India acts to save girl babies:
The Indian Parliament has acted to prevent doctors from telling parents the sex of their expected children. The high bride price for girls at marriage partially motivates poor Indian parents to prefer raising boys. The practice of female infanticide has existed historically for unwanted girls. The Lower House of Parliament in India has recently approved a bill which “will eliminate sex-determination shops. and put an end to this practice,” according to Deputy Health Minister Pawan Singh Ghatowar, the proposal’s sponsor. The measure prohibits physicians from telling either the pregnant women or their families the gender of the expected child. The bill also bans the conduct of ultrasonography tests for the purpose of determining the sex as well as the advertisement of sex determination tests.
Sanctions for violators include three years in prison and a fine of 10,000 rupees. Physicians found guilty of violating the law face debarment from their profession for two years for the first offense and permanent debarment for the second. It has been reported that in the western state of Rajasthan and a tribal area in the southern Tamil Nadu state, unwanted female infants are killed by mothers or midwives minutes after their birth. In Tamil Nadu, almost 80 percent of girls born in a small caste of poor laborers are killed, usually with poisonous berries (“India passes bill to stop killings of female fetus,” The Morning Sun (Dhaka), 30 July 1994).
Ambition vs. birth decline in Japan:
Japan’s international ambition continues to mount but policy planners worry about the effect of the nation’s aging society and declining population on future plans. By U.N. classification Japan is an aged society though the population is younger than many Western European nations. Concerns are substantiated however by the fact that the aging population is growing much faster than other countries because of rapid declines in birth and death rates. Yoichi Okazaki, an economic professor at Nihon University explains: “The share of Japan’s aged population grew from seven to 14 percent of the total in just 26 years, whereas the same transition took 115 years in France, 85 years in Sweden and 45 years in Britain and West Germany.”
The birth rate decline is now a negative 1.5 per couple due to the changes in social institutions. Hisahide Satoh, a former journalist and present research and reference director at the Japan foreign Press Centre says, “If this rate persists, the population, now about 125 million, will be reduced to half in only 70 years.” Satoh quotes statistics, “[A]fter 1000 years, there will be no Japanese on earth!” (“In the Land of the Setting Sons,” The Financial Express, 8 July 1994).
The China model revisited:
A ‘quality person’ legal requirement has been passed by China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) for the purpose of “improving the quality of the population.” This has occurred only one year after a draft bill triggered a series of protests among the international community and some Chinese doctors. Some compared the regulations to the eugenics policies of Nazi Germany.
The “Law for the Protection of the Health of Women and Infants” was enacted by the NPC during a plenary session, according to a parliamentary spokesman. The new law is said to be primarily aimed at avoiding births of babies with congenital or infectious diseases.
Although officials deny eugenic comparisons, critics of the law view with marked suspicion the NPC statement that it will help “upgrade the general qualities of a new population.”
The New China News Agency (Xinhua) reports the new version of the law still claims it “will help reduce births of physically or mentally abnormal babies.”
“Statistics show that the country now has more than 10 million disabled persons, who could have been prevented if their parents had such a law to follow,” according to Xinhua.
The new law requires people diagnosed as suffering from mental and contagious diseases “to defer their marriage when the diseases are serious and likely to affect others.” A pregnant woman whose expected child is diagnosed as carrying a hereditary disease or is “seriously abnormal” will be advised to go through with a “termination.” Granting a rhetorical ‘right’ to the mother, the law states that “the mother or guardian at the time the mother loses consciousness, has the final say on whether to abort the baby.”
The law further stresses that only state hospitals and authorized medical personnel can be responsible for the latest “maternal and infant health care.” (“Law aims to create ‘quality’ populace,” South China Morning Post, 28 November 1994).
U.S. Agency for International Development under fire:
A U.S. Republican effort threatens to put foreign aid on the ‘chopping block.’ New chairman of the Senate Appropriations Foreign Operations Subcommittee, Senator Mitch McConnell (Kentucky), wants to eliminate AID and place the remaining aid program in the State Department — after eliminating $800 million for Africa and $450 million in population programs. Columnist Pat Buchanan believes that all programs should be eliminated, including $5 billion in economic and military assistance to Egypt and Israel, the two largest aid recipients. “We do friends no favor,” says Buchanan, “by putting them on the welfare rolls, which is what foreign aid is. It creates dependency, breeds corruption, corrodes honest relations and bloats government at the expense of the private sector.”
USAID has responded with a new public relations effort. Administrator, J. Brian Atwood, gave nine speeches and 15 interviews with the news media in the first five weeks after Americans replaced many congressional Democrats with Republicans in the recent U.S. elections. USAID also initiated a television advertising campaign, “By helping others, we help ourselves,” they assured the American public while claiming that AID programs have generated over 900,000 U.S. jobs (“AID under fire,” Washington, Associated Press, 29 December 1994).
