Christmas inspires us to reflection; New Year’s to resolution. We are called to reflect on the successes and setbacks of the year ending; we gird ourselves for new challenges in the year to come.
The year now ending marked Population Research Institute’s coming of age as an organization. Battles — to end mass sterilization in Peru, to cut off funding to the UN Population Fund, to protect families from intrusive population control programs (the Tiahrt Amendment) — were fought … and won.
An organization is no better than its people. PRI is blessed with some extraordinary talent, who in 1998 did some extraordinary things.
David Morrison’s heroic investigative journalism in Peru led to the collapse of the government’s mass sterilization campaign there. Until recently David was our Director of Communications, and edited the PRI Review. Sadly, this will be his last issue. We wish him well in his future endeavors.
Kateryna Cuddeback, who coordinates institutional and program development for us, went head-to-head with population control (and quinacrine sterilization) advocate Stephen Mumford on The Jay Diamond Radio Show in New York. Not only did she best him in the debate, she so flummoxed him that he was reduced to attacking her faith. “You cannot be a good Catholic and a good American at the same time,” Mumford cried out near the end of their exchange, an expression of blatant anti-Catholic bigotry that won him a rebuke from the show’s host.
Sarah Dateno, my executive assistant, has done yeoman’s work over the past year as we became independent from Human Life International (still our chief supporter), taking care of the myriad changes that our new status entailed.
Tracy Trunk, our Information Projects Coordinator, spent months assembling data on human rights violations in population control programs, research that contributed directly to the passage of the Tiahrt Amendment by Congress. Tracy, along with Sarah and Kateryna, is a graduate of Christendom College here in Front Royal.
We are also blessed with some extraordinary friends. Congressional pro-life leader Christopher Smith, for example, wrote me earlier this year about “how vital [PRI’s] research is to [me] and my colleagues in Congress who are seeking to defend women and children around the world from coercive population control programs.”
We are also blessed with friends like you, our readers, whose continuing and generous support in the coming year we are counting on.
I hope you and your families had a blessed Christmas, a hopeful New Year and look forward to a fertile and prosperous Spring.
Steven W. Mosher
President
