Every president before Obama has refused to fund ONFPA; the next president should refuse to as well. A collection of marvelous early Baroque songs about Mary features truly gifted singers; and the situation in the Philippines worsens, threatening the family and pro-family supporteres in an uncertain and dangerous environment.
PRI Review
Get US Out of UNFPA; Beautiful Music About Mary; The Situation in the Philippines Worsens
August 26, 2016
We begin with a weekly briefing from the Population Research Institute.
The U.S. Government wastes billions on programs and initiatives that American taxpayers don’t want and certainly don’t need. But no example of government waste is more disgraceful than the tens of millions of dollars handed over each year to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)—an organization that for decades has been working hand-in-glove with China’s brutal and repressive population control policy.
Since the Reagan administration, only Obama has fully funded the UNFPA’s involvement with China’s forced abortion program, which is still forcing mothers to abort children if they don’t have the state’s permission to give birth. UNFPA has never condemned or even apologized for its activities in China.
Since 1979, when the Chinese Government put the one-child policy in place, UNFPA supported the Communist Party’s efforts to limit the number of births women were allowed to have. UNFPA’s executive director, Rafael Salas, even publicly praised the program saying "China provides a superb example of integrating population programs with the goals of national development."
In 1983, UNFPA gave its highest award, the UN Population Award, to the chairman of the National Family Planning Commission, Qian Xinzhong. The UN Population Award is given to an individual that exemplifies what the UNFPA considers to be “outstanding contributions to population and reproductive health questions and to their solutions.” That same year, according to statistics reported by the China ministry of health, Qian Xinzhong and his Commission oversaw the enforcement of over 20 million coerced sterilizations, nearly 18 million coerced IUD insertions and more abortions than at any other time in all of Chinese history. Never have there been more abortions in the Mainland than there were in 1983—neither before nor since.
For all of Qian’s efforts to achieve “outstanding contributions to population,” however, he was forced to share the limelight of receiving the coveted UN Population Award with another of UNFPA’s heroes, Indira Gandhi. The former Prime Minister of Indiahad launched a brutal campaign that forcibly sterilized over 11 million men during the infamous Emergency Period (1975-1977).
India’s current Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently called the those years “one of India’s darkest periods…when the then political leadership trampled over our democracy.”
In 1998, at the invitation of the Chinese Government, UNFPA began operating family planning programs in partnership with the state-run Office of Family Planning in 32 counties throughout the country. These were “model counties” where the one-child policy was supposedly implemented without coercion.
Would the UNFPA would be able to recognize coercion at all? UNFPA had cheered the one-child policy from day one. Why change now?
UNFPA’s Nafis Sadik had publicly stated that “the acceptance of the [one-child] policy is purely voluntary,” but its “model counties” were soon found to be the most repressive in all of China.
Some years ago, a team led by Population Research Institute investigative journalist Josephine Guy went into one of these “model counties” and documented numerous human right abuses.
Guy encountered countless women with similar stories. Many told of how they had been forced to abort their child or had been forced into hiding once the family planning police had discovered the “illegal” pregnancy.
How do you like that – “Family Planning Police” – every county, every town and village in China has them.
So all Chinese women of childbearing age were subject to routine and invasive periodic pelvic examinations and sonograms to assure that they were not pregnant without a birth permit.
Women who hid from the police to save their child often saw their relatives rounded-up and thrown into prison. Livestock, food stores, and other possessions of the transgressors could be confiscated. Women who failed to abort their child saw their homes and the homes of their relatives destroyed by jackhammer-wielding demolition teams. One woman’s story was typical in UNFPA project counties:
“They wanted me to report to the hospital for an abortion but I refused to go. I went into hiding in my mother's village. Then my brother, my older sister, and my younger sister were all arrested. I had no choice but to go somewhere else to hide…They arrested six people in my mother-in-law's family and destroyed three homes.”
Women were forbidden to marry until 23 and were forced to abort if found to pregnant out of wedlock. In Fujian Province, where UNFPA operates a number of county programs, women who became pregnant before 20 years of age were required to be forcibly aborted, forcibly sterilized, and fined 10,000 yuan as a matter of standard policy—a policy that was enforced in every county in Fujian without exception.