Women of India used for anti-pregnancy vaccine trials:
The Population Council, Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the New York-based United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the Indian government have funded the trial of an anti-pregnancy vaccine in New Delhi. The trials were run at New Delhi’s National Institute of Immunology (NII). Dr. Gursaran Parshad Talwar, a founder of NII, began working on the vaccine to be used on Indian women as early as 1975. The vaccine uses the woman’s own immune system to trigger a post-conception rejection of her pregnancy.
“This is a very promising development for women around the world,” said Dr. Rosemarie Thau, director of contraceptive development for the Rockefeller and USAID-funded Population Council. “I think the vaccine would provide women with an excellent new choice for family planning,” she concluded.
Dr. Vernon Stevens, a reproductive immunologist working on the development of another anti-pregnancy vaccine for the World Health Organization explained: “One of the big problems in developing countries is that most contraceptives like the pill or any of the barrier devices, require too much attention. So people don’t use them.”
Evidently provider-controlled drugs are considered the better ‘choice’ for Third World women by well-funded pharmaceutical engineers (“Anti-pregnancy vaccine will soon be in the market,” Daily Star, 9 December 1994).
Enough’s enough!
U.S. groups across the nation planned to stage rallies against the United Nations. Plans included burning the U.N. flag to protest what they see as the international body’s growing influence on U.S. domestic and foreign policy.
Volunteers from over a dozen communities from Bakersfield, California to Columbus, Ohio, scheduled demonstrations “outside courthouses, city halls and state capitols to coincide with National United Nations’ Day.” The demonstrations indicate a growing “uneasiness with the United Nations’ role” in directing the use of U.S. troops in Iraq, Somalia and Haiti under Presidents Clinton and Bush.
“The fact that President Clinton is comfortable with bypassing Congress and going to the U.N. Security Council for permission to invade Haiti was the last straw. It’s totally offensive,” said Jane Bates, an organizer of one of the protests. Miss Bates, is from Bakersfield, California, where the burning of a U.N. flag was planned outside the Superior Court Building. “We invaded a sovereign nation without permission of our Congress,” she said. “If the president only needs the permission of the U.N., what about our Constitution?” (Valerie Richardson, “Groups nationwide plan to protest U.N. influence,” Washington Times, 22 October 1994). .
Bioethics in Beijing:
Human Rights Watch/Asia reports that executed prisoners have become the principle source of supply for China’s organ transplant programme. The release of the report, which coincided with the 15th Congress of the World Transplant Society in Kyoto, Japan, also claimed that executions were “deliberately botched to secure fresh organs from living prisoners.” In some cases organs were reported to have been removed prior to execution. The report also claimed that the “lack of judicial safeguards” in China “guarantees that many people will be wrongfully executed — and become unwitting organ donors.”
Chinese law requires the authorities to obtain the con sent of prisoners for organ donations but consent is seldom sought. Prisoners are often not told of their impending execution until the night before, the report said. Further, “the presence of doctors at the execution site and their involvement in the execution process” violates international standards of medical ethics.
The reluctance of people to donate their organs, combined with a significant increase in judicially-ordered executions since China crackdown on crime in 1983, has led to condemned prisoners becoming the largest single source of human organs for transplants in the mainland. As if the circumstances were not tragic enough, most of the organs removed from executed prisoners, mainly kidneys and corneas, are “transplanted into government or military officials as well as rich foreigners and overseas Chinese.” A survey conducted by a surgeon at Hong Kong’s Prince of Wales Hospital found that 75 per cent of Hong Kong patients who underwent transplant operations in China received their new organs from executed prisoners.
The practice of using executed prisoners’ organs is apparently widely accepted by many people in China as “a way for criminals to repay their last debt to society.” The Human Rights Watch report quotes from a 1988 training manual for state prosecutors: “A very few localities, in order to be able to use particular organs from the criminals bodies, even go so far as to deliberately avoid killing them completely when carrying out the death sentence, so as to preserve the live tissue” (Geoffrey Campbell, “Executions main source of organs in Beijing,” South China Morning Post, 10 August 1994).
Eugenic and bio-ethical restrictions in France:
The Associated Press reports “medical ethics laws took effect in France which prohibits eugenics related to surrogate parenting, draws strict requirements for the patents of “test tube” babies and regulates organ donations.”
The laws are apparently aimed at ensuring “the primacy, indispensability and integrity of a human being.” They forbid “any practice of eugenics that leads to the organized selection of people.”
And yet, serious questions were raised about the legislation. The legal protections were upheld by the Constitutional Council after a group of deputies contended the legislation approved by the conservative-dominated Parliament 21 July was not strict enough. The deputies called the laws anti-family and anti-children.
