Women Deliver Conference 2013: do women have a right to kill but no right to conceive?

Peter Singer: supports infanticide

The 2013 Women Deliver took place in Kuala Lumpur from 28th-30th May. It was attended by representatives of many organisations at the forefront of the culture of death, including the United Nations Population Fund, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, Marie Stopes International, the Ford Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the US administration of Barack Obama.

One of the speakers was infanticide advocate Peter Singer who suggested that rising population might make it necessary to forcibly prevent families from having children. (See here for consideration of the origins of the over-population myth.)

‘It is possible of course’ Singer told the conference ‘that we give women reproductive choices, that we meet the unmet need for contraception but that we find that the number of children that women choose to have is still such that population continues to rise in a way that causes environmental problems.’ He also suggested that it was “appropriate to consider whether women’s reproductive rights are 'fundamental' and unalterable or whether… there can be imaginable circumstances in which you may be justified in overriding them.” In other words, if abortion and contraception fail to reduce human population growth it would, in Singer’s view, be morally acceptable to forcibly prevent men and women from having children. The reality however is that population growth is already on the verge of collapsing in many parts of the world, with all the economic and social dangers which that entails, precisely because of the widespread legitimisation of abortion and contraception.

Kavita Ramdas, an Indian representative of the Ford Foundation, made similar points arguing that “you can force women to have less children [sic], you can force people to consume less”. Reversing the racism often shown by the population control movement she asserted that the United States and Europe ‘are truly putting an unsustainable load on the planet for all of us’ and suggested that ‘if Americans consume more than Africans, they should be forced into a one child policy’.

I wonder how the delegates attending the conference would have responded if a speaker had suggested that the so-called 'right' to abortion had to be overriden to deal with declining population growth? The right to kill seems to be unchallengeable but a woman's right to truly control her own fertility by conceiving children within the self-giving supportive union of marriage can be overriden to suit the political agenda of ideologues such as Singer and Ramdas.

These calls were addressed to representatives of the UN, national governments, and some of the largest NGOs in the world. The forces arrayed against the family, and especially against it’s most vulnerable member, the unborn child, are very powerful, very wealthy and very determined.

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The Life and Crimes of Margaret Sanger Part V: Birth Control and Abortion

Margaret Sanger in her later years

Margaret Sanger’s most concrete legacy is surely the International Planned Parenthood Federation which consists of 150 affiliated organisations working in 172 countries. Together they form the largest organisation in the world dedicated to the promotion of contraception and abortion.

Margaret Sanger’s name is therefore inextricably associated with abortion, yet during her lifetime the practice was illegal in most American states and in almost every country in the world. It will be of interest then to consider Sanger’s views on abortion and ask why the birth control organisations she led were to become the major abortion providers wherever abortion was legalised, and the major advocates for its legalisation in those nations where it was not. 

Sanger was in favour of abortion from an early stage in her career despite her reluctantance to support it publicly. In her 1920 book Women and the New Race she claimed that throughout history societies have feared overpopulation and therefore practiced abortion and infanticide. Accordingly she argued that only the widespread availability of artificial birth control could bring an end to such 'horrors'. Sanger gives examples of women who have been ‘forced’ into abortion because they could not afford any more children. She used the natural abhorrence of abortion to try to overcome the equally natural abhorrence of contraception. If she was sincere in her profession that abortion was something to be regretted she was nonetheless prepared to support it. In her book Family Limitation she stated baldly that ‘no one can doubt that there are times when an abortion is justifiable.’ According to Angela Franks there is evidence that her Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau referred at least seventy-five women for abortions.[1] Indeed Sanger’s criticisms of abortion seem to focus on the danger abortion procedures pose to the health of the mother rather than on the rights of the unborn child.

One of the major questions Sanger poses in Women and New Race is ‘Contraceptives or Abortion—which shall it be?’ Sanger’s commitment to radical sexual liberation, which admits no possibility of sexual abstinence or self-restraint, combined with her conviction that overpopulation is the cause of poverty, renders her unable to accept the possibility of any other solutions to the problems that she raises. This refusal to acknowledge that rational human beings can exercise self-control in sexual matters is very prevalent today. Young people are taught to consider themselves as subject to uncontrollable desires which will result either in ‘unwanted pregnancy’ or sexually transmitted diseases unless they allow themselves to be subjected to a variety of contraceptive methods.  Modern sex education therefore strips from young people any sense of self-respect or true understanding of their sexuality.

