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The UN War on Population
One of the greatest hoaxes of the 20th century, now accepted without question by much of the world’s “educated” populace, is the fraudulent contention that the earth is terribly overpopulated with humans.
So serious is the “overpopulation crisis,” according to prevailing wisdom, that it threatens not only to outstrip food production and all other basic resources, but also to render our planet uninhabitable for humans and other animal species because of pollution.
Overpopulation is a crucial tenet underlying much of the collectivist One-World agenda. According to its theorists, this global “crisis,” justifies the most far-reaching government controls imaginable: controls over the economy, the environment, and, of course, over the most private and intimate of areas, our reproductive lives. The high oracle of the doctrine of overpopulation for more than two decades - and a leading advocate of totalitarian “remedy” for this supposed affliction - has been Paul Ehrlich.
Since its publishing debut in 1968, more than 20 million copies of his book The Population Bomb have been sold, making it one of the best-selling books of all time. It remains on high school and college required reading lists, along with Professor Ehrlich’s newest diatribe, The Population Explosion,5 a 1990 update of his famous doomsday message of 1968.
In the earlier work he warned:
Although his radically pessimistic predictions of dying oceans and imminent global catastrophes were refuted at the time by many men of science (and the passing years have seen the refutations increase in number),7 the biologist from Stanford University rocketed to stardom as a leading spokesman of the environment/population control movement.
In The Population Bomb, Ehrlich praised abortion as “a highly effective weapon in the armory of population control,” and suggested that “compulsory birth regulation” through the government-mandated addition of “temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food” may become necessary.8
Then, completely disregarding parental rights, norms of morality, and the fact that our constitutional system grants the federal government absolutely no authority to meddle in such affairs, he called for “federal laws making instruction in birth-control methods mandatory in all public schools.”9
Increasing the intensity of his totalitarian demands, he stated,
Sound a bit authoritarian?
Well, according to this anti-population crusader, we’re facing a deadly serious situation, and the “operation will require many brutal and tough-minded decisions.”11 Ehrlich’s critical acclaim in the major media and his phenomenal book sales ushered in a doom boom that has fed, and in turn has been fed by, an ever-expanding proliferation of population control programs.
They are funded by tax dollars funneled through national government agencies, the United Nations, and an international network of private anti-natalist organizations. Of the many ecological jeremiads following in the wake of The Population Bomb, two of the most influential were The Limits to Growth (1972),12 a report produced for the Club of Rome, and the Global 2000 Report to the President of the United States (1980),13 a federal government publication that gives legitimacy to the thoughts of a large assemblage of professional wailers from environmental/population control circles.
The Limits to Growth has sold over 10 million copies and has been translated into more than 30 languages. The prodigious Global 2000, whose physical size resembles a New York City telephone book, sold over one million copies. Both achieved an aura of importance with their reliance on sophisticated computer modeling to analyze massive banks of data, factor in various assumptions and variables, and then predict the future.
Karl Marx could not have phrased it better. And, of course, the social engineers with their mighty computers would show the way. Not everyone, however, was favorably impressed by their efforts or their results. Scientists and scholars from many disciplines, representing a broad cross-section of political thought, thoroughly discredited these studies with facts, logic, and sound analysis. Even socialist Gunnar Myrdal, certainly no opponent of heavy-handed government, remained unconvinced that the celebrated MIT researchers had made a worthwhile contribution to our knowledge of the world, how it works, or what to expect in the future.
Or, as another unimpressed scholar would aptly put it, the MIT team amounted to little more than a glorified “Malthus with a computer.”16 The Global 2000 team differed little from the MIT group in approach, methodology, assumptions, and conclusions. In its letter of transmittal to the President of the United States, its staff reported, as expected, that the world’s future was indeed bleak:
But a different group of eminent scientists and academics, surveying precisely the same horizons, came away with a completely opposite picture of what the future holds. In The Resourceful Earth: A Response to Global 2000, these experts predicted:
The authors of The Resourceful Earth marshaled an avalanche of scientific evidence to substantiate their optimistic projections and to refute the dire prophesies of the Global 2000 alarmists. Their authoritative refutations received scant media attention, however, and were not successful in offsetting the harmful influence of the doomsday reports or in stanching the seemingly endless succession of imitators. What The Resourceful Earth scientists and many other scholars have conclusively demonstrated is that the scientific credibility of overpopulation alarmists is about as reliable as that of Chicken Little.
