PRI WEEKLY BRIEFING
Prospects for Life; Prospects for Federal Courts; Duterte Challenges Philippines Supreme Court.
February 1, 2017
Last week over half a million pro-lifers marched in Washington in loving memory of the 58 million children killed by abortion in America since the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973.
This time around, they may have something to celebrate.
After one of the most historic campaigns on record, the 45th president of the United States took the oath of office on January 20 th.
In his inaugural address, President Donald Trump made it clear that he was going to govern as – well, as Donald J. Trump.
With the leaders of the bipartisan establishment surrounding him on the western portico of the Capitol, the president made it clear that he intended to change things.
A lot.
They unabashedly invoked the blessing of God on our nation. He dared to mention the scourge of Islamic terrorism, called it what it is, and promised to fight it without a politically correct blindfold.
And then he spoke to the folks sitting beside him – most of them leaders of the establishment he ran against.
“The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country,” he told them. “Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs. And while they celebrated in our nation's capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.”
Yes, for years the bipartisan logjam in Washington has continued to fund Obamacare and abortions, has fully funded Planned Parenthood, and the Republican majority on Capitol Hill has given Obama all the money he wanted without raising one red flag.
Those days are over. As PRI President Steve Mosher puts it, America’s pro-aborts have just lost the war.
“Immediately upon assuming office,” Mosher says, “President Trump issued an Executive Order renewing and strengthening The “Mexico City Policy” that has been enacted by Republican presidents since Reagan, and subsequently overturned by Democratic presidents. It bars U.S. taxpayer funding to organizations abroad that perform or promote abortions.
Mosher tells us that Trump’s version of the executive order goes even further. The executive order is “absolutely” more comprehensive than its predecessors, he says, for two main reasons:
1. It now applies to “global health assistance furnished by all departments or agencies”—i.e., not just USAID family planning programs; and
2. It now covers “involuntary sterilizations” in addition to abortion.
“It’s a wonderful policy,” Mosher says. “Trump is not just reverting to the policy of previous Republican administrations, but is actually going well beyond it.”
He said if properly implemented, the Trump policy will save more lives than past versions of the Mexico City Policy.
“On the campaign trail, Donald Trump often said, “I’m going to make every dream you ever dreamed about your country come true.”
The “dream” of pro-lifers has been an America where the scourge of abortion is no more. That’s why they voted for Trump in overwhelming numbers, returning a pro-life majority in the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.
Now that Donald Trump has assumed office, a pro-life majority will be seated in the House and the Senate with a pro-life President.
.
Now the American people rarely give the same political party control over the House, the Senate, and the White House. But that it exactly the happy situation that, thank God, we find ourselves in now.
For the first time since 1928, Republicans—we should really say the Party of Life–will control both the executive and the legislative branches of government.
…
Let me take a minute here to provide some important historical context. Back in 1979, Steve Mosher went to communist China as an independent scholar under the auspices of Stanford University to study life in China's rural areas – which included some 900,000 rural villages with some 1000 inhabitants each. That's 900 million people, and they were impoverished because of China's ironfisted communist rule in the residue of Mao Tse Tung’s so-called Culture Wars, which had killed tens of millions of Chinese and left hundreds of millions more flat-out destitute.
The Chinese communist government at the time was convinced that the Chinese people were the problem, not the solution, to economic progress. So in 1979 they instituted the draconian forced abortion policy allowing no family to have more than one child. All the rest must be aborted, forcibly if necessary.
During his investigations in China, Steve documented this gruesome program and the bloody terror it caused throughout the vast country. When he began to share his findings, the communist government of China expelled him, and warned officials at Stanford University that they had better expel him too, or they could forget Stanford’s role as the "American Doorway to China" which it enjoyed at the time.
The Washington Post happened to publish a brief story on Mosher's ejections from China and Stanford. When I read it, I was on the staff of Senator Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican who was responsible for turning the GOP into a pro-life party in the 1980s as the Democrats abandoned any pretense of protecting the unborn. Senator Helms was a senior member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and he scheduled hearings on Mosher's revelations.
Of course the State Department fought us all the way. Yes, Ronald Reagan was president, but State was run by secular population-controllers – so-called “professionals” – who always considered the president to be just another political appointee.
Nonetheless, with the tenacious and sustained effort of Senator Helms and President Reagan himself, the Mexico City policy was born and made law. Because the Congress was led by a Democrat pro-abortion majority until 1994, Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush had to institute the policy by executive order – so their orders were reversed by later pro-abortion administrations. So the policy was reversed by Bill Clinton, restored by George W. Bush, and reversed again by Obama.
Now it has been restored by President Trump.
