Global Monitor

Planet-savers pig out; how many moms die?

More than 1,000 self-proclaimed environmentalists fossil-fueled their way from 130 countries to Montreal, Canada, in October where they gathered to talk conservation, compared notes about how to husband the Earth’s resources, and pondered the fate of the world.1

The occasion was the World Conservation Congress, the world’s biggest environmental schmooze, a place for scientists, activists and governmental officials to gather and ponder strategies to save the Earth.

At the big reception dinner, the conference attendees were treated to fabulous snack trays loaded with giant slabs of beef, bowls of shrimp, wilderness treats like partridge and pheasant, and local favorites such as buffalo brochettes, rabbit pie and “superbly prepared” caribou and sheep sausage. Worldwide food problems and consumption patterns were apparently not an issue for conferees, at least when their dinner bell rang.

One local college student, who was helping at the conference, was aghast at the conspicuous overindulgence: “We’re talking about conservation and cutting consumption, and there’s this extravagant thing going on [here]. It doesn’t follow what they are talking about.” Paper use was also of no particular consideration: the packet of conference materials weighed seven pounds, meaning that some four tons of paper were utilized to discuss environmental issues such as the clear cutting of timber and the value of old growth forests.

A similar situation prevailed in Cairo at the 1994 U.N. International Conference on Population and Development. Conference delegates were housed in the very best hotels along the Nile in rooms costing $l50 to $200 (or more) a day, while nightly they dined on thick steaks and lobster flown in daily from Europe. The paper blizzard at the Conference was astounding whole forests were probably leveled to provide the wood pulp needed to print all the conference books and materials, reports, press releases and daily conference newspapers.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world’s inhabitants are being told to tighten their belts, slash their consumption of the Earth’s resources, get rid of their automobiles, and go down to the nearest Planned Parenthood facility and get sterilized or aborted.

UNICEF recently claimed that old maternal mortality statistics seriously understated the number of women dying in pregnancy, childbirth and unsafe abortion annually, New data show a 20 percent increase over previous [UNICEF and WHO] estimates” of “500,000” maternal deaths yearly, almost all occurring in the developing world,2 the organization opined.

The new figure, according to UNICEF, was “585,000.” But almost immediately, it rounded the figure up- wards to “nearly 600,000.” Within weeks International Planned Parenthood’s Secretary General further bumped the statistic to “650,000 women [who] die from pregnancy related causes .…”3

Now along comes the Rockefeller Foundation, which, although not providing any specific figures, alleges that thanks to US financed “family planning” programs in the underdeveloped world “substantially fewer women [now] die in childbirth.”4

The discrepancy is readily explained. UNICEF and its cohorts have inflated the mortality statistics to advance their population control agenda and secure more financing to cope with the allegedly increasing maternal mortality problem, the cure for which, they claim, is more contraception, sterilization, and legal abortion. The Rockefeller Foundation, which is lobbying mightily to preserve and increase US population control funding, deflated the number to create a “success” story to justify the past programs and funding levels.