An Interview with Steven W. Mosher, President of the Population Research Institute
RTB: An article about the history and purpose of the United Nations Population Program. The push to control world population was foremost on the minds of scientists and social scientists, as well as historians and activists, from the 19th Century to the present day. This movement has gone underground since WW2 put a bad light on Eugenics and population control. This article is written from a Catholic perspective; RTB takes no religious point-of-view, and takes no position against legal abortion, nevertheless, the concerns expressed are relevant: The major thrust of intervention has not been on the improvement of quality of life by the reduction of poverty and building of infrastructure; it has been on population control and reduction.
‘Abolish the United Nations Population Fund’
An Interview with Steven W. Mosher, President of the Population Research Institute
By John Mallon
Note: A shorter version of this interview appeared in the October issue of Inside the Vatican magazine as part of a special section on the Catholic vote. We publish here the interview in its entirety courtesy of Inside the Vatican. To obtain a copy of this special edition or for subscription information for Inside the Vatican, call 800-789-9494.
Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law…. Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.
-Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, No. 17
1. Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
2. Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
3. The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State
-United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, Article 16
Steven W. Mosher, President of the non-profit Population Research Institute (PRI), is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on the population question. His writings demonstrate that overpopulation is a myth, and that the efforts of population controllers to reduce human numbers have led to massive human rights abuses and undermined the health of women and children. Mosher came face-to-face with the nightmare of population control when he was the first American social scientist to live in rural China in 1979-80. He saw pregnant women hunted down by population control police and subjected to forced abortion for violating China’s one-child-per-family law, women mutilated through forced sterilization and women forced to endure life-threatening forms of birth control.
Mosher returned to his studies at Stanford University and wrote about the population control horrors he witnessed in China. Bowing to demands of the Chinese government, Stanford expelled Steve Mosher rather than grant him the Ph. D. he had earned.
Mosher was named President of PRI in 1996 by Fr. Paul Marx, O.S.B., Ph. D., who founded the organization in 1989. Mosher gave the following interview to Inside the Vatican especially for this Special Dossier on the Catholic vote in the American presidential election and the effect it will have on human rights abuses in the name of population control and ideologically driven *sexual and reproductive health* efforts worldwide.
Inside the Vatican: Mr. Mosher, your mission statement says, *The Population Research Institute is dedicated to stopping human rights abuses committed in the name of family planning, and through research and education to dispelling the myth of overpopulation.* From your point of view based on your experience in this work, what’s at stake in the current presidential election?
Steven Mosher: What is at stake in the current presidential election is precisely the sanctity of human life and the integrity of the family. I think the positions of the candidates on the life issues are well known. John Kerry is in favor of abortion. George Bush is self-avowedly pro-life.
As far as the integrity of the family, by that I mean that couples have the God-given right to decide for themselves the number and spacing of their children by natural means. I think that President Bush respects that right. I think that John Kerry by his votes in favor of population control programs over the past 20 years in the U.S. Senate has clearly ceded those rights to government. That is a very dangerous thing.
We see in the case of China a government which has expropriated the people’s right to decide for themselves the number and spacing of their children, and we see the terrible crimes against women and children that result from that position. So I think there’s a very clear choice that the voters have between a candidate who is pro-natal in the broadest sense of the word, is open to new life, and a candidate who is anti-natal and opposed to new life.
ITV: You’ve spoken out forcefully against the methods of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). They claim they just want to improve the conditions of poor women in the developing world. What is the problem with what they’re doing?
Mosher: The problem with what the United Nations Population Fund does is this: First of all, it misrepresents what it is about. This is the United Nations Population Fund, after all. It is not the United Nations Maternal Health Fund, it is not the United Nations Pre-Natal Care Fund.
It is an organization that was set up in 1968 for the purpose of reducing fertility rates around the world, and over the past three-and-a-half decades it has not deviated from that purpose. To give you one example, the U.N. Population Fund recently offered the government of Pakistan $250 million in aid in return for the insertion of sex education programs in all of the primary and secondary schools throughout Pakistan, sex education programs which would not only provide-impose-sex education on young and innocent children but would also attempt to instill in them norms of small family size, to instill in them anti-natal attitudes.