That is the background which reveals Steve Mosher’s central role in the development of America's international pro-life policies. When I read about his ouster, I contacted him from my office at the Foreign Relations Committee. It took me several weeks, because officials at Stanford were not only uncooperative, they were hostile.
Once I managed to reach Steve, he told me that, even though he had been back in the United States for over a month, I was the first person he had heard from who supported him. And I have supported him ever since, joining his board when the Population Research Institute became independent some 20 years ago.
According to Jonathan Abbamonte, our research analyst here at PRI, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and its member associations alone performed 964,325 chemical and surgical abortions worldwide in 2015. In fact, international “family planning” agencies worldwide “collectively received nearly $90 million from 2013-2015 in global health assistance funding from the U.S. Government.”
Now this funding is part of what in this country is called "foreign aid," a program that began at the end of the Second World War with the historic Marshall Plan that was put in place to help rebuild Western Europe.
Here’s how that happened.
In the wake of World War II, special interests gathered around the concept of foreign aid under the umbrella of the bipartisan anti-communism that prevailed in the United States at the time. Of course, there were liberals and conservatives then as there are now. In order to share the spoils, they divided foreign aid into overlapping categories: the liberals championed "humanitarian aid," the label they gave to welfare programs abroad – programs that included a healthy dose of aggressive population planning in Third World countries with majority brown or black populations. Meanwhile, conservatives championed "military aid" to anti-Communist governments around the world, if they were threatened in one way or another by communist aggression externally or guerrilla wars internally. The point of this program was to defend those countries from the expansion advocated by the Soviet Union in what became the Brezhnev Doctrine: Communists insisted that those countries we occupy are ours for good; those we don’t control are up for grabs.
In addition to sending money, equipment, and personnel to other countries, both of these foreign aid programs spent billions of dollars in the United States. American manufacturers, suppliers, businesses, consultants, welfare agencies, contractors, and so-called experts throughout the country benefited. With such substantial taxpayer funding, beneficiaries sprung up and grew, eventually receiving taxpayer funding in every state and virtually every congressional district in America.
Now, even though foreign aid funds were spent virtually without congressional oversight, the exploding federal bureaucracies that doled out the money quickly encouraged their beneficiaries to hire lobbyists and public relations experts to keep the money flowing. As a result, when some sensible members of Congress and citizen groups rose to criticize this lavish spending, there sprung up cries in every ZIP Code that defunding foreign aid would destroy jobs in every American community – the jobs of government employees and so-called “nonprofits” that were for all practical purposes government agencies.
Unfortunately, the fix was in, and it was irreversible. Needless to say, as the so-called population bomb hoax took root in the 60s and 70s, population controllers were quick to gain control of the family planning agencies, adding abortion to their services in the spirit of the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion on demand nationwide.
So that’s a very brief overview of how they got there, and Donald Trump is showing them the door.
This is PRI Review from www.pop.org. We’ll be right back.
Segment two
We at PRI are excited about the prolife direction of the White House and Congress, but believe me, the deadwood “legacy” media and the hard pro-abortion core of the Democrat Party will continue their hysterical theatrics.
That’s a given. Remember, the left lives in a dream world in which Hillary Clinton was supposed to win in a landslide and the only people opposing her were simply deplorables clinging to their Bibles and their guns.
These radicals want to make their dream our nightmare. And with their histrionics they are fomenting lawless violence in the streets, which they refuse to condemn.
What about the Republicans? Well, we have to bear in mind that not all GOP members of Congress and the Senate are as resilient as President Trump when it comes to standing up to the Fake News artists. For years, to put it bluntly, many Republicans have felt intimidated by the legacy media and its pretense of credibility and objectivity.
President Trump has destroyed that false façade forever. He has branded the Old Media as the Opposition Party, and they are in disarray. If there’s one pro-lifer in the offices of the major networks or the prestige press, it’s probably the janitor.
That’s why pro-life, pro-family Americans have to support their elected officials in Washington directly. After all, the media’s loaded polls – like those preceding the elections – will constantly lie. They are designed to intimidate, not to inform.
So we have to tell our elected officials the truth that the deadwood media won’t.
That brings up an old rule in politics that pro-life pioneer Paul Weyrich articulated best: be sure to tell your friends in Congress when you support them, and tell them again and again. Never stop, and never let them off the hook when they waver, either.
President Trump has asked the House and Senate leadership to send him legislation defunding Planned Parenthood. Once this is signed, the abortion giant, which has killed over 7,000,000 babies since Roe v. Wade and which spent $38 million in a vain effort to elect Hillary Clinton, will no longer be on the receiving end of federal funding. Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars will no longer flow into Planned Parenthood’s coffers. The loss of roughly 40% of its annual revenue will surely slow down the killing.
Trump will also back the passage of legislation banning abortions after 20 weeks. He has pledged to sign the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which will save tens of thousands of lives each year.