The most disputed measure was the genetic testing of an embryo before it is implanted, allowing doctors to determine if the child would be susceptible to a genetic disorder. The law allowed such testing “in exceptional cases to detect an illness and treat it,” During debate earlier this year, one lawmaker said such testing would lead to “an Aldous Huxley-style nightmare.”
“Medically assisted procreation,” would require a couple be married or living together for at least two years. The woman must be “of the age of procreation” or pre-menopausal. Surrogate parenting was prohibited as well as the implantation of an embryo in a woman whose partner is deceased. In order to “guarantee the care of a child” from a sperm donor, the couple having the child must sign a pledge “before a judge or a notary public,” one law said. Social Affairs Minister Simone Veil, sponsor of the bill, said during debate that the legislation establishes “a balance between the desire of couples to have a child, even if they cannot do so naturally, and the need to set norms and, notably, to avoid anything that smacks of eugenics.”
A medical rule was codified which guaranteed that organ or blood donors remain anonymous and that the donations be made free of charge. However, it allows doctors to identify a donor if required for medical care. The legislation maintains the principle of presumed consent in removing organs from a deceased person (“Bioethics laws come into effect in France,” Bangladesh Observer, 1 August 1994).
This is health care?
A UNICEF baseline survey on drug use at primary health care level in rural Bangladesh has revealed that doctors at government-run health care centres in rural areas issue prescriptions after patient consultations which last a mere 54 seconds on the average. The survey, which was only obtained recently, was conducted by four of the nation’s medical colleges in l992.
Forty thana health complexes (THC) and 40 union sub-centres (USC), the lowest level of primary health care facilities, were represented in the survey. A total of 2880 prescriptions, consultations and drug dispensing practices were studied and the availability of essential drugs and the essential drugs list were also recorded in the survey.
Other survey findings indicated that, on an average, only 37 percent of the patients were adequately examined at the THCs and the USCs and only 41 percent of the prescriptions conformed to the standard treatment guidelines. The survey report said that the average “dispensing time was 23 seconds and 81 percent of the patients were dispensed according to prescription,” Thana health complexes are staffed by five to eight doctors attending to 200-300 outpatients per day, and union subcentres are staffed by one doctor and for a medical assistant attending 50-100 outpatients per day (“Prescriptions after 50 second consultations!,” The Financial Express, 23 October 1994).
Anti-GATT protests in India:
Massive demonstrations have erupted in India against the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Thousands of demonstrators marched into Delhi on 18 March 1994 to protest against the signing of the Gatt documents. Mr. Chandra Selchar, a former Indian Prime Minister, addressed the gathering crowds. He denounced GATT “as a document of economic slavery” and charged that the government had “bartered away the country’s interests to allow free entry to multinationals.”
Another demonstration against the GATT Treaty on 5 April 1994 drew more than 200,000 people. Clashes broke out in which more than 500 people were injured. M.K. Pande, the Secretary-General of central Industrial Trade Unions, warned that the agitation could extend to towns and villages.
The following day, another demonstration was conducted in Delhi by the “Right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).” BJP leaders warned the Indian government would be overthrown if it signed the GATT Treaty (“The gathering storm,” Third World Resurgence, no. 45).
Bribing parents in Germany to the tune of $650 per baby:
The East German state of Brandenburg announced that it will pay $650 for the birth of every child. Birth rates have dropped precipitously throughout the five states of East Germany but are most pronounced in Brandenburg where they have fallen from 38,000 in 1989 to 12,000 last year. Births are down by more than half in the other eastern states.
Brandenburg Premier Manfred Stolpe described his plan as a “special signal” to couples who have chosen not to have children due to economic concerns. Payments to parents will begin immediately in addition to national health insurance for obstetric and other medical expense coverage. A monthly allowance, called Kindergeld, will be awarded on a sliding scale based on income and may be used for expenses related to child rearing.
German experts predict that there will be fewer than half as many children in Eastern Germany in the year 2010 than there are today. Wolfgang Jahmer, the director of social welfare programs in Schwerin, where the birth rate has fallen by 59 percent over the last five years, said: “We have some fears that the tree of life may be falling” (Steven Kinzer, “$650 a baby: Germany to pay to stem decline in births,” The New York Times, 22 November 1994).
Zimbabwe parliamentarian accuses developed nations of plot:
Zimbabwean parliamentarian Ruth Chinamano told the House that the distribution of “condoms and other contraceptives are a way of wiping out Africans .… Africa is not overpopulated.” “Whites want blacks to be less. Every action by developed countries since the days of slavery was for their own economic gain. We should view foreign prescription with suspicion,” she warned (“Zimbabwe MP says condom use plot .…,” Reuter, 16 December 1994).
