Popcorn: The Truth Never ‘Bamboozles’

What is it about population control advocates that they have to doubt not only the motives but also the intelligence of their opponents? Soon after the controversial vote in the House of Representatives, Werner Fornos, wealthy population control advocate and President of the Population Institute accused “anti-family planning forces” of “bamboozling” Mary Ann Glendon, long time United Nations observer and professor at the Harvard University Law School.

Fornos appeared particularly irked at a recent piece of Glendon’s which ran in the Wall Street Journal in which she expressed support for the Mexico City Policy, decrying population control opponents’ (presumably among them this Institute) “craftily framed” arguments which had so taken in an otherwise intelligent woman. But in the very next paragraph Fornos seeks to defend just the sort of outrageous program from which the Policy attempts to withdraw US funds. “Fornos pointed out, however,” reads the Population Institute Press Release, “that UNFPA [United Nations Population Fund] recently entered into a four-year demonstration project aimed at promoting volunteerism in family planning in China.”

Now, this is clearly ridiculous. In which part of China does the ultimate volunteerism — the freedom to say no when the ‘family planning’ cadre comes to your door — exist? Nowhere, whether in the parts of China with a brutal population control policy or those where UNFPA tries to make it appear more genteel, can a woman decline to participate in so-called ‘family planning.’ The only difference is that the authorities in the UNFPA controlled counties will presumably merely suggest the methods other authorities in other areas will demand. But whether a woman is being offered a genuine choice between going under the knife, accepting an intrauterine device or having an abortion, is meaningless if authorities forbid the ultimate fourth choice — that of refusing all these methods and carrying her second, third or fourth child to term.

Fornos also trots out the tired argument that withholding US funds somehow harms freedom of speech. Yet this is also ridiculous. No one forbids organizations that do not use US funds from advocating any public policy they choose. Rather what the Policy seeks to protect is the taxpayer freedom not to associate, through public funding, with lobbyists whose positions they find morally offensive. Certainly the International Planned Parenthood Federation, who declined to take US funds under the former Policy, still vigorously maintained its positions favoring population control.

Finally, Fornos alleges that not “even a single penny” of so-called “US family planning” assistance has been used on abortion. Yet, China, again, declares the deception. In just this issue we document that the US Agency for International Development has contract with the organization Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH) to the tune of $34 million. PATH uses part of this money to support, refine and further train officials of China’s population control program, thus apparently making them even more efficient and effective enforcers of the one-child policy. Merely padding and heating the boxcars on their way to the Gulag would not have removed their horror. They would have remained the instruments of a brutal and bloody regime.

It’s time everyone begins to bring the truth about these funds out into the open. Contrary to Mr. Fornos assertion that “poor women in the world’s poorest countries… would benefit from US international population funds,” almost the exact opposite is true. Every penny that is withheld from such duplicitous, coercive, dishonest and imperialist programs and channeled instead into areas where real help is needed is not merely saved but multiplied.

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