The president has also pledged to “repeal and replace” Obamacare. With its demise will go hundreds of burdensome regulations, including those that brought the Little Sisters of the Poor and other plaintiffs to the federal courts to seek relief from its abortion mandates.
And of course, President Trump has named a solid Constitutionalist as his nominee to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court.
Will the legislation pass? Will the Gorsuch nomination be approved by the Senate?
That’s up to the American people. When President Trump introduced Judge Gorsuch on January 31, he pointed out that millions of Americans voted for him precisely because their first priority was his promise to appoint a justice in the mold of Antonin Scalia.
The confirmation of Judge Gorsuch to the Supreme Court will not be easy, but those diehard senators who insist on opposing this eminently qualified jurist will have to answer not to their friends in the media, but to the people.
What about those same millions of American voters for whom this judicial nomination was their first priority? They have to let their senators know, early and often, that they want the senate to act quickly to confirm Judge Gorsuch. If they do, he will indeed be confirmed.
This is PRI Review from www.pop.org. We’ll be right back.
Duterte Ignores Supreme Court, Orders Action on Controversial Reproductive Health Law
Executive Order Issued by Philippine President Threatens to Create Constitutional Cri sis
Jonathan Abbamonte
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has signed an executive order mandating the immediate and full implementation of the controversial “2012 Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act” (RPRH). According to the Duterte Administration, the new executive order (EO) aims to “intensify and accelerate” efforts to eliminate all “unmet need for modern family planning” for low-income households by 2018.
Since 2014, the RPRH Act has been under a temporary restraining order (TRO) from the Philippine Supreme Court. The Court blocked the law from going into effect after evidence that the country’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had violated drug approval protocols for a number of contraceptive drugs surfaced. The Court also expressed concern that several artificial contraceptives approved for distribution under the RPRH were abortifacient in nature. Because the Constitution of the Philippines explicitly protects life from the moment of conception, abortifacients are prohibited under Philippine law.
With this executive order, Duterte is directly challenging the authority of the Court. His administration claims that the order is necessary because the Supreme Court is taking too long to issue a final ruling in the case.
Director-General of the National Economic and Development Authority Ernesto Pernia told a press briefing that the executive order “will pressure the Supreme Court to stop dillydallying.”
Duterte has long been a supporter of the RPRH Act, having supported a similar initiative when he was mayor of Davao. The executive order calls on the Department of Health to “map areas to locate couples and individuals with unmet need for modern family planning” and to “accelerate the implementation of RPRH law.” The goal is simple: mobilizing the state to increase the distribution of and referrals for contraceptives and to generate demand for birth control. The executive order also directs the Department of Education to implement “comprehensive sexuality education” in public schools across the country.
While the EO calls for mobilization of artificial methods of contraception, no similar effort is made to promote natural family planning methods. Many Catholics and pro-life advocates in the Philippines have condemned the EO as unlawful and biased against natural methods of fertility regulation.
“The President is exposing himself to a taxpayer’s suit if the execution of RH services and products using the budget derived from taxes only includes artificial methods,” says Eric B. Manalang. Manalang is the president of the pro-life group that filed the original petition against the RPRH Act with the Supreme Court in 2013. “The RH Law in spirit and definition is to be neutrally implemented without bias for or against Natural Family Planning or artificial methods,” Manalang insists.
While the Court’s TRO remains in place, Minister Pernia has suggested that the President’s EO could provide a way for some local officials to circumvent the Supreme Court’s restraining order.
“With the EO, there might be some municipalities or local governments that can get around the TRO by letting NGOs implement [programs],” Pernia said .
The EO is not the first attempt by the Duterte Administration to circumvent the rule of law. The United Nations and human rights groups worldwide condemned President Duterte when he called for extrajudicial killings of drug dealers and other criminals.
Since Duterte took office last year, it is estimated that over 6,200 people have been killed by vigilantes without trial or proof of guilt. Duterte himself has publicly admitted to carrying out extrajudicial killings in the past.
While contraceptive prevalence in the Philippines has increased in recent years, artificial contraception remains relatively unpopular throughout much of the overwhelmingly Catholic country. For many Filipino Catholics, artificial methods of contraception (i.e. “modern” methods) violate their religious beliefs and constitute a violation of human dignity as well, by rejecting an openness to life and by commoditizing children and spouses.
The RPRH Act has run into serious opposition from many Filipinos who see the law as an intrusion on their values. The law also constitutes a corrupting element in society that will lead to lax attitudes on sexual mores and could well open the door for the legalization of abortion on-demand. Controversy surrounding the RPRH Act was so great that the Philippine Congress rejected funding for the law’s contraceptive provisions in the government budget last year.
