- Satan Weighs In On Humanae Vitae
- Just why do we need more people in the United States?
- Population Control in Recent History
Satan Weighs In On Humanae Vitae
This week marks the fiftieth birthday of Humanae Vitae, the brilliant encyclical of Blessed Paul VI on family, marriage, children, sex, and society. After Humanae Vitae appeared in 1968, a tremendous backlash occurred in the Church. The sexual revolution was in full swing, and the notion of denying contraception to willing partners was simply too hard for even many prelates to defend.
Now more of our shepherds are bringing Humanae Vitae “out of the shadows.” Why? For fifty years, the absence of this teaching has allowed the sordid impact of the sexual revolution to seep into the Church. Deprived of solid teaching. fifty million Catholics have left the pews. Parishes that used to have three marriages every Saturday in June are now lucky to have one in the entire month. Catholic schools are closing by the thousands as Catholic families have fewer children.
What spiritual defects have fed this decline?
Well, my generation, known as “baby boomers,” has also been called the “me generation.” Self-centered, egoistic, even narcissistic. And yet, those temptations have hounded every generation since Cain killed Abel out of pride and envy.
Today we look at that temptation where it began – in the Garden of Eden – and how Satan’s latest version has succeeded today in the form of population control.
Satan Weighs In On Contraception
Humanae Vitae’s text beautifully invokes the natural law to celebrate life, the family, children, and the role of sexual affection in God’s plan for procreation. But Blessed Paul also warns us that, if contraception becomes widespread, governments will eventually use it to destroy the family, and ultimately, the culture. This tyrannical practice has diverse methods, but they all operate under the umbrella brand called “population control.”
Blessed Paul’s warning has often been called “prophetic,” but it is based on Scripture as well as common sense and experience.
Consider Genesis I, verse 28: “And God blessed them, saying: be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth.”
That is a command from our Creator.
Now consider: if Satan heard this – and he did, of course – what would he want to tell Adam and Eve?
Don’t be fruitful. don’t multiply, and don’t replenish the earth.
That is the first commandment of Population Control, the tyrannical policy of countless governments that Blessed Paul warned us against.
Back to Eden. What else would Satan want to tell our first parents?
Don’t subdue the earth, and don’t have dominion over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth.
Don’t have dominion over them. No, let them have dominion over you.
Here we see in action the endless temptation to rebel against God. And Satan’s been using it ever since.
Disobedience Makes Us Mean
In Genesis 2:20, God puts Adam in charge of creation. The Tree of Knowledge was part of that creation. So was the forbidden fruit.
Consider Genesis 3:6 – “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise…”
Notice that, like all of God’s creation, this tree is perfect. It gives perfect food, it is beautiful, and it gives knowledge. There is nothing wrong with that tree.
Now didn’t God just dominion over that tree to Adam and Eve, to do with it as they willed? Even eat that good and beautiful fruit?
No. God told Adam and Eve not to eat of the tree. There’s nothing wrong with that beautiful, tasty fruit, but there is [italics] something wrong – very wrong – in eating it.
Well, Satan told Eve she could eat it – with a special bonus: “ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
Here Satan is tempting Eve to act like God already – even before she eats the fruit, she wants to eat it. God told her not to eat the fruit, but the goddess Eve said yes I can – and she did. And so did Adam.
Now the tree as God made it was perfect. And He made the human body perfect too.
“Male and female He created them.”
“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. [Psalm 139:13-14]
We have been given wonderful bodies. But God commands us to use our bodies according to His will. When we defy His will, it doesn’t make us gods at all – it makes us ugly and mean.
And it doesn’t take long. Watch how quickly this original sin turns Adam against his wife:
The man said, “The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate.” (Genesis 3:12)
Isn’t that classic? As soon as he’s caught, Adam blames her.
And that’s what contraception does to husband and wife. They’re gods now, they can write their own rules. As soon as pride takes over – as it does in every contraceptive act – it turns husband against wife. Don’t be fruitful, don’t multiply. Let the pill take dominion over you, your marriage, and your family.