The UNFPA demanded control over this curriculum and control over the budget of these programs. The government of Pakistan finally said no, that they did not want to cede control of their schools over to the U.N. Population Fund.
So this is a radical group, which, in the case of Pakistan, attempted to usurp the national sovereignty of Pakistan where the business of educating its own children was concerned-education of Pakistani children. All for the purpose of doing what? All for the purpose of achieving a reduction in the birth rate, in fertility reduction.
So, all of the propaganda emanating from the UNFPA about maternal health is just that: propaganda. Propaganda intended to disguise its real purpose, which is reducing the birth rate.
ITV: You’ve anticipated my next question, which is: Why is it that health issues of poor women worldwide have been placed in the hands of a UN agency dedicated to controlling population?
Mosher: Yes, and that is precisely where it shouldn’t be. We should be dealing with the health problems of poor women in the Third World but not by preventing them from having children. The United Nations Population Fund and other U.N. agencies argue that when they sterilize a woman they are actually preventing her from dying in childbirth. Well, it is true that a woman who has had her fallopian tubes ligated is not going to get pregnant again, and therefore is not going to be at risk of dying in childbirth.
But let’s be honest about what the real purpose of the organization is. The real purpose of the UNFPA’s sterilization emphasis is to prevent children from being born, not to save mothers from dying in childbirth. That’s just a secondary, indirect consequence of what they are really about. It is equivalent to my saying let’s reduce the number of traffic fatalities in this country by forbidding everyone to drive a car. Well, if we did that, if we forbid everyone from driving cars, we would reduce the number of automobile accidents to zero. But most people would agree that the cure is worse than the problem.
In the same way, the UNFPA says they’ll reduce maternal mortality by preventing women from having babies. Even when they want children, even when they and their husbands decide they would like children, the UNFPA would like to put them out of the business of childbearing. It is the wrong solution to the wrong problem.
ITV: The UNFPA claims they do not promote abortion, yet their documents and rhetoric are filled with references to *safe* abortion, which usually translates into *legal* abortion. Would you comment on that?
Mosher: Safe abortion is just a euphemism for legal abortion. The United Nations Population Fund would like to see abortion legalized worldwide, including in the 114 countries where there are significant restrictions placed on abortion, and it works to that end. Now it has occasionally made clear in documents its own pro-abortion stance, but it likes to work with affiliates. It likes to affiliate with other groups like the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which has joint projects with the UNFPA in different parts of the world, which then carry water on the abortion issue so that the UNFPA can avoid doing heavy lifting.
But make no mistake about the fact that this is an organization that is devoted to aborting and sterilizing and contracepting as many women as possible. In fact, its own publications make clear that when it is talking about reproductive health, what it is principally concerned about is making sure that women have access to contraception, sterilization and abortion. They measure reproductive health by the percentage of women who have access to abortion, sterilization and contraception.
What that means is that a society enjoying perfect reproductive health, that is where all the women are contracepting or are sterilized and have easy access to abortion would be a population which would not be able to reproduce at all. That would be perfect reproductive health in the eyes of the U.N. Population Fund, ironically enough.
ITV: Isn’t there a risk if population runs unchecked? What is the proper Catholic response to population issues?
Mosher: I think there’s a problem in even thinking that population is something that governments want to be intimately involved in. These are decisions that should properly be made by husbands and wives, not by the state. We are all gifted with creative intelligence from God and we can respond to our own circumstances by adjusting our fertility using natural family planning, abstinence and other means. That God-given right to reproduce should not be usurped by governments or government planners. When it is, you see the horrific consequences that result.
ITV: Why is it that traditionally, men of extreme wealth have such an interest in population control?
Mosher: This is a question that has long puzzled me. Why did John D. Rockefeller III make it his life’s work to reduce the number of poor and unwashed? He was a man of great wealth, perhaps the wealthiest man in the country during the 1940s and 50s, before the era of Bill Gates, Ted Turner and Warren Buffett. He began his organization, the Population Council, in New York with his own money because the Rockefeller Foundation thought that interfering with the birth rate was too controversial a topic for the foundation to undertake. It made the other trustees nervous. So as a true believer, he used his own money to set up the Population Council, spent his own money to fund projects shipping contraceptives around the world to countries like India.