Concern over possible abortifacient mechanisms of certain contraceptives has led the Supreme Court to direct the FDA to conduct hearings to ensure that approved methods on the Essential Drug List are not abortifacient in nature.
IUDs in particular could present a special challenge to the full implementation of the RPRH Act. The law calls specifically for this method, among many others, to be part of the ramping-up of contraceptive procurement. While IUDs function primarily by preventing conception, it is likely that they rely on postfertilization effects as well, causing early-term abortions.
In one study, a fertilized egg was found in an levonor/gestrel IUS user at a rate higher than the expected failure rate for the IUD.[i] A number of studies have observed that IUDs create a proinflammatory endometrial environment, inducing macrophages to attack unfertilized ova.[ii] Several studies have also found that while IUD users are less likely to have an ectopic pregnancy than women not using IUDs, when pregnancy did occur, the pregnancy was much more likely to be ectopic.[iii] Since ectopic embryos are not viable, IUDs under these rare circumstances reduce the likelihood that the embryo will survive and are for that reason abortifacient.
The Duterte Administration asserts that “zero unmet need” for contraception is necessary to curb population growth in order to reduce poverty, teen pregnancy, and maternal deaths. As Philippine Congressman Edcel Lagman put it , “unbridled population growth stunts socio-economic development and aggravates poverty.”
Of course, there is no evidence that stemming population growth reduces poverty. If the economy is growing sufficiently, and new jobs are being created in adequate numbers, then poverty will rapidly diminish regardless of the rate of population growth. Without adequate growth, it matters very little what the population growth rate is–poverty will not decrease in a society where vast segments of the population remain unemployed, underemployed, or otherwise excluded from the market due to socioeconomic barriers like corruption.
High unemployment, not the number or density of people, has been a cause of poverty across much of the Philippines. Unemployment remains high in many rural areas in part due to barriers with securing land tenure and a lack of access to financial services which makes investment and creating jobs difficult. For much of the Philippines’ rural poor, unsustainable farming practices have made agricultural land less profitable. While Filipinos are generally well-educated (less than 5 percent of the population has no formal education and a relatively high percentage of the population attains four-year college or advanced degrees) among some of the Philippines poorest, illiteracy rates remain high, hampering socio-economic mobility.
RPRH supporters have pointed to the fact that the Philippines is one of the most densely populated countries in the world as a reason for needing population control policies. But the population of many of the world’s wealthiest countries—places like Belgium, the Netherlands, and Singapore—are even more densely populated. Indeed, the state of New Jersey averages 470.311 people per square kilometer, far above The Philippines’ 343 people per square kilometer – yet few would argue that New Jersey is overpopulated.
Poverty is not likely to increase even if current population growth trends continue. In 2015, the Philippines was the world’s 12th most populous nation and the 33rd largest economy. Goldman Sachs projects that by 2050 the Philippines will be the world’s 14th largest economy. At the same time, the Philippines population ranking will have fallen one place to become the world’s 13th most populous country. Even without ramping-up contraceptive procurement, the Philippines is projected to have below replacement fertility by 2050.
Maternal mortality is not contingent on contraceptive prevalence either. Rather, access to a skilled birth attendant at the time of birth is the strongest predictor of the maternal mortality rate. In the Philippines, only 73% of births are attended by a skilled health worker or midwife and only 84% of pregnant women receive the minimum of four antenatal care visits recommended by the World Health Organization.[iv] By comparison, in Thailand, where the maternal mortality rate is much lower than the Philippines, 99.6% of birth are attended by a skilled midwife and 93.4% of women receive four or more antenatal visits.[v]
Increasing contraceptive prevalence is not a panacea for lowering maternal mortality. Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, Laos, South Africa, Nicaragua, and Suriname, just to name a few examples, all have higher contraceptive prevalence rates than the Philippines but have not been able to achieve maternal mortality rates as low as those found in the Philippines today.
[i] Ortiz ME, Croxatto HB. Copper-T intrauterine device and levonorgestrel intrauterine system: biological bases of their mechanism of action. Contraception 2007; 75: S16-S30.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Approximately 1% of all pregnancies are ectopic; however, for women using the levonorgestrel IUS, over half of pregnancies were found to be ectopic. See: Backman T, Rauramo I, Huhtala S, Koskenvuo M. Pregnancy during the use of levonorgestrel intrauterine system. Am J Obstet Gynecol 2004; 190: 50–54.
[iv] Philippine Statistics Authority, ICF International. Philippines National Demographic and Health Survey 2013. Manila, Philippines and Rockville, Maryland: PSA, ICF International; 2014.
[v] National Statistical Office, UNICEF, Thailand Ministry of Public Health. Thailand Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey 2012. Thailand; 2013.