Suddenly the man is afraid: “she might get pregnant.” The woman is afraid too – “he might get me pregnant.” And the prospective child? Whose body is gloriously made? That child is the enemy. Unwanted. A mistake. Get rid!
There you have the sexual revolution boiled down to one tiny pill. The pill will make you free.
Creation Turned Upside Down
The desire for dominion lies at the core of population control’s favorite cover story – environmentalism as religion.
Contraception today is an indispensable tool of population control. It turns everything upside down. Man is now god. Children are not only avoidable, they are disposable. After all, too many children might mean that we lose “the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth.” And they’re more important than children. Especially brown and black children in the Third World.
What could possibly motivate man to so defy God and demean himself?
The apostle John explains how each aspect of man’s created being can be perverted by sin:
“For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world.” (1 John 2:16)
Here John tells us about the disorders that plague the fallen soul. First we have the Lust of the flesh –including the carnal appetites. Well, we’re gods now, right? Why not enjoy them when we want to enjoy them?
Then we have the lust of the eyes – including greed and envy. We want what is not ours. We steal what we can and we envy what we can’t steal. These lusts are so powerful that there are four Commandments forbidding them – Six, Seven, Nine, and Ten. These lusts tell you that everybody else is your competition. The more they have, the less you can have. The less they have, the more you can get.
The envious person is desperately unhappy, but he doesn’t want anybody else to be happy either. He’s mean.
Lastly, John introduces Superbia Vitae, the Pride of Life – the sin of Satan: the lust to be as gods. This is the sin not of the body but of the will.
Augustine calls it the libido dominandi – the lust for power, stronger than all other inordinate desires. After all, you can eat, drink, carouse, or satisfy your carnal appetites only so much. Eventually you get worn out. But the lover of power never gets enough power. God is his competition, and God is all-powerful.
St. Augustine says that this love of power is so strong that it is the motivating force of the City of Man, whose ruler is Satan, the Prince of this world.
But what does power lust have to do with population control?
Well, it works right into the population controller’s agenda. Consider: if you go around town telling people not to have babies, or harassing them for having too many children, or telling poor people or brown people or stupid people that they should get sterilized, eventually you’re going to be arrested, right? Maybe even worse. You’re not going to be very popular.
Enter the lust for power.
Normally, we can’t tell other people what to do. But sometimes you really want to. Well, why not have the government tell them? You envy their freedom. Left alone, they will mess up and crowd the beautiful world that you have every right to enjoy without being bothered by them. You can’t stop them – but the government can.
If you do it, it’s illegal. But not if the government does it.
And that’s what governments do today – at home and abroad. Because government has power, governments throughout what was once Christendom are pushing population control.
Unfortunately, our government does too. And last April, at the Humanae Vitae conference at Catholic University, Donald Critchlow, Professor of History at Arizona State University, made a startling observation:
Based on his thorough research in the archives of the USCCB, Dr. Critchlow found that America’s bishops have never condemned the billions of dollars that the U.S. Government spends on pushing contraception, at home and abroad.
This poses a problem, and frankly it has for 50 years. When Humanae Vitae appeared in 1968, there was a widespread rebellion lead by liberal theologians and a number of priests – And even a few bishops.
Father Bill Miscamble, a history prof at Notre Dame, is writing a biography of Father Hesburgh, longtime president there. Father Bill recounts how Father Hesburgh worked with Patty and Patrick Crowley from Chicago, who had been active in the Catholic Family Movement (CFM) for years. CFM was an early version of today’s “Social Justice” movement.
The Crowleys were members of the Vatican Commission that had been set up prior to 1968 to advise Pope Paul VI. Mrs. Crowley carried letters and stories from Catholic women worn out by multiple pregnancies, medical problems, and the financial burdens of raising large families. The commission deliberated for two years, and Mrs. Crowley was sure her pro-contraception views would prevail.
When Humanae Vitae appeared, the Crowleys, Father Hesburgh, and a great number of liberal Catholics were shocked and outraged. They simply thought their views had carried the day.
That view was prominent, even fifty years ago, among Catholic “notables” like Father Hesburgh and the Crowleys. The problem arose when they decided that the encyclical was simply unacceptable.