There is no evidence that the earth, or any region of it, is overpopulated. China and India, two countries most often cited as cases of extreme population density, in reality have population densities similar to Pennsylvania and the United Kingdom, respectively.19 These and other socialist nations suffer not from overpopulation, but overregulation: not too many people, but too many bureaucrats and too much government stifling productivity and progress.
Thus we have reports like Changing Our Ways (1992) from the Carnegie Endowment’s National Commission on America and the New World, claiming population growth “threatens international stability,” and “universal access to family planning services ... is the least costly and ... the most pragmatic means to address the issue.”20
The Carnegie Commission charged that “American leadership has been absent on the population crisis for too long,” even though it admits in the next breath “the United States remains the largest donor (in 1990, $280 million).”21
The Carnegie collectivists were referring to the congressional cutoff of funding for these organizations, beginning in 1985, because of the support they were providing for coercive abortion policies and programs in China. But the cutoff of American-supplied funds for one UN agency did not kill the UN’s efforts to force population control.
The barbarity of China’s one-child policy was so repugnant that, as reports came out, even many liberals were repelled.
In her book entitled The War Against Population, conservative Professor Jacqueline Kasun supplied a stunning summary of the shocking brutality directed against pregnant women by China’s communist officials:
China scholar Steven Mosher, who personally witnessed the harshness of these policies in the rural Chinese village where he lived and worked on his doctoral studies during 1979-80, noted that U.S.,
Long after China’s atrocious policies were brought to light, UNFPA was still supporting the totalitarian measures. In July 1987, for example, the New China News Agency in Beijing reported the praise an UNFPA official had showered on the regime.
The Council on Foreign Relations chose to swallow the line put out by Chinese communist officials and UN bureaucrats rather than believe the independently corroborated stories of both Chinese and Western observers. In his article entitled “The Case for Practical Internationalism” in the Spring 1988 issue of Foreign Affairs, top CFR strategist Richard N. Gardner reiterated earlier calls for programs to meet the “population challenge” and asserted:
According to Jacqueline Kasun, AID may not have done so directly, but,
But, if the UNFPA received U.S. funds indirectly through other U.S.-funded organizations, isn’t it still accurate to state that the citizens of this nation are helping to fund the population control activities of the UN? Also, the denial by Chinese and UNFPA officials that coercive abortion is being practiced in China is a bald-faced lie.
The taxpayer-funded IPPF, says Fr. Paul Marx, the founder of Human Life International, “is the world’s largest purveyor of abortion on demand. IPPF’s model of ‘safe motherhood’ is a sterile woman with a dead baby, preferably a baby killed at one of their numerous abortion mills.”29 Author Claire Chambers, who has done extensive research on the history of the population control movement, charged in 1977:
Evidence to support that contention is plentiful. Jacqueline Kasun made the same point in her The War Against Population:
From the UN’s very beginning, key UN figures such as Brock Chisholm, Julian Huxley, and Paul Hoffman were promoting anti-natalist policies.32
The first director general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was humanist leader Julian Huxley, who in 1947 wrote in,
UNESCO’s quarterly journal, Impact of Science on Society, served as a regular platform for anti-natalist propaganda. In the fall of 1968, almost the entire issue of this publication was devoted to population control themes. The UN’s formal acceptance of the world leadership role for population control can be traced back at least to 1954 when a UN Population Commission recommended that every country should “have a population policy.”34
“Human Rights Day,” December 11, 1967, proved to be a landmark date. On that occasion, UN Secretary-General U Thant, President of the United States Lyndon B. Johnson, and 29 other heads of state issued a Declaration on Population.
That same year saw the establishment of the UN Fund for Population Activities by Secretary-General U Thant, a Marxist, and the subsequent organization and management of the Fund under the administration of Paul Hoffman (CFR) was another major advance for the population planners. UNFPA, says Professor Kasun, “excellently illustrates the labyrinthine financial connections of the world population network.”