Ann Furedi, Chief Executive of BPAS (British Pregnancy Advisory Service), has argued that we must either view abortion as a ‘problem’ or we must ‘allow people their moments of intimacy, we allow them to enjoy sex, and we allow them to make use of abortion as a back-up to contraception.’[2] In other words, as no limit can reasonably be placed on the pursuit of sexual pleasure (because the right to such pleasure is so fundamental and the desire for it so overwhelming) it is permissible to destroy the ‘unwanted’ results of such actions, even though they be unique and innocent human beings.

If we have learnt anything in this series of posts about Margaret Sanger it is surely that the origins of abortion lie in an erroneous ideology of sexual liberation which separates sexual pleasure from the procreative and unitive ends of the sexual act. Once this isolation of pleasure has taken place then it becomes ‘necessary’ for birth control to be used to allow for the maximum pursuit of this pleasure. The failure of birth control to prevent all ‘unwanted pregnancy’ then renders abortion equally ‘necessary’.  This is why the birth control movement was brought forth by the movement for ‘sexual liberation’ and why it has seamlessly developed into the abortion industry that we confront today.

Only by working tirelessly to restore a true understanding of human sexuality can the pro-life movement ensure that all human life will once more be loved, protected and welcomed.

You may be interested in reading the other posts in this series:

The Life and Crimes of Margaret Sanger: Part I

The Life and Crimes of Margaret Sanger II: From Marx to Malthus

The Life and Crimes of Margaret Sanger III: Eugenics and Birth Control

The Life and Crimes of Margaret Sanger IV: Eugenics and Race

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[1] Angela Franks, Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility, p11

[2] Ann Furedi, ‘Why rising abortion rates are not a problem?’, Spiked Online, (31/3/2008)

The Life and Crimes of Margaret Sanger II: From Marx to Malthus

“Birth Control is no new thing in human experience, and it has been practised in societies of the most various types and fortunes. But there can be little doubt that at the present time it is a test issue between two widely different interpretations of the word civilization, and of what is good in life and conduct. The way in which men and women range themselves in this controversy is more simply and directly indicative of their general intellectual quality than any other single indication. I do not wish to imply by this that the people who oppose are more or less intellectual than the people who advocate Birth Control, but only that they have fundamentally contrasted general ideas,—that, mentally, they are DIFFERENT. Very simple, very complex, very dull and very brilliant persons may be found in either camp, but all those in either camp have certain attitudes in common which they share with one another, and do not share with those in the other camp.”

…

We are living not in a simple and complete civilization, but in a conflict of at least two civilizations, based on entirely different fundamental ideas, pursuing different methods and with different aims and ends.

Margaret Sanger in 1922

These words of H. G. Wells', found in his introduction to Margaret Sanger’s 1922 work The Pivot of Civilization, clearly state the profound truth that of all the ideological conflicts of the early twentieth century the struggle for the control of human reproduction was to prove one of the most significant.[1] Those who advocated birth control wished then, and still wish today, to remould society according to their own ideological principles through ‘the control and guidance of the great natural instinct of sex’.[2] Control was central to Sanger’s philosophy. In The Pivot she stated “I [was] dominated by this conviction of the efficacy of "control,"' and decades later this conviction had not lessened. In 1955 she was to argue ‘I see no wider meaning of family planning than control and as for restriction…. [it] should be an order as [well as] an ideal for the betterment of the family and the race.’[3] This struggle for control has already claimed many millions of lives through abortion, euthanasia, genocide, embryo experimentation and artificial methods of reproduction. Margaret Sanger’s life, work and relationships exemplify the close interconnection between all the aspects of this struggle between two irreconcilable views of human civilisation.

