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.

From 1965 to 1980, government spending on welfare programs increased by 263 percent. The federal government also initiated public-private partnerships with the population control foundations. The Population Council and the Ford Foundation were the major beneficiaries of these funds.

However, in 1965 the Treasury Department issued a report that was strongly critical of the tax-exempt foundations for abusing their tax-free status. Foundation grants became an issue of controversy in Congress when it was revealed that the foundations were not nonpartisan or objective or merely interested in funding scientific research. By 1977, when it withdrew from the population control network, the Ford Foundation had spent over $200 million reducing population around the world. The Ford Foundation created “demonstration programs” abroad that were then applied inside the United States.

The main Ford population control program was centered in Louisiana. Blacks were 30 percent of Louisiana’s population, and one-fourth of blacks received welfare assistance in 1965. Dr. Joseph Beasley conducted a study among poor women and wrote a report claiming that establishment of a birth control program would save the state millions of dollars in welfare costs. The Ford Foundation supported Beasley’s pilot program with a grant, and Beasley claimed to have reduced births by 44 percent in two years. HEW then gave New Orleans a $1.75 million grant to continue Beasley’s program in 1967, and another $1.2 million in 1970. The Ford Foundation also supported Beasley’s program. By 1972 Beasley was receiving over $14 million from over 50 private groups. Beasley opened over 150 family planning clinics and employed over 500 people. Beasley was elected chairman of Planned Parenthood, and projects were proposed for Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela based on his model. Beasley became a consultant to the World Health Organization, the State Department, USAID, and the World Bank.

In 1971 black militant groups began to charge Beasley with engaging in racist genocide against blacks. Black Muslims began to confront family planning workers with charges of “race traitor.” Beasley then hired his critics and promoted many into top management. Governor Edwin Edwards then established a program of kickbacks to black contractors and their relatives to silence criticism of the government’s family planning programs.

In 1972 the Louisiana State Medical Society charged the Family Health Foundation with double billing the government. Beasley was indicted on charges of attempting to defraud the government. Out of this investigation came evidence of misuse of private donations and illegal contributions to political campaigns of state officials. After three separate trials, Beasley was sentenced to two years in prison. His license to practice medicine was revoked. He then moved to Bard College in New York and received Ford Foundation grants.

New York City was the location of the first major family planning program in the United States. By 1970 Planned Parenthood had established 91 clinics and programs that extended through 39 government agencies. These programs were financed by Medicaid as well as foundation grants and Planned Parenthood fundraising activities.

The Ford Foundation, the Baltimore Urban League, and Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health developed a contraceptive program targeting inner-city black teenagers in Baltimore. This program offered neighborhood sex education courses and hired fieldworkers to herd teenagers into the program. Over a thousand teenagers entered these courses, but most of the white teenagers dropped out immediately, and only 123 teenagers eventually received contraceptives. Program officials explained the dropout rate as due to a lack of audiovisual materials. The dropout rate of the early programs was around 50 percent, which matched the percentage of adult women in the general population who had abandoned oral contraceptives because of negative health side-effects.

In Harlem a similar program was attacked by black leaders as a “genocidal program.” Black leaders criticized the Harlem program for failing to inform blacks of the dangerous after-effects of birth control pills and abortions. Local black leaders framed their opposition to family planning as a matter of racial survival. A similar response occurred in Chicago. These complaints led to a shift in emphasis among the leaders of the Baltimore program toward favoring sterilization. But by the mid-1970s both the Ford Foundation and the Population Council had withdrawn from involvement in local family planning programs. Early feminists joined this chorus of disapproval of family planning targeting poor women as genocidal and as ineffective at influencing “the underlying causes of poverty.”

The Catholic opposition to such family planning programs emphasized the encouragement of promiscuity, the breakdown of the family, the exploitation of women for sexual pleasure, and the splintering of community. However, Catholic leaders generally accepted the idea that there was a worldwide overpopulation problem even though population was declining in most countries. Moreover, Catholics were generally liberal and supported the New Deal as they believed socialism equated to Catholic ideas of social justice. But a few Catholic leaders mobilized their efforts to speak out against birth control, and they became the main opposition voice. Most Protestant denominations favored birth control.

