New World Order University Forum

Review of Donald T. Critchlow, Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Government in Modern America, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Critchlow has written a dry outline of world population control history that omits the horrors of this anti-human holocaust. This is a “policy” book focusing on American politics rather than on the international intrigue of plotting and the eugenics conspiracy. We are endorsing Intended Consequences as a starting point for the naive. Its main value is to establish the time-line of the successes of the eugenics movement in penetrating the U.S. political establishment during recent decades.

Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist who promoted population control policies that included sterilization and race improvement through selective breeding. These were also the central ideals of the Nazi Party in Germany. Eugenicists at the beginning of the twentieth century did not support birth control as they believed contraception would reduce the birthrate among the upper and middle classes, and this was a bad thing as the superior people would not reproduce themselves. In the 1920s the eugenicist position included birth control for the lower classes, sterilization of idiots, and immigration restrictions to improve the white race.

In 1954, Hugh Moore published a pamphlet, The Population Explosion, which predicted an immediate economic crisis caused by global overpopulation. Moore worked with Planned Parenthood, but he split with them over their adoption of women’s rights as the leading strategy for population control. Moore wanted to dispense with rights and force everyone to comply with mandatory population control policies.

Federal funding for contraception and abortion began under the administration of Lyndon Johnson. By 1997, state and federal funding for family planning programs reached $700 million annually. Initially the movement for family planning came from the believers in overpopulation. Later the feminists joined the overpopulation believers and redefined birth control and abortion as issues of women’s rights rather than methods of world population reduction. The first organizers of the anti-population movement were the Ford Foundation, the Population Council, the Population Crisis Committee, and Planned Parenthood. The pivotal figure in this movement was John D. Rockefeller 3rd, grandson of John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller 3rd organized the Population Council in 1952 to train demographers to study world population. Promoted as a neutral, scientific organization, the Population Council actually consisted of experts who shared a common goal of reducing the world’s population.

(World population trends are a difficult area of study, and Rockefeller’s demographers made many false claims.)

Population control came out of the postwar movement for one-world government. Hugh Moore and William Vogt of Planned Parenthood were the leading population control lobbyists around the world. Alan Guttmacher and Cass Canfield of Planned Parenthood were also devoted to world population control. These leaders were supported by social scientists who believed that controlling population would promote economic growth and economic stability, alleviate poverty, reduce crime and pollution, and ease the management of the welfare state.

(However, these quality of life values are simply soft liberal ideals; no research had been done studying causal relations between population growth and economy, crime, pollution, or any of the other objectives when the population reduction agenda became policy. In other words, these were simply nice-sounding excuses to reduce population.)

Lyndon Johnson linked family planning with the War on Poverty. A key event of this administration was the Social Security amendments of 1967 proposed by Congressman George Bush of Texas and Herman Schneebeli of Pennsylvania, which allowed the federal government to fund programs through state agencies and private organizations. The system that emerged was led by Planned Parenthood, the Population Council, and the Ford Foundation, who created demonstration programs as models. These models were then funded by the U.S. government as well as by private foundations and UN agencies.

In 1974 the United Nations held a World Population Conference in Bucharest. Following this conference the Population Council endorsed abortion as a birth control measure. This position was not exactly new as Planned Parenthood and Hugh Moore had been attempting to revise anti-abortion laws for over a decade. Planned Parenthood had consistently promoted sterilization and abortion as “family planning.” John D. Rockefeller 3rd focused on abortion rights and sex education after Bucharest and placed these issues under the term “women’s rights.” Rockefeller also embraced homosexual rights as part of this program.

(Women’s rights and homosexual rights are fronts for world population reduction.)

The leaders of the population control movement consisted of a small number of wealthy Progressive elitists. But the new propaganda movement to make abortion a legal and acceptable form of “family planning” aroused political opposition, mainly from the Catholic church and black organizations.

The population control movement succeeded in enlisting the UN and various government agencies around the world in a wide network of sex education and contraceptive programs. By 1990 about half of the couples in the world were using birth control, and 80 percent of couples in the United States were using birth control.