As later PRI on-the-ground investigations in China revealed, similar human rights abuses have continued in UNFPA project counties until at least 2009.
Today’s two-child policy was celebrated as an end to all that, but human rights abuses continue. As recently as 2015, cases of mandatory abortion have been reported in China—for one woman as late as eight months into pregnancy.
Aside from officially allowing all couples to have two children and making registration (hukuo) available for children who had been born “illegally,” all other aspects of the one-child policy remain in force to this very day. The Vice Minister of the National Health and Family Planning Commission, Wang Pei'an, recently made it very clear that China’s Planned Birth Policy will remain in place for a “long-term adherence…at least 20 years, 30 years.”
Here we should remember the prophetic warning of Blessed Pope Paul VI, when he warned in Humanae Vitae that contraception would ultimately lead to the manipulation of births by governments. In China, the very notion of privacy is a thought crime.
UNFPA continues to work in close collaboration with the Chinese Government. Its latest strategic framework for program activities in China over the next five years (2016-2020) is in perfect harmony with that of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. The program framework stipulates that “UNFPA and the Government of China, through the Ministry of Commerce as the coordinating entity, will be jointly responsible for management of the programme.”
To this very day, UNFPA refuses to acknowledge the Government’s responsibility in enforcing a repressive and coercive planned birth policy. Instead, it insists that “the Government promotes Informed choice of contraceptive methods.”
The lies abound. UNFPA has never admitted, much less condemned, the Chinese Government’s forced abortions, forced sterilizations, house demolitions, imprisonment, crushing fines for “illegal” children, and other egregious human rights abuses, all in the name of enforcing its planned birth policies.
On top of UNFPA’s support of China’s forced abortion and one-child policy, it has been complicit with numerous other human rights abuses around the world.
In Peru, UNFPA served as a technical secretary for former President Alberto Fujimori’s infamous coercive sterilization campaign which specifically targeted poor and indigenous women – always a target of the population controllers – because control brings extermination in its wake.
UNFPA even imported family planning police
from China to advise the Fujimori regime on how to build an effective control and extermination program.
And how effective worry were they?
Well, consider this: the campaigns sterilized over 300,000 poor and indigenous women, many of them coercively. Curiously, Fujimori has since been convicted of “crimes against humanity,” but only for ther charges.
Although UNFPA claims not to promote abortion as a method of family planning, UNFPA apparently has no issue with giving significant grants and funding to organizations that perform abortions as a core service. Since 2001, UNFPA has given over $20 million dollars to the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) in support of various IPPF activities. Over the past decade, UNFPA has represented one of the most important non-governmental sources of revenue for IPPF.
U.S. law, under what is commonly referred to as the Siljander Amendment, currently forbids federal funds to be used to promote abortion in foreign aid programs. Yet the U.S. Government under the Obama administration continues to fund a U.N. agency that in turn funds organizations like IPPF that openly promote and perform abortion.
Money is fungible. If the federal government uses UNFPA as a pass-through for IPPF, that constitutes a violation of the Siljander Amendment and contravenes the very purpose of the law.
Yet the scandal continues. In 2015 alone, IPPF performed nearly one million chemical and surgical abortions worldwide. Moreover, the group actively advocated to lobby governments in various countries to change more than a dozen laws and policies to undo protections put in place to safeguard unborn life.
Remember, most of these countries are ruled by corrupt regimes – some of them billionaire tyrannies. How did they get rich? By skimming a healthy chunk of all that foreign aid that was supposed to be helping their poor and indigenous people – instead, it’s exterminating them
UNFPA claims not to promote abortion as a method of family planning. But if UNFPA’s funding of a radically pro-abortion organization like IPPF does not constitute complicity with abortion as a method of family planning, it is difficult to see what does.
If there were any doubt regarding UNFPA’s promotion of abortion, just earlier this year, the U.N. agency bestowed its UN Population Award on none other than the former Director of the IPPF’s Western Hemisphere Region, Carmen Barroso.
Complicity with deplorable human rights abuses like China’s one-child policy, Fujimori’s sterilization campaigns, and abortion disqualify UNFPA as a recipient of funding from American taxpayers. Yet it keeps coming.