Notre Dame’s theology department and those of other Catholic institutions across the country and throughout the western world began teaching telling future priests and Catholic students not to worry, that Humanae Vitae would be rescinded, just ignore it. And that view prevailed even at the prestigious seminaries in Rome, where future bishops studied.
Of course, the broader culture was sinking fast into sexual squalor. There would be no support there.
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Next segment
Just why do we need more people in the United States?
–Steve Mosher, President, PRI
The spectacle of caravans of desperate people trekking across half a continent to get to their Promised Land elicits strong reactions from those who are already here. Some Americans would like to welcome all comers with open arms. Others, like the Canaanites of old, would like to shut down immigration altogether.
Among these is my friend Michael Anton, the former director of communications for the National Security Council, who recently argued in the Washington Post that we have enough people already (“So why do we need more people in the United States anyway?” June 22, 2018). Adding more people runs the risk of “stuffing the land beyond bursting,” he says.
I disagree. I believe that the United States, with its population of 328 million, does need more people, and I will tell you why. But before we get into why population growth is a net positive, we first have to dispel what even The New York Times has accurately called the “myth of overpopulation.”
The idea that human beings are breeding themselves off the face of the planet has been around for a while now. Many Americans still believe that the United States would be better off if we both stopped having children and stopped importing people, at least for a while. Zero population growth, if not an actual reduction in the number of Americans, is their goal.
That was certainly the view of Richard Nixon’s Commission on Population, which warned in 1972 that America’s then-population of 209 million people was already “straining its resources.” There was an urgent need to trim the birth rate, the Commission reported, and went on to recommend the legalization of abortion and the promotion of the two-child family.
The Supreme Court obliged by legalizing abortion the following year. Nixon refused to even consider the second, seeing any effort to limit American fertility as political suicide. Of course, he managed to commit political suicide by other means anyway.
Even during the height of the fearmongering over population, our government took a generally hands-off approach to our numbers. Not all peoples have been as fortunate. The population “goals” or “targets” that were set by many governments have often led to forced-pace measures. For information on how government restrictions on childbearing can lead to massive human rights abuses, Google “China’s One-Child Policy.”
As a result of our laissez-faire policy on reproduction combined with our generous immigration policies, our population has increased by half since 1972. But before anyone recoils in horror from that statistic, let me note that, over that same period, despite the population increase, wages have remained stable.
Anton blames out-of-control immigration for keeping working and middle-class wages low. But the wage stagnation of the last 15 years has had much more to do with China making off with tens of thousands of factories and millions of jobs than with any increase in America’s working population.
With factories now moving back to the U.S. and unemployment rates at historic lows, it seems to me that there is no reason why we can’t both continue to welcome immigrants and see wages rise. Besides, with the economy on the cusp of 4 percent economic growth, and with our pool of available labor rapidly running dry, where else can we turn to find the workers we need to fill the jobs that are even now being created?
This does not mean that we should simply let in all comers. Legal immigrants from Asia, Africa and Latin America who have college degrees should receive preference over, say, economic migrants from Central America with sixth grade educations, especially if the latter have not even taken the time to actually apply. This is not racism; it is merely common sense.
Those who would allow anyone who shows up at our doorstep into the country run the gamut from the American Chamber of Commerce on the Right to Democratic strategists on the Left. But I would argue that neither extreme has yet to grasp how the fractious debate on the issue is actually playing itself out in the minds of Americans. It seems obvious to me — and, remember, I favor generous immigration quotas — that unless we get illegal immigration under control, the public mood will shift decisively against all immigrants.
Populations chiefly expand by filling cradles, of course, not immigration quotas. The latest news on the fertility front is not encouraging. America’s total fertility rate, or TFR, has collapsed. As a people, we are now averaging only 1.7 children, well below the 2.1 needed to sustain the present population. This is the lowest level ever recorded in U.S. history, and foreshadows a sharp demographic decline.
Some profess not to be disturbed by today’s dismal birth rate, pointing out that it is still higher than many other developed countries. This is like telling a patient dying of cancer that she is better off than the patient in the next bed because her cancer is not as advanced. Maybe so, but it will still kill her in the end.