She explained:
On November 12, 1971, the UN Population Commission adopted a resolution urging, among other things, that all member states:
The year 1972 saw the convening of the UN’s Conference on the Human Environment, which met in Stockholm, June 5-16. Just prior to the conference, UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim expressed the opinion that the conference’s leaders “must surely link the increasing pollution of the planet with the increasing population of the planet.”39
The Stockholm conference urged that “special attention be given to population concerns as they relate to the environment during the 1974 observance of World Population Year.”40
The population conference was held in Bucharest, where, notes Professor Kasun, “The dean of the American activists, John D. Rockefeller III, addressed the assembled delegates to stress that ‘population planning’ should be incorporated into all plans for economic development.” Rockefeller added: “Population planning must be a fundamental and integral part of any modern development program, recognized as such by national leadership and supported fully.”41 The year 1994 will mark the 20th anniversary of that event.
Accordingly, plans are being laid for a Population Summit in 1994, along the lines of the 1992 UNCED Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Not that population issues were ignored at Rio. Far from it. Underlying all of the issues dear to the hearts of “environmentalists” is the matter of population, or rather, population control. In spite of disagreement on many other issues, the one thing that finds the greens in greatest unanimity is the belief that there are too many people in this world and that something drastic must be done to address the situation.
Parroting the new Paul Ehrlich population scare stories, the famed oceanographer urged “drastic, unconventional decisions” if the world is to avoid reaching the “unacceptable” and “absurd figure of 16 billion human beings” by the year 2070.43 The same theme was echoed by Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, who is a member of the Socialist International and chair of the World Commission on Environment and Development; by Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program; and by many others.44
Agenda 21, one of the main documents to come out of the UN’s Rio conference, asserts that $4.5 billion per year is needed for demographic policies in developing countries and says some $7 billion per year is needed until the year 2000 to implement “intensive programmes” necessary for population stabilization.45
What that means, in plain English, is that the UN wants a lot more money to expand its population control programs of sterilization, abortion, and universal access to sex education and contraceptives.
Much of the UN’s activity in support of its war on population comes from its World Bank. At the Rio Earth Summit, Bank president Lewis Preston (CFR) pledged to increase greatly his institution’s support for population control programs.46 He had already begun those efforts earlier in 1992 with the launching of the so-called “Safe Motherhood Initiative” that opponents were denouncing as “a policy that puts a bounty on the lives of unborn children.”
The initiative is a joint project of the World Bank, International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), Family Care International, the U.S. AID-funded Population Council, and several other agencies - including the supposedly pro-child United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO), and UNFPA.
According to Jean M. Guilfoyle, director of the pro-family, Washington-based Population Research Institute, the Safe Motherhood program involves “the legalization of abortion surgeries and the imposition of restrictive population control policies.” She noted that there are “those among the targeted nations who dare to call this ‘economic blackmail with genocidal intent.’”48
In the May/June 1992 issue of Population Research Institute Review, Guilfoyle stated:
Population Research Institute Review reported that, in addition to the Safe Motherhood strategy session held in March 1992 at World Bank headquarters in Washington, there had also been an earlier conference in January in Guatemala.
At this gathering, a World Bank official proposed that Latin American countries make the legalization of abortion the centerpiece of their maternal and infant health programs. Speakers at the conference claimed that large monetary savings would accrue if maternal and child health programs in both the public and the private sector were oriented toward “safe abortion” and contraception.50
World Bank officials at the conference actually pressured Latin American governments to legalize abortion and make it the center of the maternal-infant health programs. Mexican officials promptly fell in line. According to Human Life International, World Bank official Anne G. Tinker demanded that governments provide “safe abortion” in all maternal-infant health programs. Legislative changes needed to legalize abortion must be undertaken immediately, she told the gathering.51 Abortion currently is illegal in all Latin American countries except Uruguay and communist Cuba.
World Bank president Preston said the Bank will integrate the full “Safe Motherhood” agenda into its “policy dialogue” with developing countries.52 This means that developing countries must meet World Bank requirements in the area of population control in order to qualify for Bank loans. By including the “Safe Motherhood” agenda in its “policy dialogue,” the Bank is extending its tremendous financial clout into the political arena of sovereign nations, compelling those nations to legalize abortion and initiate or expand heavy-handed population control programs.
And the leader of those “major enemies of unborn children, women and
families” is the United Nations, supported by major funding from the
U.S. government.
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