The House Appropriations Committee recently voted to cut all funding to UNFPA from the 2017 State and Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill.
One would think that it was unanimous, but it wasn’t. Will President Obama sign it? Will he shut down the government over it? Or will Congress cave and slip the funding into a continuing resolution as it has in past years with funding for Planned Parenthood?
Every past president of the U.S. has at some point, cut funding to UNFPA on account of its programs operating in China.
American taxpayers should not be forced to pay millions of dollars every year to a U.N. agency that has been complicit with egregious human rights abuses in China and elsewhere. Let us hope that the next administration returns to the sensible policies of the Reagan administration and cuts all funding to this rogue organization once and for all.
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Do you want to win pro-life legislative and political battles?
For years, PRI has been helping pro-life leaders on the ground around the world to win legislative and political battles in order to protect the lives of the unborn.
And now, we’re asking for your help so we can continue this vital work.
Let me tell you more.
In a number of countries around the world, there are still pro-life laws on the books. But the Planned Parenthood – abortion-uber-alles malthusians are out to get rid of those laws.
Nearly five years ago, the Pontifical Council on the Family asked PRI to be the main organization to help the pro-life movements around the world to be more effective.
In response to the Vatican’s request we created our Pro-Life Victory Seminars and our Pro-Life Strategy Guide.
The Seminars are grueling, demanding 12 to 14-hour intense working sessions. Only the most proven and successful leaders are invited to speak. Only the best and the most committed activists are invited to attend. To date, we have conducted 60 such sessions in 18 countries.
We have trained more than 1700 people who are serious about protecting the unborn in their respective countries. They have won some victories, but I’m not going to tell you about those, because I don’t want to put a target on the backs of those leaders.
I’m not going to tell you the names of their countries, either, because I don’t want to make it even harder for them to do their work. But here’s a hint: most (though not all) of them have Spanish as their native tongue. It’s no secret that south of our border pro-abortionists are zeroing in on the existing pro-life laws.
I cannot tell you battle stories (though there are many!) without endangering the victories or the leaders. I must ask you to take my word that some battles in some countries could not have been won without the training and support received from PRI.
What kind of training am I talking about?
Everywhere in the world, defenders of life need everything – strategic thinking skills, campaign skills, legislative skills, lobbying skills – to protect their pro-life laws and to stop pro-death initiatives.
Around the world, we’ve found that the biggest thing lacking is Know-How.
By Know-How, I mean political sophistication. Here in America, we’ve been fighting pro-life battles for almost 50 years, and, while we haven’t won definitively, we have learned a lot about how to fight – as well as how not to fight.
One of the most important tools of our Pro-Life Victory Training is the manual that the trainees get to take home with them, the Pro-Life Strategy Guide—the Guide to Winning Pro-Life Battles. Think of it as a field guide to activism.
The Guide is a compendium of Know-How. It is 200 pages of distilled experience and wisdom, with step-by-step instructions about how to advance our issue in a representative landscape.
Here’s a small sampling of the know-how delivered in these training sessions:
how to raise money
how to lobby legislators
how to write powerful pro-life advertising
how to effectively appear on TV and radio
how to enlist volunteers
how to get out the vote
how to successfully debate pro-abortionists
All this and much, much more is covered in the Training Program, and reinforced in the Guide. The first edition came out in 2012 — but we are all out of them now! They have all been distributed.
So today we have had it revised and updated by two of the best, most successful activists in the Spanish-speaking world. Today the new PRI Pro-Life Strategy Guide – the Guide to Winning Pro-Life Battles – is ready to go to press.
This is where you come in.
Will you help us get it into the hands of the people who need it?
It’s in Spanish right now and that’s as it should be, because we’ll distribute it throughout the Spanish-speaking world. The Vatican wants this field manual in every diocese in the world.
Will you help me to fulfill that request?
I have ordered 10,000 copies of the Guide printed – enough for every student who will attend our training sessions for the next several years, along with all the actively pro-life bishops around the world. Just the printing alone will cost me $50,000.
The whole International Victory Training Program costs another $50,000 – and that is in addition to the field guide!
But right now we want to get these Guides printed. So I turn to you, because I know you understand the value of it.