America’s birth dearth is especially troubling in light of our rapidly improving economy. In the past, the return of prosperity has produced a quick rebound in births. Not this time.
The reasons for this are complex. They include rising levels of student debt, a preference for cohabitation over marriage, and a general unwillingness on the part of young people to take on the responsibilities of marriage and family.
The trillion-and-a-half dollars in student loans that young Americans have been shackled with is proving to be the best contraceptive ever invented. Couples who are heavily in debt are reluctant to commit to each other, much less to the long term and costly project of raising children.
Add to the mix a hookup culture that does not encourage the kind of permanent relationships that are the most fruitful, along with government exactions that frustrate fertility through high tax rates and expensive housing, and you have a recipe for depopulation.
While welcoming immigrants will help to offset this, it is even more important to encourage younger Americans to have children. This can be done by offering generous tax credits based on the number of children. Indeed, I would argue that couples who are willing to raise three or more children should be sheltered from taxes altogether. After all, such couples are providing for the future of their country in the most fundamental way, by providing, often at great personal sacrifice, the future generation.
Some might argue that such policies run the risk of turning women into unwilling breeders, but the truth is exactly the reverse. Surveys show a surprising amount of frustrated fertility in the United States. Young women express a desire to have an average of 2.5 children, which is nearly a full child more than the 1.7 children they will actually bring into the world if current fertility rates hold. This means that allowing young couples to keep more of their limited incomes will actually empower women by enabling them to more freely act on their deeply held fertility desires.
Among the benefits of a higher birth rate is a natural easing of the entitlement crisis. For every one-tenth of an increase in the total fertility rate, for example, Social Security remains solvent for an additional three years. More taxpayers mean more tax revenue.
There are other cost savings as well. When a family living in the United States has another child, it doesn’t put the same stress on housing prices and public schools that arriving immigrant families and their children do, especially if they are not fluent in English. Most native-born students come to school already equipped — by their own parents — with the language skills they need to learn. Many immigrant children don’t, and require years of expensive special instruction.
One would hope that both the Republican and Democrat parties would be able to embrace policies that are both pro-natal and pro-immigration. The Republican Party would do well to check the impulses of its nativist wing and welcome immigrants, lest economic growth be kneecapped by a shortage of workers.
The Democratic Party, for its part, needs to abandon its radical abortion policies and once again celebrate life. It is a national tragedy that so many are still dying at the hands of Planned Parenthood.
Democrats would do well to remember the words of one of their own, President John F. Kennedy, himself one of nine children, who said: “Children are the world’s most valuable resource and its best hope for the future.”
Indeed, children are the ultimate resource, and the one resource you cannot do without if our country, or any country, is to have a future.
So let us all continue to welcome new Americans, both those who arrive in hospital delivery rooms as well as those who arrive in airports.
In the end, we all benefit.
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Next Segment:
Population Control in Recent History
Humanae Vitae warns against State power contributing to the breakdown of the family – which is exactly what our government has been fomenting during the last 60 years, at home and abroad.
In the post-WWII period, after two wars in thirty years, leaders of philanthropic foundations, corporations, and academics came to believe that future wars could be prevented by population control.
This acceptance of the concept as a Panacea cannot be overemphasized. It was the pill, writ large: the Pill can solve all your personal problems as well as your country’s problems. Even the world’s problems.
It was a new religion.
Quickly US policy initiatives got under way both internationally and domestically.
Private foundations began the first efforts to fund medical research in better contraceptive methods
But the support network for more population control continued to grow. Advocates of homosexual rights, feminism, environmentalism, eugenics, and abortion worked closely together. In fact, they featured interlocking boards of directors, all facets of the same rejection of human dignity, marriage, and the family.
What drove this religious zeal was the common faith in the possibility of social engineering over living and dying controlled by the enlightened in the name of humanity.
Social engineering engineered by the powerful, of course.
All in the name of “humanity.” But remember that to Shakespeare, humanity meant your humanity – your uniquely human character. To modern tyrants, humanity is a symbol that forgives any sin: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Kim Jong IL – they murdered hundreds of millions, all for the sake of “humanity.”