In The Pivot of Civilization Sanger explains her ‘conversion’ from Marxism to the ideology of eugenic birth control. She argues that, instead of pursuing violent revolution, those who seek to realise ‘the glorious vision of a new world, of a proletarian world emancipated, a Utopian world’ should pursue eugenic birth control.[4] Sanger, as we saw in the first part of this series, began as a socialist revolutionary. In The Pivot she explains how she lost faith in the standard Marxist narrative and began to associate the problems of poverty with ‘overpopulation’. ‘In spite of all my sympathy with the dream of liberated Labor’, she writes, ‘I was driven to ask whether this urging power of sex, this deep instinct, was not at least partially responsible, along with industrial injustice, for the widespread misery of the world.’[5] She travelled throughout Europe meeting with leading revolutionaries, including some of the most extreme anarchists such as Enrico Malatesta. It was in Britain however, amongst members of the Neo-Malthusian League and writers such as H. G. Wells, that she found a philosophy most congenial to her tastes. “I was encouraged and strengthened in this attitude” she recalls, “ by the support of certain leaders who had studied human nature and who had reached the same conclusion: that civilization could not solve the problem of Hunger until it recognized the titanic strength of the sexual instinct.”[6] Indeed she dedicated the The Pivot of Civilisation to Alice Drysdale Vickery (see picture to the right), a leading figure in the Neo-Malthusian league. This dedication, taken with Wells’ foreword and the appearance of a quote by Havelock Ellis on the title page, supports our conclusion that eugenics, birth control, abortion and disordered forms of sexuality are all closely connected.

We saw in the last post that Sanger was given millions of dollars by wealthy industrialists, and particularly by J. D. Rockefeller III, whose assassination she had called for not many years earlier. This ‘conversion’ from Marx to Malthus might seem surprising but it is not in fact very remarkable if we look a little deeper. It is a very common phenomena for revolutionaries to pass from one ideology to another even when the latter stands in contradiction to the former on central points. This occurs because a revolutionary like Sanger is really seeking the formula that will enable mankind, of its own efforts, to create a paradise on earth.[7] When a revolutionary no longer feels that their current methods will achieve their ends they will simply move on to another ideological position, often excoriating those who were until recently their allies.[8] This political messianism obviously stands in stark contrast to the doctrines of Christianity, which most ideologues therefore vociferously reject.[9]

Why then did Sanger adopt this particular ideology? In The Pivot of Civilisation she tells us that she felt that the progress of the working class was being held back by ‘the burden of their ever-growing families’.[10] ‘Something more’ she realised ‘than the purely economic interpretation was involved.’[11] This ‘something more’ was the ‘driving power of instinct, a power uncontrolled’.[12] Sanger believed that the inability of the working classes to control their sexual desires was the main cause poverty. It could be argued that her language in the The Pivot manifests a fear or disgust of healthy sexuality.[13] We know that Sanger’s own promiscuity was notorious. Is it possible that Sanger is projecting her fears about her own lack of self control onto working class women? Her awareness of her own sexual conduct and her consequent ‘need’ for birth control perhaps drove her to advocate that other women subject themselves, or be subjected, to the same control. It is surely of interest that her lover H. G. Wells presents a similar paradox. He also was a notorious adulterer, with at least one illegitimate child, and yet he argued that the reproduction of others needed to be controlled and that people who lacked ‘self-control’ were a threat to society. It has also been suggested by E. Michael Jones that Sanger’s zeal in advocating birth control was partially the result of the guilt she felt at having abandoned her daughter to the care of others while she was in England. [14] Peggy died shortly after Sanger returned to America and Jones argues that it was by convincing herself that she was working for the greater good of future generations of women that she was able to ease the pain suffered by her conscience, which accused her of betraying her own daughter. In any case, it is certainly true that many more mothers and children were about to suffer as a result of the life and crimes of Margaret Sanger.

To be continued…

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[1] Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, (New York, 1922)

[2] Ibid

[3] Quoted in Angela Franks, Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility, (Jefferson, 2005) p5

[4] Sanger, Pivot

[5] Ibid

[6] Ibid

[7] In The Pivot of Civilization Sanger argues that men and women must ‘light their way to self-salvation’, the Catholic Church being ‘organized to exploit the ignorance and the prejudices of the masses.’ She saw birth control as a way to ‘triumph finally in the war for human emancipation.’