The cost comes out to about $5.00 a book – which is not very much, considering the impact it can have and the lives it can help save.
With your tax-deductible gift of $50.00, PRI can put this Guide into the hands of ten in-country pro-life leaders.
With a gift of $100.00, we can make sure that ten friendly bishops get a copy, to guide their strategic thinking in the protection of life.
No gift is too small. If you can only spare $5.00, please send it today. Unborn babies around the world will be safer because of your sacrifice today.
Can we count on you today to help PRI to continue to train and empower the pro-life movement around the world?
On behalf of all those fighting to preserve pro-life laws around the world, thank you.
Second Segment
Recently I received a CD that contained a wonderful rendition of Magnificat antiphon at First Vespers of the Feast of the Assumption. The collection is so stunning that today we review a marvelous set of recordings from the renowned European label widely known by its initials, CPO.
On this collection, the Renaissance ensemble of Bremen teams up with internationally prominent vocal artists specializing in the music of the 16th and 17th centuries. The ensemble’s members perform here on original period instruments. All this is directed by Manfred Cordes, who brilliantly presents a vibrant and flawless presentation of sacred works from the Renaissance and early Baroque.
In honor of Feast of the Assumption this month, we present here the first track of this disc, Virgo Prudentissima, Most Prudent Virgin, which is also the title of the disc.
This marvelous and stirring rendition comes from the arrangement by the noted 17th century Polish composer, Marcin Mielczewski.
The text sung in Latin reads:
Virgo prudentissima, quo progrederis,
quasi aurora valde rutilans?
Filia Sion.
Tota formosa et suavis es:
pulchra ut luna, electa ut sol.
The English translation goes like this:
Virgin most prudent, whither do you go,
shining as brightly as the rosy dawn?
Daughter of Zion, you are radiantly beautiful and delightful, fair like the moon, sublime like the sun
Here is Virgo Prudentissima:
[music]
You have been listening to a performance of Virgo Prudentissima, the first track of the CD by the same title. This truly marvelous compact disc comes from the CPO label and is distributed by Naxos of America.
You’re listening to PRI Review from www.pop.org. We’ll be right back.
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Injectable Contraceptives Put Women at Risk for HIV Infection
The Population Research Institute has just released a New Video Showing the Dangers of Using Depo-Provera®
This is important news. This stunning new video shows how women using injectable contraceptives like Depo-Provera may have a greater risk of contracting HIV.
Several studies have now established a probable link between Depo-Provera (sometimes simply called “Depo”) and HIV transmission. Injectables like Depo are among the most popular contraceptives imported by population controllers into Sub-Saharan Africa.
Despite the risk of HIV transmission, the U.S. Government continues to spend tens of millions of dollars every year to ship these dangerous drugs to areas hard-hit by the HIV epidemic. And your senators and representative in Congress might not even know it’s happening.
“It is unconscionable that USAID, UNFPA, and others continue to ship tens of millions of doses of this dangerous contraceptive every year to Sub-Saharan Africa and other areas suffering from the HIV epidemic,” says PRI President Steven W. Mosher. “Numerous observational studies now have found that Depo-Provera and other similar drugs could place women in harm’s way by vastly increasing the likelihood that they will contract HIV. American taxpayers are forced to shell out millions of dollars every year to fund injectable contraceptives like Depo-Provera in Sub-Saharan Africa. This blatant violation of women’s rights on the dime of American taxpayers must cease,” he said.
You can watch this revealing video by entering this link in your browser: tinyurl.com/pridepo – That’s http://tinyurl.com/PRIdepo. And be sure to spread the word.
Third Segment
Here’s the weekly briefing from the Population Research Institute, written by Professor Federico A. Nazar, a researcher and writer specializing in bioethics and global health.
Philippines: No to Population Control, Yes to Authentic Development—Part I
Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte has vowed to “champion contraception…to reduce poverty by 25 percent in six years.” “I only want three children for every family,” Duterte stated publicly, “I’m a Christian, but I’m a realist so we have to do something with our overpopulation.” Having promoted, as former mayor of Davao, sexual “education,” free contraception and free access to tubal ligation, Duterte now says that “a more aggressive approach” is necessary because “our resources cannot meet the demand.”