As a result, Military, industrial, science, financial, academic, and government Elites joined together to form the most vast social engineering effort in human history
Hello, world. “There’s just enough of us, but waaay too many of you!”
But we never put it that way. On the plane this morning, I was reading Peter Brown’s history of charity in the late Roman empire. In the fifth century, he writes, the emperor was admired, but he also had to be obeyed. But how?
Brown tells us: “Intensely aware of their privileges, the People of Rome could not be suppressed. They could only be controlled by appearing to be loved.”
That’s as true today as it was 1600 years ago. And when it comes to overpopulation, the population controllers appear and tell their prospective victims, “We’re from the advanced, wealthy, and superior West, and we’re here to help you.”
Yes, we want to help them become more like us: secular, fruitless, and sterile.
John D Rockefeller III established the Population Council in 1952. Echoing Sanger, he sought to control overpopulation and create conditions “in which parents who are often above average in intelligence and quality of personality … produce larger than average families.”
Yes, all people are equal, but some people are more equal than others.
But making that kind of control possible takes not only persuasion, but all too often, it takes force.
The Ford Foundation gave millions to the effort, and the United Nations got involved worldwide. Planned Parenthood USA and the Population Crisis Committee went global. Hugh Moore, the founder of Dixie Cups, helped found the IPPF, which evangelizes the world with abortions that are “safe, legal, and free.” And that organization has received billions over the years in support from governments – including our own. In fact, since President Reagan initiated the Mexico City policy barring US funding, only presidents Clinton and Obama have provided that funding, however.
But what motivates these elites to want to eliminate everybody else?
Well, some 30 years ago, Mrs. Alice du Pont Mills invited me to visit her in her expansive Virginia horse farm – several thousand acres of it – about an hour west of Washington.
At the time, I was Staff Director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, and Mrs. Mills told me that she was very concerned about the situation in Central America, where civil wars were creating chaos in several countries at the time.
Well, it quickly became clear that Mrs. Mills was not so interested in the warring factions of Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador thousands of miles away; no, she had other fish to fry.
Mrs. Mills was worried. After the Vietnam war, 10% of the Vietnamese population had become “boat people,” fleeing from communism and truly risking their lives – in fact, thousands of them died trying to escape.
But they had to leave by boat. There’s no ocean between the US and Mexico – just the Rio Grande river.
Well, back then, some 100 million people lived between the Rio Grande and the Panama Canal. And Mrs. Mills was dead set on preventing 10% of them from coming to the United States. In fact, because there was no risk of dying at sea, she was concerned that the percentage might be even higher.
I didn’t know it until later, but Mrs. Mills was a longtime member of the National Board of Planned Parenthood. That explains why she revealed to me a surprising fact that rather startled me thirty years ago: Mrs. Mills was also active in Mexico.
Aware that it was illegal to sterilize immigrants once they were in the United States, she told me that she contributed heavily to sterilization clinics that were on the Mexican side of the US – Mexico border.
There, the poor Hispanic women coming towards the United States could be coaxed – often with money, maybe even a free portable radio – to be conveniently mutilated without any untidy legal consequences. Sure, they could continue on into the States, but they couldn’t reproduce. Thus, a great danger was prevented.
Mrs. Mills said this so matter-of-factly that she assumed that any American in his right mind would feel the same way.
Now I mentioned elites. As I took my leave, she generously showed me some beautiful paintings which, I remarked, I thought I had actually seen before.
No, she explained, I had seen reproductions. These paintings were actually the gorgeous originals that her son-in-law, Jamie Wyeth, had painted. They were in a dark hallway, not well-lit, museum-style, and there were several of them.
I knew that I was in the midst of old money.
Well, Mrs. Mills died in 2002 ago at a ripe old age of 89. She was a generation younger than Margaret Sanger, to be sure – but Sanger lived until 1966, when Mrs. Mills was 54. If Mrs. Mills didn’t know Sanger personally, she undoubtedly knew that Planned Parenthood’s notorious foundress was a rabid racist and a grimly dedicated eugenicist.