[8] Much of The Pivot of Civilization is dedicated to attacking Marxism, but see Chapter VII in particular.

[9] For a classic example see Sanger’s attack on the Catholic Church in Chapter IX of The Pivot of Civilization.

[10] Sanger, Pivot

[11] Ibid

[12]  Ibid

[13] E.g. ‘blind and irresponsible play of the sexual instinct’, ‘sex as a factor in the perpetuation of poverty’,  ‘the fundamental relation between Sex and Hunger’, ‘the sexual and racial chaos into which the world has drifted’, ‘chance and chaotic breeding’, ‘the trap of compulsory maternity’, ‘the mother remains the passive victim of blind instinct’, and so on.
[14]   E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control, (2005)

Dr Halliday G. Sutherland and resistance to the birth control movement

“... the ordinary decent instincts of the poor are against these practices, and indeed they have used them less than any other class. But, owing to their poverty, lack of learning, and helplessness, the poor are the natural victims or those who wish to make experiments on their fellows. In the midst of London, a woman, who is a doctor of German philosophy (Munich) has opened a Birth Control Clinic where working women are instructed in a method of contraception described by Professor McIlroy as ‘the most harmful method of which I have had experience.’”

“It is truly amazing that this monstrous campaign of birth control should be tolerated by the Home Secretary. Charles Bradlaugh was condemned to jail for a less serious crime.”

For these words a renowned medical pioneer was prosecuted for libel by Marie Stopes in 1923.

Dr Halliday G. Sutherland (1888-1960)

Dr Halliday G. Sutherland stood up courageously against the birth control and eugenics movement in the early twentieth century and his life therefore deserves the attention of those of us who continue that battle today. He was born in Glasgow in 1882 and studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, graduating in 1908. He began his career as a bacteriologist at Liverpool Chest Hospital before spending time practising medicine in Spain at a British medical clinic. On his return to Scotland he worked at various hospitals before becoming Medical Officer at St. Marylebone Tuberculosis Dispensary in London in 1911. When war broke out he joined the Royal Navy, and then the fledging Royal Air Force. After the war he returned to the practice of medicine becoming an expert in tuberculosis and holding many senior positions in that field. He was also a popular travel writer and adventurer writing books such as Lapland Journey, Spanish Journey, and A Time to Keep. His autobiography The Arches of the Years was published in eight European languages and reprinted thirty-five times.

Shortly after the First World War Sutherland was received into the Catholic Church. He dedicated a great deal of time and energy to exposing the incipient birth control movement publishing Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine against the Neo-Malthusians in 1922. He began this work by examining and refuting the doctrines of Malthus and the Neo-Malthusians concerning overpopulation. He argued that there was no evidence that the world was facing a crisis of overpopulation and then deconstructed the Malthusian narrative step by step. He argued that the real cause of poverty was economic injustice and not overpopulation. He then moved on to discuss the health risks of contraceptive methods, the degradation of women which was inseperable from their use, the damage that they caused to marriages and finally the way in which in birth control was used to control the poor. He ended the book by discussing the immorality of contraception in the light of the teaching of the Catholic Church.

The first trial of Halliday Sutherland took place in February 1923. Marie Stopes argued that the extracts quoted above were libellous because they alleged that she was taking advantage of the weakness of the poor, that she was subjecting them to dangerous experiments, and that she was guilty of criminal practices. She said that her reputation and that of her clinic had been unjustly damaged. Sutherland defended himself by arguing that his words were true and fair comment made in the public interest. The jury decided that the claims made by Sutherland about Stopes were accurate but that they had been made in a defamatory manner and awarded damages of £100 to Stopes. The judge rejected their verdict and Sutherland was aquitted. Stopes successfully appealed against this decision and £100 of damages were once more awarded to her. Sutherland then appealed to the House of Lords where the Law Lords reached a verdict 4-1 in his favour.

Lord Vincent concluded that Sutherland’s accusations were fair comment and a reasonable expression of the commonly held opinion that ‘such practices are revolting to the healthy instincts of human nature’. Indeed, Lord Vincent expressed his own opinion that works promoting methods of birth control ‘are calculated to have a most deplorable effect upon the young of both sexes’ and pointed out that Stopes’ works were ‘of such a nature that they were not read aloud’ in the court. The accuracy of Lord Vincent's prediction has become all too clear in our own day (see here and here for evidence of this).
  