What in the world was he thinking of here? In a sense, I think that men of great wealth have a guilty conscience. Somehow the sight of all the numerous poor of the world make them feel guilty for the wealth that they posses. Of course by the standards of John D. Rockefeller III, or Bill Gates or Ted Turner, we’re all poor, and so we would all be subject to these fertility reduction programs.
In one sense I think he was also laboring under the misguided notion that you can reduce poverty by eliminating the poor. Of course, you can’t do that. We know the way to reduce poverty is to set up the rule of law, put in place a system of respect and safeguards for private property. You set in place a fair and just legal system, you allow entrepreneurs to keep the proceeds of their enterprise rather than have them taxed away or stolen away by corrupt officials.
If you do those things, you will soon find your Gross National Product doubling and doubling again. You don’t cure poverty by eliminating the poor, you cure poverty by making the poor the agents of their own development by giving them the opportunity to start businesses, by giving them protection from government usurpations by corrupt officials. If you give them those protections and opportunities, they will quickly set about improving their own lives.
ITV: How do you envision the world under a Kerry presidency?
Mosher: I think the first day of a Kerry presidency would fairly closely resemble the first day of the presidency of William Jefferson Clinton. You recall that on January 23 of 1993 he did several things which set back the cause of life and family. One of the things he did was authorize the release of funds to the United Nations Population Fund.
These funds had been held up by the first Bush Administration and the Reagan Administration on the grounds that the United Nations Population Fund was participating in a program of forced abortion and forced sterilization in China. Clinton overturned that overnight.
He also did away with the Mexico City policy which forbid U.S. funds from going to any organization that promotes or performs or lobbies for the legalization of abortion. This was a policy that, I think, had the broad support of the American people, the majority of whom did not want their money going to abortion-performing groups overseas.
Clinton did this in the past, and Kerry-if the future is a Kerry presidency-would do precisely the same thing. This would set back human rights. Obviously, it would set back the rights of women considerably in countries around the world. It would not be good for their general health or the health of their families either.
To the extent that our foreign aid focuses on fertility reduction, it ignores other primary health care and thus indirectly leads to the deaths of millions.
ITV: The UNFPA, together with their friends at Planned Parenthood, seem to behave as though they had some kind of international authority. They are not a sovereign state but they act as though they have some kind of governmental authority behind them when they attempt to inflict their programs. What authority do they actually have to do what they do?
Mosher: I think that they assume they have a lot more authority than they actually do. It is no secret that the UNFPA and the U.N. Development Fund and these other groups would like to see a supra-national governmental authority set up using the structure of the United Nations. They would like to have the U.N. have its own system of justice, its own courts, its own police force, its own ability to tax, its own independent source of revenue.
But even in the absence of that, it behaves, vis-Ã -vis poor countries, as if it already has that kind of authority. A large part of that is the power of the purse. There are about 40 countries in the world which receive at least a quarter, and sometimes as much as a half, of their health care budgets from international organizations, such as the U.N. Population Fund.
That financial grant of money to these governments gives the UNFPA tremendous clout as in the case of Pakistan, which we discussed earlier. They try to dictate what children are exposed to by way of teachings about life and the family. They try to dictate the laws of countries around the world, trying to increase access to *safe* abortion-which, as I said earlier, is a euphemism for legalizing abortion. They try to impose sterilization and contraception on peoples around the world.
When, in fact, if you look at what the people themselves want, oftentimes this kind of so-called reproductive health care is way down on the list. If you ask people, as we have at PRI-if you ask women in Kenya and Ghana and the Ivory Coast and Nigeria what they want by way of health care, they’ll say, *We want help with AIDS, we want help with cholera, typhus, we want help with other tropical diseases like malaria. We want inoculations for our children, we need vitamins for our kids.* Way down on the list, usually last, is reproductive health care and family planning.
Yet, even though this is last on the list of health needs by women in the developing world, it is first on the list of things that are being provided by the U.N. Population Fund.
The time has come to abolish the U.N. Population Fund. We have been working for several years at not only defunding the U.N. Population Fund, but taking the monies thus freed and putting them into child survival programs so that we can save the lives of children rather than focus our efforts on trying to prevent them from coming into existence.
http://www.pop.org/main.cfm?id=151&r1=10.00&r2=1.00&r3=0&r4=0&level=2&eid=678
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