From the Countries

Big dollars for U.S. environmentalists

Annual expenses for the following environmental advocacy groups in 1990:

$4,300,000 Center for Marine Conservation
$8,200,000 Conservation International Foundation
$15,700,000 Cousteau Society
$4,200,000 Defenders of Wildlife
$68,700,000 Ducks Unlimited
$15,600,000 Environmental Defense Fund,
$3,300,000 Friends of the Earth (merged with Environmental Policy Institute)
$38,200,000 Greenpeace USA
$1,800,000 Izaak Walton League of America
$35,800,000 National Audubon Society
$6,200,000 National Parks and Conservation Association
$77,900,000 National Wildlife Federation
$15,300,000 National Resources Defense Council
$121,000,000 The Nature Conservancy
$7,200,000 Resources for the Future
$5,000,000 Save-the-Redwoods League
$31,500,000 Sierra Club
$5,000,000 Sierra Club Foundation
$7,200,000 Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund
$10,400,000 Trust for Public Land
$3,000,000 Union of Concerned Scientists
$17,700,000 Wilderness Society
$9,200,000 World Resources Institute
$50,800,000 World Wildlife Fund and the Conservative Foundation

(Shared Concerns, NCIB 1992).

U.S. abortion president, Bill Clinton, cares about nonhuman “species extinction”

President Bill Clinton advanced his abortion advocacy of human species through the signing of executive orders on the 20th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade/Doe vs. Bolton (See PRI Review, vol. 3, no. 2, 9). He even invited UNFPA executive director, Nafis Sadik, to the White House to witness the signing (Family Planning World, Mar./Ap., pp. l, 9).

Now he has moved to protect nonhuman “endangered species.” Smiling merrily while posing among the ferny greens of the nation’s botanical gardens, he announced his signing of an international treaty “protecting plants and animals and setting a firm timetable for reduction of ‘greenhouse gases.’”

Having moved to “reassert” U.S. “leadership” in people reduction, both at home and abroad, through “family planning” and abortion programs; and internationally, through the elimination of the “Mexico City” policy, Clinton is now described as asserting U.S. “leadership” on environmental issues. Fred Krupp, executive director of the Environmental Defense Fund, while smelling the rosy scent of future government dollars, said, “President Clinton is poised to recapture world leadership on environmental issues” (Washington Post, “Clinton to sign ‘Earth Treaty,’” 22 April, A4).

Who’s that knockin’ on my door?

Andrew Kantner, research associate at the East-West Center’s Population Institute in Honolulu, and Ali Noor, population specialist with the U.S. Agency for International Development, report that the annual population growth rate in Bangladesh fell to 2.3 percent in 1991.

In 10 years the proportion of married women under age 50 using birth control more than doubled — from 18.6 percent in 1981 to 39.9 percent in 1991. The study notes that since “services” outside the home are limited by “socio-cultural traditions in Bangladesh,” it is “crucial that family planning and maternal and child health services be made available to women in their homes.” Approximately 29,000 female field workers therefore provide “door-to-door family planning and maternal and child health services.”

The International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research in the subdistricts of Matlab, Aboynagar, and Sirajganj “tested” features of the government’s family planning program including “door-to-door injectable contraceptive services and the building of satellite clinics.”

Researchers Kantner and Noor concluded that “14.4 million births were averted between 1974 and 1990 by the use of contraception” (Popline, “Distribution System in Bangladesh Spurs Decline in Growth,” July-Aug. 1992).

Methanol to revolutionize wheat and cotton farming in arid world regions

Botanist Arthur Nonomura has discovered that simply spraying methanol on plants nearly doubled their growth rate while requiring only half as much water. Andrew Benson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a collaborator of Nonomura, believes the discovery will revolutionize farming in arid areas such as “Mexico, Egypt, Israel, North Africa, Brazil and other regions where water is scarce.” The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has now designated methanol as a fertilizer, clearing the way for “unregulated use of methanol on farms” (Lee Dye, “Spray: Methanol Effective on Crops,” Los Angeles Times, 4 April 1993).

British “switch-me-off” card

The British Medical Association backs the idea of a ‘switch-me-off’ card to be carried by people who do not want to be kept alive on a life-support machine if there is “no hope of recovery” (Alert: Euthanasia Update, quoted from The Independent, 11 Nov. 92). In the meantime, a recent study in the Annals of Internal Medicine shows little difference in medical care or its cost between patients who signed “living wills” or other advance directives and those who did not. In the study, those with directives incurred medical costs averaging $19,502 in the last month of their lives, compared to $19,700 for those without them. “There wasn’t even a clue that this went in the direction of reducing costs,” said the study’s director, Dr. Lawrence Schneiderman of the University of California, San Diego Medical School (Life at Risk Newsletter 1993).

European population growth rates

According to the Council of Europe, the average number of children born to women of child-bearing age (15–41) in 1991 was: Austria 1.50; Cyprus 2.45; Czechoslovakia 1.92; Finland 1.80; France 1.77; Eastern Germany 1.6; Hungary 1.86; Iceland 2.19; Ireland 2.18; Italy 1.26; Poland 2.05; Spain 1.28; Sweden 2.11; Turkey 3.58, U.S. 2.01 (APn, “Europe-population-box,” 3 Mar. 1993).