The Stopes vs Sutherland trial ended with criticism of Marie Stopes being heard in the highest court in the land and with at least one of her allegations against Sutherland being dismissed as ‘absurd.’ The enormous costs that she was made to pay were a setback to her work. Unfortunately the courts would not long remain places where human dignity was upheld yet Sutherland can remain for us a model of courage and tenacity in defence of human life.

Dr Halliday G. Sutherland died in April 1960. He had been made Knight Commander of the Order of Isabella by the Spanish government in 1954 for his services to the Spanish people. In 1955 he was presented with the Pope John XXI medal, which is awarded to Catholic doctors who have made an outstanding contribution to the field of medical ethics.

The British government thinks a manual vacuum aspirator in the hands of an abortionist counts as development aid for mothers

SPUC recently held a very successful conference in London on the topic of abortion and maternal health in the developing world. You can read a full report with photos on the SPUC website. SPUC also has a briefing on these issues, and the texts of the presentations will be available shortly.

One of the key issues looked at was the funding given for promoting and doing abortions in the developing world. The Department for International Development (DFID) gives hundreds of millions to organisations like International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), Marie Stopes International (MSI) and  International Projects Assistance Services (Ipas) who specialise in killing unborn children. This funding usually takes the form of a  Partnership Programme Arrangement (PPA) which lasts several years, but funding for individual and country-specific programmes can also be given under initiatives like the Civil Society Challenge Fund (CSCF).

The latest project launched by DFID is called Preventing Maternal Deaths from Unwanted Pregnancy (PMDUP). DFID will give £67 million pounds over 5 years from July 2011 to June 2016 via MSI and Ipas, to carry out and promote abortion and contraception in 14 countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Pakistan, DRC, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. In its Business Plan (2011 – 2015) DFID committed ‘to embed in every relevant bilateral programme specific plans to take forward the promotion of choice for women over whether and when they have children’ - i.e. DFID will make sure abortion and contraception are part and parcel of any funding and aid they offer, as far as possible. 

Reading through the PMDUP business plan reveals that MSI and Ipas will be responsible for collecting the programme data, and Options - the consultancy firm wholly owned by MSI - will provide consultancy for the PMDUP programme and be linked to the impact evaluation. Options will also be involved in providing evidence to shape PMDUP implementation strategy. Not only is DFID leading the way in killing unborn children in the developing world, they are getting the abortion organisations to collect the programme data for the programmes they themselves will be carrying out, provide consultancy to DFID, and influence the impact evaluation of the programme they have been asked to do.

To use an analogy, it's a bit like a firm making landmines being given tens of millions to make and plant landmines in the developing world, and allowing that same firm making the landmines to collect data on the impact of landmines, advise the government on the safety and effectiveness of their programme to promote landmines, and then allowing the firm to evaluate themselves. The mind boggles. 

Some charts are provided in the business plan about "growth forecast" for the PMDUP programme. The 2 charts below detail the hoped for number of women having abortions and receiving contraceptive devices by MSI and Ipas. The second chart details the future increase in the number of MSI and Ipas facilities conducting abortions - usually using misoprostol or manual vacuum aspirators. 

For MSI 2,866,880 mothers are expected to undergo an abortion or post-abortion "care", and for Ipas the figure is 519,535. It's very probable that Options or MSI and Ipas themselves came up with these figures, considering how much of a free rein they have been given by DFID.

The term "post abortion care" (PAC) is deceptive. PAC is part and parcel of the abortion promotion agenda of organisations like IPPF, WHO, DFID, MSI, and Ipas who in 1993 together with IPPF founded the PAC Consortium. In 2007 pro-lifers and religious leaders rejected proposals by the Guatemalan Ministry of Health to introduce post-abortion care into public health, citing the reason that such measures are tactics to further the abortion agenda.