Mrs. Mills was almost the personification of the highbrow super-rich Eastern secular elite (for the record, however, her obituary did state that she was an Episcopalian).
Margaret Sanger’s eugenics crusade targeted brown and black people everywhere – including Italians and Greeks and Spaniards, apparently.
Yes, she was the classic nativist. And she is representative of the rich elites who bought into population control. They were everywhere.
Back to the timeline.
The population controllers were determined. In 1964 they held an international conference on voluntary sterilization, funded by private foundations.
Then birth control programs were launched by private foundations in Asia, Western Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.
The Population Council began population control operations in countries outside of the United States. Lobbyists working for those private foundations worked to get the federal government involved, and finally, under President Lyndon Johnson the federal government incorporated family planning programs into his War on Poverty. The assumption was that family planning would reduce poverty – so the programs targeted the poor – specifically urban areas, minorities, and Indian reservations.
LBJ’s Office of Economic Opportunity launched 45 family planning projects located in public housing and community centers in poor areas.
The US Public Health Service made family planning available on military bases, and by 1966 more than thirty state governments offered family planning services.
The US Office of Education – Today’s Department of Education – funded some 700 projects of family planning for children.
When President Nixon came into office, he continued funding for these programs, and expanded them.
Consider his statement of December 26, 1970, on Signing the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970
“It is noteworthy that this landmark legislation on family planning and population has had strong bipartisan support. I am confident that by working together-at Federal, State, and local levels–we can achieve the goal of providing adequate family planning services within the next 5 years to all those who want them but cannot afford them.”
Nixon was correct. This legislation targeted the poor and it had broad bipartisan support. And unfortunately that is still true today.
In 1972, the US government joined the international community to push population control. In his foreword to the Report of The Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, known as the Rockefeller Report, Nixon wrote:
“One of the most serious challenges to human destiny in the last third of this century will be the growth of the population. Whether man’s response to that challenge will be a cause for pride or for despair in the year 2000 will depend very much on what we do today. If we now begin our work in an appropriate manner, and if we continue to devote a considerable amount of attention and energy to this problem, then mankind will be able to surmount this challenge as it has surmounted so many during the long march of civilization.”
There’s our familiar mankind again. Fascinating.
Finally came the National Security Study Memorandum known as NSSM 200. It specifically addressed the “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth For U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” It’s known as the Kissinger Report, and was published on December 10, 1974.
The crusade was gaining steam, but the population controllers in the twentieth century were no more civilized that Malthus was in the eighteenth. In 1969, Frederick S. Jaffe (Vice-President of Planned Parenthood-World Population) wrote to Bernard Berelson, President of the Population Council, advocating, among other things: (1) Encouraging increased homosexuality; (2) Putting fertility control agents in the water supply; and (3) Forced abortion and sterilization for all but the elite. Savage, right? Yet these two organizations, Planned Parenthood and the Population Council, were among the three that the Kissinger report specifically recommended for carrying out the worldwide population reduction program of the United States.
The extreme was quickly becoming mainstream. And because they were run by powerful governments, many of those programs produced truly savage results, with forced sterilization and abortion programs that shocked even feminists –
Yes, the feminists were confronted with the logical – and horrendous – consequences of their rejection of the family, the church, and the dignity of women in the home, but they had no moral code to appeal to any more.
And the savagery continued. In 1969, Richard Bauer, a Mellon Bank heir and founding member of ZPG – Zero Population Growth – wrote that “volunteerism is dead. It’s a farce.” Bauer urged licenses for couples to have children sterilization of welfare recipients , laws enforcing population limits, including forced sterilization for parents with more than five children.
Whew. That’s a relief. I’m number 5, so is my wife – but my dad was 9, which means I guess we don’t belong here either.
In fact, Father Paul Marx, Founder of PRI, was child number fifteen in his family. Undoubtedly his gratitude to God and the generosity of his parents contributed to the tireless devotion he had to the unborn.
++
The US agency that sends population control to Third World countries is called the Agency for International Development, or AID. It is the most pro-abortion government agency in Washington, whichever party is in power.