Is he right?
Let’s look at the economy.
In terms of population, which grew from 26 million in 1960 to the current 103 million, the Philippines is the 12th largest country in the world, but only 38th in terms of density.
Many densely populated countries are well off (UK, Germany, Japan). Even more, they have high GDP growth: the Philippines annual GDP growth rate of the last 5 years is about 6%, way more than the 1.6% population growth. In the last 55 years, only 5 years showed lower GDP than population growth, the average being about 4%.
Except for economies highly based on extractive industries like oil and minerals, it is difficult to find even one large country with at least a decade of high GDP-growth rate that isn’t densely populated.
This real demographic dividend resulted in a tremendous rise in GDP/capita, which has grown 70% in a decade.
Given this trend, Duterte could enjoy the political dividend of poverty reduction and growth, without doing anything new, like population control.
Let’s look at the population issue.
The population growth rate of the Philippines is falling.
The current growth rate is below 2.9 and has been on the decline since 2013.
So even if Duterte does absolutely nothing to change current family planning trends, fertility will continue declining below 3 children per woman.
Moreover, due to the trend of longer life expectancy and better nutrition and healthcare, the population of the Philippines is expected to continue growing over the next several decades. The population is projected to peak at about 150 million.
However, this is compensated by the fertility decline which means that the number of children under the age of 5 is projected to decrease from 12% of the population in 2010 to 7% in 2045.
Although the number of births per year in the Philippines has varied over the past few decades, it
has consistently declined since it last peaked in 2012.
Given current trends, the Philippines’ total population could start declining as early as the year 2060. If the trend continues, the Philippines is headed into complete extinction in a couple of centuries – like many other developing and developed countries throughout the world that have adopted a cultural antipathy to having children.
That’s our weekly briefing from the Population Research Institute. Be sure to check out the footnotes and informative charts and graphs in the complete article on our website at www.pop.org.
Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte has vowed, and I quote, to “champion contraception…to reduce poverty by 25 percent in six years.”
“I only want three children for every family,” he stated publicly, “I’m a Christian, but I’m a realist so we have to do something with our overpopulation.” Having promoted, as former mayor of Davao, sexual “education,” free contraception and free access to tubal ligation, Duterte now says that “a more aggressive approach” is necessary because “our resources cannot meet the demand.”
Is he right?
How can anybody believe that innocent unborn babies are a menace to the economy and the environment? Is pregnancy an epidemic disease that demands contraception and abortion, paid by a system that’s supposed to keep people healthy?
Antinatalism and its companion, so-called ‘overpopulation,’ are ideologies foreign to the baby-friendly Filipino culture. President Duterte’s false logic demonstrates why “cultural colonialism” is the global public enemy #1. His rationale is false, un-scientific and detached from the reality of human nature.
Overpopulation refers to an under-nourished, under-educated and under-treated population—a contradiction in terms. It is people who produce supply and generate demand and growth. What is the value of the urban land of a ghost town? Practically nothing.
Poverty is not caused by excess of working minds and arms but by an unfair system that ruins human capital potential, treats people like garbage, and then complains about those “parasites” that consume resources without producing enough. Human capital was the key to post-war recovery of Germany and Japan. Human capital is the real wealth of nations.
And that’s why artificial contraceptives are today’s public enemy number two.
A 3-child policy would reduce fertility dramatically because it would imply the application of aggressive promotion of contraception and surgical abortion to the nearly two-thirds of married Filipino women who do not use contraception at all.
After all, a fertility ratio of 3 doesn’t mean that each woman will have 3 children along her life. It is a ratio, which includes women who have zero, one or two kids. Those are compensated by the ones who have more. Giving rewards for sterilizations, or taxing families that have more children, is both folly as policy and fallacious as a goal.
Let’s look at Marriage
At least 1 in 14 condom users are likely having zero “protection” against STD’s. All contraceptives, even tubal ligation, have unacceptable real-world failure rates. Population controllers spread the false gospel of “safe sex” and countless women who became infected found that was a lie. Officials
now reluctantly acknowledge they meant “safer sex” – another lie, as though sex were an end in itself. In fact, irresponsible sexual relations result in “unexpected” pregnancies which either end with surgical abortion or deprive children of being raised in an environment with loving, married parents.
