A diminished vision? Does a major Christian relief agency advocate population control?

Has World Vision lost its way? As one of the world’s largest
Christian relief organizations, with programs in 103 countries, World
Vision stands uniquely poised for doing good. According to World
Vision, donors in the United States and other first world nations
provided over one million children around the world with vital food,
clothing, medical supplies and education through its child-sponsor
ship program in 1996. This, along with its roots in evangelical
Christianity and its long-standing policy against abortion, seemed to
make it an unlikely population control proponent. So when, during the
February fight over population control funding, World Vision seemed to
come down on the wrong side, many population control opponents were
caught off guard.

At issue were two particular actions. First, World Vision joined
CARE and Save The Children in a letter urging Congress to release the
Ohm funds for “family planning” efforts Dual earlier
rather than later1 and, second,
World Vision seemed to allow funding supporters to use its name in the
congressional debate over that funding. (Although later correspondence
tried to clarity the group’s position as favoring the early release of
funds only if language restricting the funds from being used to
perform or promote abortion were added, and population control
opponents also quoted from this letter during debate.)

Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) led the floor fight to release the money and
boldly declared World Vision’s support: “I join with many
well-known development organizations such as CARE, World Vision, Save
the Children, and some church-related groups…in urging my
colleagues to vote yes in accepting the presidential
finding.”2 These two
elements led many Christian and human rights organizations to wonder
if World Vision has not, in fact, joined the population control
effort.

Weak foundations?

While the organization does not appear preoccupied with demographic
questions, it does seem to accept unquestioningly the notion that
there is something called “overpopulation.” However, World
Vision’s policy statement tends to tum the customary demographic
formula on its head. “recognizing” in its position on
“population, contraception, birth control, family planning and
abortion” that “overpopulation is a serious problem
resulting from poverty in many developing countries.”3 This flips the usual
population/poverty link which tends to see poverty as a result of
“overpopulation.” not the other way around. However, the
seeming unqualified acceptance of the overpopulation allegation,
concerns population control opponents because, in so many other
instances, it has set the stage for the types of abuses which have
been endemic to population control programs since their inception.

World Vision seems to more favor the argument that women in the
developing world need to space their children. Indeed, according to a
3 March memo from World Vision’s President Robert Sieple to all World
Vision’s US employees, this concern motivated the organization’s
lobbying efforts during the funding battle. There is a large body of
evidence supporting the impact that spacing births has on the health
of both mothers and children in the developing world. However, these
noble intentions do not relieve World Vision from the responsibility
to understand the controversial nature of many programs that emphasize
the so-called ‘modern’ methods of birth control.

World Vision’s activities

According to Dr. Milton Amayun, a “Team Leader” with
World Vision Relief and Development, two thirds of the 4500 to 5000
World Vision projects around the world have a health component and a
“family planning” component. However, in at least 90% of
those projects, according to Amayun, the “family planning”
programs restrict themselves to educating couples are also counseled
about the benefits of delaying marriage as a way of better planning
their families.

“No more than 10% of our programs around the world actually
distribute contraceptives,” Amayun said, although he admitted
that the contraceptives distributed did include methods like the Pill,
which many medical professionals consider abortifacient. “It’s
difficult to quantify how many of each contraceptive we use,”
Amayun said, “since the actual method varies with the woman and
some women change their method month-to-month.”

Amayun firmly defends World Vision’s policy of making sure its
birth spacing programs are “desired by individuals” and
“acceptable to both the culture and government of a
region.”4 When asked
to elaborate, Amayun cited a project in the Philippines in which
“World Vision first surveyed and interviewed women in the
project area and found that “most would have liked to have had
more time between children,” and then used the survey results to
plan a program. In keeping with World Vision’s policy on local
involvement and in support of the Philippine’s constitutionally stated
pro-life stance, the program focused entirely on education, natural
methods, and greater marriage preparation to influence its ends.

Need for precision

So, has World Vision become a population control advocate? In a
word, no. The attempt to clarify the organization’s position on
population control funding, although ignored by congressional
population control advocates, must be taken at face value. And Tim
Dearborn, newly named Director of World Vision’s Institute for Global
Engagement, said, bluntly, that if World Vision were given another
opportunity to sign the original letter with CARE and Save The
Children that it would not do so. Yet there are signs that the
organization must do more to clarify both its positions and its
language and to bring more of its employees into a greater
understanding of the different stakes involved.

One example of how important communication has become arose in a
conversations between Ken Casey, World Vision’s Senior Vice-President
and Shelia Maloney, a staffer person with the Family Research Council
[FRC). In a later memo to FRC President Gary Bauer, Maloney indicated
that Casey had defended the actions of the International Planned
Parenthood Federation (IPPF). Dean Owen, World Vision’s spokesman,
strongly challenged Maloney’s version of the conversation, stating
that she had “misinterpreted” and later
“misrepresented” Casey’s comments.

“Everyone needs to understand that we would never
support Planned Parent- hood,” Owen said.

In the end the confusion over World Visions’ position in the
funding fight only serves to highlight the critical need for precise
and truthful language. Both IPPF and World Vision speak in their
literature about “family planning,” as do USAID, the
Pathfinder Fund and others, but they clearly do not mean the same
things. What has become more critical is for everyone to understand
that while words are objective, their definitions have become much
more subjective.

Endnotes