Catholics argued that family planning was different from other types of social planning because it established government control over life, and such programs always included a racial eugenic component. Catholics were effective in blocking individual family planning programs in particular cities but generally were ineffective at influencing the growth of family planning by the federal government after 1975. By 1970 nearly 70 percent of Catholic women were using some form of birth control. Only about 15 percent of priests preached the official doctrine against contraception. Pro-contraceptive Catholics dominated Catholic universities.

Feminism was the main driving force to legalize abortion. The National Organization for Women under Betty Friedan advocated repeal of anti-abortion laws in 1967. In 1970 New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller signed a liberal abortion law, and within months the number of abortions in New York surpassed 100,000.

Generally Jews favored abortion, and so did Presbyterians, Church of Christ, Methodists, and Baptists. Black groups such as the Congress for Racial Equality and the NAACP endorsed family planning and marginalized the more radical black voices protesting against genocidal policies. Black Muslims opposed family planning and abortion, but progressive Martin Luther King was a recipient of the Margaret Sanger Award. The Black Panthers opposed abortion and family planning, and similar radical groups engaged in violent protest against family planning clinics on a small scale.

In 1970 a federal sterilization program funded by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare sterilized two young sisters under false pretenses, resulting in a lawsuit against the federal government. Further investigation revealed more sterilizations of black women under false pretenses in Tennessee, Alabama, and South Carolina under OEO guidelines.

In 1968 the United States and other developed countries began to experience a sharp decline in the rate of population growth, below 2.2 children per family, or below the “replacement rate.” The developed nations experienced zero population growth right at the moment that the Zero Population Growth movement formed. Within the population control movement, this event served to split radicals such as Garrett Hardin, Hugh Moore, and Paul Ehrlich from moderates, who feared that radical rhetoric promoting a false overpopulation scare might be counterproductive. Many moderates feared that blaming poverty and increases in violent crime on the “population explosion” would work against building the welfare state if there were no population explosion. (Many Progressives today believe that the welfare state is about helping the poor rather than enslaving the middle class.)

Moreover, as protest against the Vietnam war began to lag, there was a need for another radical cause to replace it, and many in the population control movement believed that this new issue should be the linking of the population explosion with concern over the quality of “the environment.” (For this line of propaganda to succeed, many environments needed to be subsumed under a single “world” environment.) Moore, Hardin, and Ehrlich favored this linkage, but Rockefeller 3rd did not. Moreover, the feminists added a third voice to this debate by criticizing “family planning” for enlisting mainly poor women. This split further radicalized when the population controllers began to demand that voluntary family planning become mandatory because voluntary programs were not addressing the “population explosion.” These radicals longed for a “crisis” that would justify putting coercive control measures in place through legislation. ZPG favored these radical solutions, such as putting birth control drugs into local water supplies, and a literature appeared that defined free choice as anarchy.

Meanwhile, over 60 percent of the population of the United States believed that the government should sponsor family planning and sex education programs without recognizing the depopulation agenda behind them. However, only about 15 percent of the population believed that teenage girls should receive birth control from the government.

Congress mandated that states extend family planning services to unmarried persons and increased funding of family planning programs in 1974. By 1974 three-fourths of all poor women in the United States were receiving family planning services. In 1973 the federal government funded 270,000 abortions at a cost of $50 million.

As population control programs spread to the United Nations Fund for Population, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization, the Population Council began to question its purpose. Third World population planning programs had run into local opposition and experienced high dropout rates. Rockefeller was aware of this growing opposition to world population control when he gave his speech at Bucharest withdrawing Rockefeller financial support for family planning. The Bucharest Conference then split into a developed world versus Third World debate. The U.S. delegation under Caspar Weinberger supported a UN resolution to enforce a worldwide 1.2 percent population growth rate under UN control. The Third World group called for a radical redistribution of the world’s wealth.

Rockefeller 3rd argued that population control had not resulted in economic development or social betterment, but instead economic development would result naturally in population reduction. At this Bucharest Conference the Chinese delegation demanded that all references to China be dropped from the conference documents and rejected any international control over China by the UN. The coalition that formed around the Chinese, including Latin America, Africa, and the Communist nations, rejected the UN world population control plan.

