For the Record

The Population Research Institute, a Catholic-based group questions how the Guttmacher Institute arrives at its statistics. Colin Mason, the media director finds it curious for example that Guttmacher would claim 250,000 illegal abortions in Colombia when according to Mason, the country’s Minister of Health says that just 50 women sought abortions after they became legal.

“If there is such an unmet need and they are in a country like Columbia spreading the word about abortion,” Mason contends, “You would think we would see more than 50 if there were more than 250,000 every year.”

Brenda Wilson, “Abortions Decline, Despite More Liberal Laws Worldwide,” NPR Health Blog, October 14, 2009, http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2009/10/abortions_decline_around_world.html


Closer to home, Mexico’s sterilization program has forced women, weary from giving birth, into signing forms granting permission for tubal ligations. Hospitals have gone so far as to implant IUD’s in women without their knowledge. The result has been heartache and pain. In Peru, hysterectomies have been performed against the will of women who have reached their allotted child limit. And the atrocities continue around the globe. You can read about them in Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits by Steven W Mosher.

Marita Vargas, “the definitive issue of our day,” RenewAmerica.com, October 1, 2009, http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/vargas/09001


PRI spokesman Steven Mosher has testified in Congress and appeared on many US talk shows.

“What population growth? Europe is dying. The US continues to increase because of immigration from other countries,” he said.

“Remember this, the Food and Agriculture Organization based in Rome, part of the U.N., says that with current agricultural technology we can feed 14 billion people. We will never get to 14 billion. We might get to eight billion.

“I have seen first-hand what happens when governments take over control of fertility in a country. I was in China when the one-child policy began.

“I witnessed the forced abortion of women at six, seven, and eight months of pregnancy and I suspect that if Professor Ehrlich had been with me in the operating room and seen these forced abortions, that he might feel a little bit differently about his population control proposals.

“We’ve documented human rights abuses in 42 different counties as a direct result of population control ideas promoted by people like the Optimum Population Trust.”

Thanks in part to the PRI’s campaigning, the body charged with world population policy, the United Nations, is itself pretty impotent.

Accused of supporting sterilization programs in Peru and forced abortions in China, US funding was cut oft-by all three Republican presidents for any UN-related aid groups that might offer abortion.

Ticky Fullerton, “Are we impotent to address population predicament?,” Lateline — ABC News, November 5, 2009, http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/05/2734609.htm?section=world


Representatives of the Population Research Institute attended an international conference on vaccination recently and listened to a presentation on Gardasil by an expert. One of the PRI representatives, Joan Robinson, noted the vaccine is designed for 9-to 13-year-old girls. She examined the research, and found that little to no impact would be made on cervical cancer rates.

“In 60 years of vaccination of at least 7O percent of the female population, [coupled] with all of those women also getting annual pap smears and monitoring as well as booster shots,” Robinson explains, “they will only have reduced, at the most, a minimal decrease of cervical cancer.”

Charlie Butts, “More questions arise about HPV vaccine,” OneNewsNow.com, October 20, 2009, http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=728652


Researchers who claim that an increased human population size harms the environment have written an editorial in a prominent British medical journal promoting contraceptive use in the Third World, leading Steve Mosher of the Population Research Institute to warn that concerns about population control and climate change neglect the concrete health problems of people…

… Steve Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute (PRI), commented on the Lancet essay in an e-mail to CNA. He charged that population control advocates blame people as the economy sours.

Claims in the article’s subtitle calling climate change “the biggest global health threat” of the century, in Mosher’s view, are “simply not true.”

“Everyone reading the Lancet article will be dead in a hundred years, and I guarantee that they will not die from ‘climate change.’ Rather, they will die from infectious diseases, from cancers, from heart attacks, from strokes, and so on.”

“These are the real health threats of our age,” Mosher claimed. “These are the threats to our lives and wellbeing that should command our attention and our resources, not some vague, unpredictable and indirect health consequences of supposed ‘global warming.’”

“Population control advocates neglect concrete health problems, Steve Mosher says,” Catholic News Agency, October 20, 2009, http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=17446

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