One of the uses of PAC is getting the abortion drug misoprostol into countries for post-abortion and incomplete abortion "services", as seen from the PAC Consortium misoprostol resources pages of their website. The devastating effect of misoprostol on a developing country has already been presented by Dr. Susan Yoshihara, following the 2010 Women Deliver Conference. Several years ago the World Health Organisation changed its policy to include misoprostol on its list of essential medicines. This move was supported by radical pro-abortion organisations such as Gynuity and MSI. This is noted by the pro-abortion Center for Reproductive Rights, and used as another prong to further abortion and avoid maternal morbidity and mortality.

PAC is a cover for introducing abortion into countries where it is illegal or highly restricted, as noted by Dr. Ideh at the SPUC maternal mortality conference. We have also seen this recently in the case of Rwanda. The radically pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute produced a study citing the lack of post-abortion care as a reason for abortion-related morbidity and lack of family planning, always discussed and offered following an abortion, as reasons for liberalising Rwanda's law on abortion. Guttmacher is supporting the lobbying efforts of Rwanda's IPPF affiliate in the country. PAC is a useful cover, as it allows abortion organisations to train people, from doctors to community health workers, to conduct abortions using MVA and misoprostol, and promote contraceptive devices, better know as post-abortion family planning. It also reinforces the canard of safe v unsafe abortion by claming that abortion is safe where post-abortion care for complications is easily available. PAC is part of a strategy which seeks to normalise abortion at the level of public opinion and medical consensus, and persuade legislators that a country's abortion laws need to be changed in favour of abortion.

What this chart above sets out is the increased number of abortion and contraception facilities that MSI and Ipas hope to establish by 2016. The total for MSI is 2563 and 1024 for Ipas.

These are desperate times for mothers, babies, and families in the developing world, where our taxes are being used to kill unborn children and harm the health of mothers. Money is being diverted away from the real causes of maternal morbidity and mortality, and instead being used to serve the ideological agenda of DFID and its partners IPPF, MSI, and Ipas. We now live in a world where the manual vacuum aspirator in the hands of an abortionist counts as aid to developing countries. 

"international aid for the poor"

Thomas Robert Malthus and the Myth of Overpopulation

It is very common to hear abortion justified on the grounds that we are suffering from overpopulation. It is argued that there are too many people living on the planet in relation to the resources available to support them. We are told that abortion and artificial birth control are therefore necessary if the population is to be kept within sustainable limits. Unfortunately only one part of this argument is correct, namely that we are suffering from a population crisis. The birth rate is in fact far below replacement level in many western nations, and countries such as China and India, which have imposed upon their people brutal ‘population control’ policies (including forced abortion and sterilisation) are suffering from a serious population imbalance due to the killing of infant girls either before or after birth. The world is threatened by a crisis of under population and not by overpopulation.

 

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834)

This blog intends to look at these issues in more depth over the coming months. We will begin by looking at the origins of the overpopulation myth in the writings of an Anglican clergyman named Thomas Robert Malthus. In 1798 he published his anonymous work the Essay on the Principle of Population. This argued that population always increases at a faster rate than food production and that famine and civil unrest are therefore the inevitable result of population growth. The birth of too many children is thus seen as a threat to the prosperity of any given nation. This was a reversal of the traditional view that population growth indicated a healthy and thriving society.

Malthus thought that the system of Poor Law, which provided limited amounts of charity to the poorest in society, was dangerous because it enabled the poor to have children that they could not support. He predicted that as population increased the quality of living for the majority must necessarily decrease. We must therefore learn the lesson taught by nature, ‘the great mistress of the feast’, who ‘wishing that all guests should have plenty, and knowing she could not provide for unlimited numbers, humanely refused to admit fresh comers when her table was already full.’

Malthus regarded contraception and abortion as serious sins and proposed sexual abstinence as the best way of ensuring that the numbers of the poor did not increase beyond society’s capacity to provide for them. Nonetheless it was Malthus’s theories that gave many early advocates of abortion and birth control the assurance that the world faced a crisis of overpopulation. Increasing numbers of people would come to feel that a new child was not always a blessing to be welcomed but rather a problem to be solved. It is these successors of Malthus then that we must study next if we are to understand the further development of this ideology, which has done so much to legitimise the killing of unborn children.