This anti-natal mentality leads to an epidemic of unwanted children born as the result of failed contraception. In 2008, 2 out of 5 births in the Philippines were illegitimate, a figure which is rapidly rising in this pro-life, pro-family culture.
Artificial contraception teaches men to treat women as disposable sex-toys. Many women indicate that they use artificial contraception because there are coerced or threatened by their partner. If she dares to get pregnant, it’s her fault and it’s her problem.
As Blessed Paul VI warned in his encyclical Humanae Vitae, this attitude has led to the treatment of women as commodities, and the demonization of children.
Moreover, the sexual degradation of men through ever-more brutal pornography is a main ingredient in the exponential increase of violence against women.
Women are also affected profoundly by the use of artificial contraception. They are isolated, alienated, and much less inclined to enjoy the intimate relationship that satisfies their natural desires and emotions.
In the Philippines, only unemployment causes more poverty and malnutrition than illegitimate birth.
Children of single or divorced mothers experience problems related to academic achievement, work, crime, and physical and psychological health, just as they do in America and other developed countries.
Because women are tempted to rely on the myth of “safe sex,” they end up accepting cohabitation without marriage as a tawdry substitute for the real thing – marriage. In the Philippines, the increase of cohabitation goes hand in hand with a nearly 40% decrease since 2003 in the number of registered marriages. Harmful effects on children’s development and future performance suffers commensurately.
The world is horrified with 200 million women have suffered from Female Genital Mutilation, but it is not willing to recognize an even worse abuse which is legal and affects even more women: tubal ligation. Women are systematically denied the right to informed consent on the risks associated with permanent sterilization, which can even be fatal.
What about abortion?
Artificial contraceptives promote risky sex, that is, all sex outside a lifelong loving relationship between healthy, faithful men and women who join together in responsible parenthood to raise their children.
Abortion could have dramatic lifelong effects on women’s health, including chronic diseases and death. Also, infertility is caused by artificial contraception, surgical abortion and sexual diseases.
Such irresponsible sex bears with it real risks: there are over thirty types of sexual diseases – where fifty years ago there were barely half a dozen – and many of them are deadly (HIV, HPV), untraceable, asymptomatic or untreatable (for instance, there is no cure for antibiotic-resistant Syphilis).
There are over 1 billion of people in the world infected with STIs but no one is sounding the alarm. Why? Because those who could sound the alarm are the same crowd that told those billion victims that sex was safe. They simply can’t face the truth – that only two things are capable of stopping the pandemic: abstinence before marriage, and real natural marriage that is heterosexual, lifelong, faithful, and open to life.
Natural Family Planning
Remember, Natural Family Planning has a real-life failure rate lower than any artificial contraceptive and with zero side effects. It appeals not only to natural science but to human nature: it inspires self-control in husband and wife, and celebrates the feminine nature rather than dishonoring it.
To serve the people of the Philippines, President Duterte should resolve to tackle the rampant corruption that impoverishes so many Filipinos while it enriches the privileged few. Politicians often promise to invest in the rural areas with infrastructure (roads, electricity, internet), health services and education (including homeschooling or parent co-ops), but in most countries that money just flows to the corrupt middlemen on both the political and the business side of the deal.
Moreover, instead of attacking the Catholic Church, Duterte should support the virtues of the vast majority of his people. Why not support abstinence, real marriage and science-backed sexual education that teaches couples to cherish one another and their children instead of complaining that there are just too many Filipinos?
In former days, children were sacrificed to pagan gods/demons. Now, everything must be sacrificed to the god of fornication, “women and children first,” truth and science, second.
As it now stands, Duterte’s ‘war on poverty’ is actually a ‘war on women and children.’ His view of population control violates basic human rights – as so manylike the right to life or the right to informed consent and ends up lowering productivity and increasing poverty and government expenditures on an increasingly unhealthy and unhappy population.
The culture of life promotes life. The un-culture of death spreads death. Contraception is like a virus which causes the suicide of a nation: a democide. Artificial contraception is a human pesticide used to kill the poor but aggravates the problem by producing more poverty and violence, without correcting the injustices endemic to the system.