World population began to decline in the 1960s, and the number of persons living in poverty declined significantly in the United States, just as the program designed to address these problems was adopted. However, the number of out-of-wedlock births rose dramatically beginning in the 1970s, and the population controllers switched their justification for government policies promoting contraception and abortion away from the rhetoric of world population crisis to sex education for teenagers in the United States. The vast majority of Americans accepted contraception by the 1970s. The population control activists were pro-feminist, pro-sexual revolution, and pro-homosexual and attempted to lobby the federal government to support their belief in the reorganization of society by promoting promiscuity and undermining marriage.

William Vogt was author of Road to Survival (1948), which framed world overpopulation as an environmental issue. Vogt emphasized world peace, environmentalism, Malthusianism, and individual rights to practice birth control. Vogt favored paying the poor to be sterilized in order to eliminate their genes from the reproductive gene pool and reduce the social cost of poverty and crime.

John D. Rockefeller 3rd took the leading role among these groups with his ability to fund research and lobbying efforts. Rockefeller’s Population Council was formed under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences from a Rockefeller grant. One of the arguments in favor of population control put forth by leading scientists was to eliminate defective genes and isolate high-quality genes. Lewis Stadler, a member of this early planning group, believed that modern civilization had replaced natural selection by enabling weaker persons to reproduce. The early policy statement of the Population Council included encouraging smarter people to have more children.

Within the Rockefeller family, Nelson argued against John D.’s position as likely to arouse political opposition. But John D. promised to promote the Population Council as a neutral scientific body so that it would gain credibility. Rockefeller also avoided overt leadership to avoid having the Rockefeller family name directly attacked for pursuing anti-human policies. Funded by the Rockefeller fund, the Ford Foundation, and other nonprofit organizations, the Population Council became the leading think-tank proposing population control programs. This included funding scholars of demography around the world and at the leading universities in the United States. These early demographers transformed demographics into a policy-oriented science. The initial demography graduates became a technical elite that provided guidance to population control programs around the world. The policy aim of the Population Council was first to reduce birthrates around the world and then to focus on the problem of population quality.

The Population Council established population control programs in South Korea, Pakistan, Malaysia, Ceylon, Barbados, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tunisia, Thailand, and the United Arab Republic. By 1968 the Population Council had programs in over fifty nations, mainly promoting insertion of the IUD to prevent births.

Rockefeller believed that these early efforts were largely ineffective and amounted mainly to propaganda. He was anxious to expand population control in the United States. Rockefeller then hired Bernard Berelson to take control over communications in 1962. Berelson believed the social sciences could be brought to bear to convince people to use birth control and to be sterilized and to influence government to fund family planning programs. Berelson personally believed in sterilization after the third or fourth child, but this idea never caught on in the United States.

(Sterilization was, however, aggressively pursued in foreign countries.)

Rockefeller also recruited medical specialists and financed their researches into birth control. Among his recruits were Alan F. Guttmacher, later president of Planned Parenthood. Eventually their research efforts resulted in the formation of Rockefeller University and the birth control pill.

At the end of the war Clarence Gamble, heir to the Proctor and Gamble fortune, was instrumental in establishing birth control programs in West Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, and Puerto Rico. Swedish socialist Gunnar Myrdal wrote that these programs were designed to lower the number of Negroes in the South. Puerto Rico had been the location of birth control efforts since 1925, when Jose Rolon a Communist, organized the Birth Control League. In 1932, a physician named Cornelius Rhoads at San Juan’s Presbyterian Hospital, working under a Rockefeller foundation grant, wrote a letter which was published in a San Juan newspaper. Rhoads wrote that “the Puerto Ricans are beyond doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere. …What the island needs is not public health work but a tidal wave or something to totally exterminate the population.” Puerto Ricans then organized groups opposed to birth control. Eleanor Roosevelt urged Surgeon General Thomas Parran to promote contraceptive programs so that births could be spaced and Puerto Rican women would not lose work due to unwanted pregnancy. The linking of contraception to health care was the way the federal government was brought into the population control movement.

The paradox of public health campaigns is that, where they were successful, population grew. To counteract the effect of a growing population due to better health conditions, the population controllers wanted birth control programs. At the end of the Eisenhower administration, this program was internationalized under U.S. foreign aid programs. Hubert Humphrey, Stuart Symington, and Adlai Stevenson were among the U.S. Democrats who supported U.S. efforts to promote birth control through foreign aid. They were joined by the Unitarian Fellowship and other Protestant groups and Planned Parenthood. Eisenhower would not publicly support their approach, however.