At the same time, legal abortions per 100 live births were: France 25; Poland 20; Italy 40; U.S. 40; Bulgaria 137; Russia 132, Romania 315 (APn, “Europe-population-abortion,” 26 Mar. 1993).

Japanese target Mexicans

Dr. Fernando Amado, a director of the Mexican Family Planning Bureau Ministry of Health (SSA), described a five year Japanese bilateral “population and family planning” project. The project, which is to be carried out in Mexico, is funded by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). The aims of the project are “expansion of family planning usage,” the integration of “prenatal care” and “family planning” and the “training of birth attendants.”

Another new Japan/MEXFAM project targets adolescents and female industrial workers. It promotes “information, education, communication” (propaganda) for Mexican schools and industries and provides laboratory tests for the purpose of generating income for the ‘controllers’(JOICFP NEWS, Feb. 1993).

Sexual behavior of men in the U. S.

A study published in the Alan Guttmacher Institute’s Family Planning Perspectives has found that: “Only two percent of sexually active men aged 20–39 have had any same gender sexual activity during the last ten years, and only one percent reported being exclusively homosexual during this interval” (Family Planning Perspectives, vol. 25, no. 2, Mar./Ap. 1993, “The Sexual Behavior of men in the United States,” 52).

Fetal tissue transplants for Parkinson’s disease

A newsletter of the Michigan Parkinson Foundation cites the “major risks” of fetal tissue transplants in Parkinson patients: “patients undergoing similar brain operations have died, had strokes, or developed serious infections.” Although the production of dopamine was increased for months afterward after some transplants, “It should be noted that levadopa and other medications commonly in use for treating Parkinson’s Disease also work in this fashion.” The author of the article, Dr. Peter A. LeWit writes, “the fetal tissue transplants to patients with Parkinson’s Disease were far less impressive. It is difficult for me to be certain if the claimed improvements had to do with the surgical procedure, the transplanted tissue, or changes that were made in the medical regimens .… For now, however, this experimental treatment is unproven as to usefulness and long term benefits.”

Condom vending machines in Zimbabwe

The country of Zimbabwe will be the first of the African countries to install condom-vending machines in public places. The “Condomats” are going into hotels, bars, and colleges as part of an effort to stem the spread of AIDS. The first machine was installed at a Sheraton Hotel in Harare. According to Dr. McLeod Chitiyo, the head of the Zimbabwe’s National AIDS Council, the number of AIDS cases has continued to grow recently despite increased public awareness of the dangers. The promotion of condom use Chitiyo said, should be “linked to one’s responsibility and manliness” (World Press Review, “Condomats,” Jan. 93, p. 4, as reported in the Herald of Harare).

U.N. war on Nigerian fertility continues

A $1.7 million program will be carried out by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Labor Organization (ILO) to pressure Nigerians to accept a “small family” norm. UNESCO will work through Nigeria’s National Education Resource and Development Council to produce family-planning materials for the propagandizing of Nigerian school children.” We are going to build on what we have already done, and this will involve population education in secondary schools and teachers colleges,” said Alphones MacDonald, the country director of the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA).

A second phase of the program will give technical assistance and equipment to the University of Lagos in creating postgraduate courses in population education. Through the International Labor Organization (ILO), UNFPA will introduce “family-welfare” education by training labor union leaders at the Institute of Labor Studies in Lagos. This training, according to the ILO, will “mobilize support among organized labor and employers to ensure that the government implements the population policy.” Grassroots public education will be organized by the Ministry of information (IPS, Lagos, 13 Jan. 1993, “Nigerian Government Sees Education as Key to…”)

Abortion “is not a sin” for Bosnian rape victims

Mehmet Nuri Yilmaz, director of the government’s Office of Religious Affairs, reports the state’s religious council has decided that there are “no religious obstacles for Moslem women in Bosnia to have abortions” after rape in the Bosnian civil war. Accordingly the Turkish health ministry, upon request from the foreign ministry, sent a female gynecologist to Bosnia-Herzegovina to assist “an abortion drive” (DPA, Istanbul, 14 Jan. 1993, “Abortion not a sin for women raped in Bosnia…”).

Ozone hole is a “western trade gimmick”

Dr. Gamal Eddin Alfindi, head of Egypt’s national astronomy and meteorology societies says that talk about a hole in the earth’s ozone layer is aimed at marketing new western technologies. He maintains there is a “deliberate western attempt to misinterpret data” about “periodical and shifting variations in the ozone layer on the basis of satellite measurements undertaken only in recent years.”

Alfindi claims current global temperature changes are mainly due to carbon dioxide from industry and motor vehicles but while this “was responsible for some overlapping of seasons,” it is “pure nonsense to claim that the poles will melt or that sea water will rise” to flood coastal areas (DPA, Cairo, 15 February 1993, “Ozone hole a “Western trade gimmick .… “).

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