Rockefeller’s experience at Bucharest led him to formulate a new approach that combined feminism with population control around the world. From this time Rockefeller was the active financier of the abortion movement in the United States. He died in 1978. By that time Roe v Wade had legalized abortion in the United States, and the pro- and anti-abortion movements had mobilized. But around the world Zero Population Growth, Planned Parenthood, and the feminist appeal to Third World women had suffered setbacks. Some old hands denounced the new coalition as Marxist or excessively utopian, whereas others denied that voluntary family planning programs had failed. Others dropped the Rockefeller approach as they did not favor worldwide income redistribution. In 1973 the Ford Foundation dropped out of financing family planning programs because of the difficulties involved in satisfying competing interests.

The overall result of this new approach was that Rockefeller’s Population Council appointed more women to its board and more aggressively pursued a pro-abortion policy. Rockefeller’s daughters Hope and Alida and their cousin Abby, the oldest daughter of David Rockefeller, began to take the lead in promoting Marxist feminism. The propaganda promoting abortion under these feminist focused on abortion as a “right” that included “freedom of choice.” This propaganda construction continues to hold sway.

The Ford Foundation then funded the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States, which linked local Planned Parenthood chapters under one umbrella organization and promoted sex education, child sexuality, and gender studies. Much of this new approach was based on the studies of the (pedophile) sexologist Alfred Kinsey. Other groups who joined this pro-abortion and sex education effort included the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional rights, the Association for the Study of Abortion, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, ZPG, and a variety of feminist groups.

Despite these massive efforts, state and local opposition to abortion led to state legislation designed to restrict abortion.

Jimmy Carter ran for office as a “born-again” Christian opposed to abortion, and Carter drew southern evangelicals into the Democratic party. But Carter’s administration was full of feminists who worked to support abortion and family planning. The Carter administration was seriously divided over the abortion issue. However, federal funding for family planning increased under the Carter administration. Follow-up studies of family planning programs showed that they were largely unsuccessful as the target populations generally ignored them or quickly dropped out of the programs.

In the late 1970s conservative Catholics and evangelicals who opposed abortion joined forces. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition joined this anti-abortion movement, which was a key component in the election of Ronald Reagan. Under Reagan’s presidency family planning budgets were cut by 25 percent and pro-abortion groups such as Planned Parenthood were excluded from receiving government funding. Reagan also banned using Medicaid funds for abortions and extended this financing ban overseas. However, during the Reagan years the number of abortions in America continued to climb, with one in three pregnancies ending in abortion. During the 1980s there were an average of 1.5 million abortions per year.

When President Clinton took office, he immediately issued five executive orders that overturned the Reagan policies. Clinton legalized federally funded abortion research, legalized the importation of RU 486, legalized abortions in overseas military hospitals, and funded international organizations that performed abortions. Clinton increased funding for family planning to $715 million in 1994.

When the Republicans were elected to a majority in Congress in 1994, they passed legislation banning abortions on military bases overseas, cut family planning programs, and banned partial birth abortions except in cases where necessary to save the life of the mother. President Clinton vetoed the bill.

Critchtlow has difficulty assessing the effectiveness in family planning programs in reducing population growth. Out-of-wedlock births have continued to rise despite well-funded family planning programs. The promise of lowering out-of-wedlock births for single women certainly did not materialize as the family planning advocates promised. In retrospect this was a waste of $3.5 billion in federal expenditures. The increase of out-of-wedlock births by over 600 percent between 1960 and 1990 can be attributed to the propaganda regarding sexual freedom and gender equality promoted by feminism and financed by Rockefeller. Poverty rates have fluctuated slightly up and down from the 1960s and probably do not depend much on family planning or population control. The social crisis involving breakdown of the family in America is largely a perception of conservative commentators. Liberals and Progressives have not been bothered by high divorce rates or children raised by mothers without fathers because the goal of Marxism has always been elimination of the family.

Tags: Donald Crichtlow, Intended Consequences, world population control

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