Under Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, family planning came under the Office of Economic Opportunity and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. As the divorce rate and out-of-wedlock birth rate began to skyrocket in the 1960s, the population control advocates began to link contraception with having fewer children as a cure for poverty. Welfare advocates then came to support family planning as a means of keeping the costs of welfare programs down. Lyndon Johnson allowed existing agencies such as USAID and HEW and OEO to expand family planning efforts without any legislative authorization. (Which is how U.S. control over world population programs maintained secrecy.) By 1969 OEO had expanded to support 160 family planning programs in 36 states through the formation of Comprehensive Neighborhood Health Centers.

In 1967 Congress passed legislation mandating that states carry out federal family planning programs. This legislation was hidden in the Social Security legislation amendments and thus went largely unnoticed by opponents of family planning and the press. The Johnson administration initiated high-level meetings that included the Bureau of the Budget, HEW, the State Department, and other population control experts. Called the “never-never committee,” this group concluded that supplying contraception to single mothers was the best method for controlling population, but the program had to be delayed until popular acceptance could be assured. The Johnson administration conceived of family planning as part of their Great Society welfare state, but they did not want to publicize an official program and inflame public opposition.

In 1968 Pope Paul VI issued an encyclical, Humanae Vitae, which reconfirmed the Catholic position against birth control apart from natural law. President Johnson, like President Nixon, feared a Catholic backlash against family planning, and he appointed Catholic members of his administration to cultivate good relations with the Catholic hierarchy.

The population control movement moved to influence popular opinion in the 1960s by flooding magazines for women with articles extolling the benefits of birth control and the dangers of a world population crisis. Novelists also took up this subject and portrayed future societies as overpopulated and reduced to mass cannibalism and forced to practice euthanasia. Logan’s Run and Soylent Green were two of these popular novels.

In 1968 Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which became a best-seller. Ehrlich predicted mass famines in the 1970s if populations were not controlled. Ehrlich advocated adding sterilants to the water supply and laws forbidding couples to have more than two children. He also proposed taxing children and higher taxes on children’s goods. Childless couples and sterilized men should receive government payments. Ehrlich was instrumental in forming the Zero Population Growth movement.

Black Muslims denounced family planning as a plot against blacks around the world, but the Urban League and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference endorsed federally funded family planning. One militant black group on the West Coast, called EROS, equated the birth control pill with a noose and warned of plots to depopulate black Americans.

To defuse Catholic opposition, the Ford Foundation sponsored a series of meetings on population at the University of Notre Dame from 1963 to 1967. These meetings helped to form a pro-birth-control faction among liberal Catholics and split support away from the natural family planning method.

By 1965 over thirty states had family planning services, but these were limited to married women. However, the federal Office of Education funded over 600 projects devoted to sex education, and the federal government supplied contraceptives to military personnel and Native Americans. Private organizations such as Planned Parenthood were prohibited from receiving government funds. It was not until the 1967 Social Security amendment that federal funds were dispensed to Planned Parenthood and states receiving federal welfare grants were required to establish family planning clinics.

In the 1960s, 23 percent of black children were illegitimate and 3 percent of white children were illegitimate. The present illegitimacy rate is about 70 percent for blacks and 40 percent for whites.

In 1967 John D. Rockefeller 3rd organized a worldwide population control conference. He gathered signatures from thirty world leaders, including Lyndon Johnson, on a statement of population control policy for the world. The Soviet Union denounced the policy as Neomalthusian, but Zero Population Growth called for a radical reduction in world population growth. Ehrlich linked population growth with pollution and a threat to natural resources, and George Bush formed a Committee Task Force on Earth Resources and Population that promoted federal family planning.

As President Nixon took office, he designated overpopulation as a great threat to the world. Nixon believed that overpopulation threatened quality education, living space, and democracy. Out of Nixon’s administration came the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970 and the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future. Family planning legislation was supported with $382 million in federal funds. These new measures had bipartisan support and little public opposition. In 1971 the budget was increased to $573 million. The Act authorized new contraceptive programs for the mentally challenged, the poor, Cuban refugees, Native American Alaskan natives, and migrant workers.

Tags: Donald T. Critchlow, Intended Consequences, world population reduction

This entry was posted by Director on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Book Reviews, Depopulation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.