Planned Parenthood supports UNFPA

Raymond Jensen

Pittsburgh Standard

On Friday January 11th, President Bush signed the U. S. foreign aid bill into law, after the bill was passed in Congress. Foreign aid is a controversial subject among lawmakers and among the general population of the United States. Proponents of foreign aid are convinced that such funding is necessary to eradicate pestilence and poverty in third-world countries.

In addition to foreign governments, the latest foreign aid bill includes funding for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). This has added fuel to the fire of controversy surrounding foreign aid, and other topics such as abortion. The reason has to do primarily with involvement of the UNFPA in population control.

The Population Research Institute (PRI), a pro-life research and educational organization, has made several claims against the UNFPA, regarding population control. These include issues such as the UNFPA distributed 350,000 boxes containing suction devices and abortion-inducing chemicals labeled as "Emergency reproductive health kits" in refugee camps in Afghanistan and the UNFPA is directly involved in the state-sponsored forced sterilization and forced abortion programs in communist China. Similar activity involving the UNFPA was reported by the PRI in Peru and in the Kosovo province of Yugoslavia.

U.S. patronization of the UNFPA is not new, and they have funded it ever since 1969, the year of the organization’s founding. Although such funding was discontinued during the Reagan administration because of the involvement of the UNFPA with the Chinese "family planning" program, the money supply to the UNFPA was restored in 1993 during the Clinton administration. The UNFPA does not receive all of its income from the U.S. taxpayers however. A lesser fraction comes from tax-exempt institutions with large bankrolls such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations.An advocate of UNFPA activity is the organization Planned Parenthood, which claims that UNFPA exclusively assists "developing countries in improving reproductive health and family planning services on the basis of individual choice and sustainable development." (http://www.plannedparenthood.org/library/FAMILYPLANNINGISSUES/UNFPA.html)

Planned Parenthood is an organization that was created in 1916 by Margaret Sanger, and was originally known as "Birth Control League of America." Ms. Sanger had some rather unorthodox views regarding population control.

Two of her mottoes included, "More children from the fit, less from the unfit - that is the chief aim of birth control," and "Birth Control: to create a race of thoroughbreds."( The New American, Vo1. 2, No. 3 (Jan. 20, 1986)

In Sangers 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization, she wrote about those who offer free maternity care to the poor. They "…encourage the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant."

More comments can be found in her "Plan for Peace" in the April 1932 issue of Birth Control Review. This article includes the following platforms:

A. To keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as the feebleminded.

B. To apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.

C. To insure the country against future burdens of maintenance for numerous offspring as may be born of feebleminded parents by pensioning all persons with transmissible diseases who voluntarily consent to sterilization.

D. To give dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.

At the Planned Parenthood website, the following is written about Sangers views: "Unable to foment popular opposition to Margaret Sanger’s accomplishments and the organization she founded, Sanger’s critics attempt to discredit [her] by intentionally confusing her views on "fitness" with eugenics, racism, and anti-Semitism. Margaret Sanger was not a racist, an anti-Semite, or a eugenicist" because "Eugenicists, like the Nazis, were opposed to the use of abortion and contraception by healthy and "fit" women." (1 http://www.plannedparenthood.org/about/thisispp/sanger.html)

Interestingly enough, in 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King received the Margaret Sanger award from Planned Parenthood. In his acceptance speech, he stated, "There is scarcely anything more tragic in human life than a child who is not wanted. That which should be a blessing becomes a curse for parent and child. Negroes have a special and urgent concern with family planning as a profoundly important ingredient in their struggle for security and a decent life. Our sure beginning in the struggle for equality by nonviolent action may not have been so resolute without the tradition established by Mrs. Sanger."(http://www.plannedparenthood.org/about/photoalb/MLK_JR.HTM)

It should finally be noted , government statistics show that at least 30% of the aborted fetuses in the U.S. have been African-American.

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