a voice for its passage.
The Birth Dearth
Finally, in 2004 we will continue to warn of the coming population implosion, already underway in nearly all of the developed countries. Anyone who doubts the seriousness of the demographic crisis that will soon be upon us can look at the projections just published by the United Nations Population Division. The low-variant projection — historically the most accurate — calls for population to peak in 2040 at 7.5 billion people, up only slightly from today’s 6,3 billion, and then spiral downward to only 2.3 billion by 2300. The world of tomorrow will resemble “old Europe” of today — graying, aged, and dying.
Not that the UNPD, which gets part of its funding from the UNFPA, got it all right. The UNPD’s “medium-variant prediction,” the focus of most of the press coverage, rosily called for population to peak at 9.1 billion in 2100 and then remain almost stable for the next two centuries. But these numbers are premised on the wildly optimistic assumption that global fertility rates will bottom out at 1.85 children per woman. In the regal language of the report, “1.85 children per woman represents a floor value below which the total fertility of high and medium-fertility countries is not allowed to drop before 2050,” No rationale is given for this limitation, The “medium variant” also shows Europe’s fertility rebounding from its current 1.35 children, mysteriously climbing to the required 1.85 by 2050, Again, no rationale is given. Fertility rates in nature, of course, do not rise or fall simply because a demographic model so dictates. In the real world, as opposed to the reified world of modeling, Europe’s fertility rates continue to crash.
Why these strange assumptions? Why is the fantasy of zero population growth promoted, and the reality of population decline downplayed? Perhaps it is because the truth would illuminate the obvious: Our long-term problem is not too many children, but too few children. And organizations like the UNFPA are only making this problem worse, much worse. PRI will continue to be a voice for truth in 2004.