Saint John Paul II talked about “The Language of the Body.” Well, policy has a language too. Image what we are telling Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans when we push birth control as a mandatory segment of foreign aid – no birth control, not clean water. Taxpayers are spending half a billion dollars a year sending contraceptives, abortifacients, IUD’s, and prophylactics all over the world.
What is our foreign “aid” policy telling these folks? “We have no respect for your family, we want to destroy your children, your entire race is an impediment to progress, and there are waaaay too many of you already.”
When I traveled for the Senate to Latin America…..
Now there is the dirty little secret of Foreign Aid. You wonder, why would people cooperate with a thinly-disguised genocide?
“We’re here to help you, remember?” So the same clinics and experts who bring you clean water, medicine, and food aid also bring you family planning. You don’t want family planning, you don’t get clean water, it’s that simple.
And why would the leaders of the countries allow this travesty?
Well, they’re elite too. And most of them are thoroughly corrupt. They take their cut on every aid shipment, believe me. Or the food we send to feed the starving will rot on the docks until all the proper bribes are paid. Period.
Some final thoughts.
The myth of population control is trumpeted everywhere, and it’s having an effect.
Demographics is playing a devastating role in many countries. In Turkey, President
Erdogan urges families to have at least three children. He tells the millions of Turks who live in the European Union that three isn’t enough, he wants them to have five. He is dedicated to the resuscitation of the historic Sultanate that collapsed after World War I.
Meanwhile, Europeans are making Erdogan’s campaign easy. Many are having no children at all. Erdogan wants Europe to be Islamic in a couple of generations – without a war, without firing a shot – simply by demographic reality.
In India, a Catholic doctor from Punjab tells me Hindu families there are having two children, Moslems families are having five. Demography is destiny.
And their only motivation is western propaganda – progress – although if you work for the government in India today, and your family has a third child – you’ve lost your government job. That’s an added incentive.
And the irony is that, for all the science and all the manipulation and force, the promises of the myth of overpopulation simply don’t deliver.
Today medical specialists can sort embryos – every one of which has an eternal human soul – to weed out and dispose of those with less than perfect characteristics.
And it still doesn’t work.
Progress, health, riches, freedom, equality – these were the promises that population planners made to the Third World. And today in almost every category, half a century of empirical evidence from these policies fails to consistently establish the truth of these promises – so they come up with new justifications.
The latest argument for comprehensive global access to contraception boils down to two claims: contraception protects the environment and it advances women’s empowerment.
Yet, women’s use of hormonal contraception – using artificial hormones that last for years – is changing the aquatic environment of streams and rivers, including the Shenandoah River that runs by our family’s farm. The fish are disfigured and sick.
In fact, the environmentalists now admit that injecting masses of synthetic estrogen hormones into wastewater is dangerous – some European studies indicate that this hormonal waste may be seeping into drinking water in certain nations whose water treatment plants cannot remove them. In those systems, that seepage is leading to lower fertility and greater susceptibility to prostate cancer among men.
And women’s empowerment? Those using contraception in Africa are more likely to develop AIDS than those who don’t. Take a look at the references I’ve printed up for you – the proof is massive.
So why does the government support these programs with billions of dollars no matter what party is in power?
And what is the Catholic Church doing about it?
We can talk about that in the Q&A.
Today the Gospel of Overpopulation has been proven false – but countries and foundations still strive to eliminate more millions of undesirable people – and they long to eliminate billions more, over time.
So that’s their Gospel. Well, what do we believe?
- We believe in the inherent dignity of everyone, no matter how big or small, old or young, rich or poor, or life circumstances. Every person is deserving of life from conception till natural death.
- People are NOT the problem, despite what many claim. We are problem solvers and innovators; be it hunger, poverty, the environment, or sending a man to the moon. People are the solution. The numbers show that the poorest third-word countries don’t have too many people, they have too few people.
- The world has many problems, but the amount of people is not one of them. There is always room for more people.
Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth. God directs that commandment to us just as forcefully as he directed it to Adam and Eve.
Thanks for coming tonight and I look forward to your questions.
