Health and Human Services recently issued a directive dealing with so-called “preventive services for women” that are required to be covered under Obamacare. This reads like a Planned Parenthood wish list which, given HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ close ties to the abortion industry, is what it may in fact be.

The Sebelius directive starts off by mandating that all private insurance plans must pay 100 percent of the cost of all FDA-approved birth control (including abortion-causing devices and drugs like the IUD, ‘morning-after’ pills, and the drug Ella) along with surgical sterilization. The insurers are forbidden to charge the users of these deadly practices a co-pay, meaning that everyone who has health insurance will be collectively bearing the cost. (That includes you, since — in case you’ve forgotten — it is illegal under Obamacare not to buy health insurance.)

But Sebelius, who has been reprimanded by her bishop for advocating abortion, is not done with you yet. All insurers, her directive states, must also cover 100 percent of the cost of promoting early-term abortions, sterilizations, and contraception among all “women of reproductive capacity” through “education and counseling.”

In other words, she not only insists that you and I pay for immoral acts, she wants you and me to pay for the cost of convincing women to engage in them as well. Now that is hubris.

There is, in her directive, a tiny exemption for a “religious employer.” This is defined so narrowly, however, as to exclude the vast majority of faith-based organizations, including Catholic hospitals, universities, and service organizations that help millions every year.

Population Research Institute, as a lay Catholic organization, would certainly not qualify for an exemption. The fact that we at PRI — including the women who work for us — want nothing to do with this “reproductive health” coverage will make not one whit of difference.

In fact, I would be willing to bet that radical feminists like Sebelius, not to mention socialists in general, take positive pleasure in the idea that they can force PRI and other pro-life organizations to support, through our health insurance, the very culture of death against which we do battle every day.

And if we refuse to purchase such health insurance, then we will be treated as lawbreakers, fined, and forced to join the government-run system — which follows the same rules. There is no escape from the box canyon into which the Obama administration wants to herd us.

For those who are aware of how state-run health care programs in other countries recklessly disregard life, liberty, and religious freedom in their pursuit of a Leftist agenda, all this will come as no surprise.

The same cannot be said of some American bishops who, enamored by the thought of “free healthcare for all,” turned a blind eye to the dangers posed by the federal government’s takeover of medicine. Abandoning the principle of subsidiarity, and expressing only carefully circumscribed reservations about abortion, conscience rights, and religious liberty, they largely bought into Obama’s scheme.

That the provisions of Obamacare are now being used to carry out a direct assault on the faith that they are entrusted to safeguard should not shock any of them. After all, even their limited concerns were largely ignored in the initial legislation. Why should they be respected now that it is (at least temporarily) the law of the land?

Of course I salute Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, chairman of the bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, for condemning Sebelius’ directive that “require[s] all … to carry health coverage that violates the deeply-held moral and religious convictions of many.”

And I am pleased that Representative Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE), appalled by these new HHS mandates, has introduced the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act in the House (H.R. 1179), and that Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) has sponsored a companion bill in the Senate (S. 1467). This measure will ensure that those who participate in the health care system “retain the right to provide, purchase, or enroll in health coverage that is consistent with their religious beliefs and moral convictions.”

This legislation will serve as a useful corrective to the HHS excesses — if it passes the Senate. But even if it is ultimately signed into law by Obama, this will not mark the end of the Church’s problems with Obamacare.

Indeed, the biggest battles are yet to come. As HHS begins to dictate what kinds of healthcare are permissible under what circumstances, Catholic and Christian hospitals will be forced to participate, in all likelihood, in acts which are indistinguishable from infanticide, euthanasia, and everything in between.

Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski’s warning may well become reality: “Catholic social and health-care providers — the largest private network in the nation — are at risk of being left out of all federal programs, despite their well-earned reputation for providing superlative service to the American public. … In effect, the Obama administration is telling these Catholic providers to surrender their conscience rights and their Catholic ethos or shut their doors.”

Unless the Catholic Church is content to become no more than what Jon Merrill calls “a secular-government contractor, a ward of the anti-Catholic State,” such battles will have to be fought again and again. And even this effort will only suffice to eliminate the worst abuses of Obamacare, not to create a health care system centered around the human person.

I am afraid that, unless Obamacare is repealed, the Church will be drawn willy-nilly into lobbying for ever more government subsidies for its healthcare institutions and for ever higher taxes on American families as a result.

If the traditional Catholic teaching on subsidiarity means anything, it means that the Catholic people themselves must take care of themselves and others, and that this must be done voluntarily with their own resources.

Bishop Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, recently celebrated the end of state funding for his charities, occasioned by his refusal to place adoptive children with homosexual couples. He said that government money had prevented his diocesan service organizations from manifesting a true Catholic ethos and that being “less dependent on government funding, … [his] Catholic Charities would be able to focus on being more Catholic and more charitable.”

If Bishop Paprocki is right – and I believe that he unquestionably is – then the nation’s Catholic bishops should not only work for the repeal of Obamacare, they should also reclaim their Catholic ethos by weaning themselves and their institutions away from federal funding altogether.

For those who believe in this agenda, population growth is the root of mankind’s problems. They claim that more people equals less . . . of everything: Prosperity, food supply, economic growth, social order.  To hear them tell it, all the earth’s real and imagined woes—from too little food and fresh water to too much pollution of air and water—are a result of the same cause.  They claim—wrongly—that the planet we call home is simply too crowded.

Pope Benedict XVI made the case for people in his recent encyclical, Charity in Truth (Caritas in Veritate), writing that “to consider population increase as the primary cause of underdevelopment is mistaken, even from an economic point of view” (no. 44). The Pope criticized “non-governmental organizations [that] work actively to spread abortion, at times promoting the practice of sterilization in poor countries, in some cases not even informing the women concerned. Moreover, there is reason to suspect that development aid is sometimes linked to specific health-care policies which de facto involve the imposition of strong birth control measures” (no. 28).

For consistently defending human life, the Church in general and Pope Benedict XVI in particular are blamed for causing governments to shy away from taking the “overpopulation problem” more seriously.  What population control activists fail to understand is that the Church’s stance is supported by hard science and not “just” traditional morality.

Science has shown that reducing the number of babies born does not in itself solve political, economic, or environmental problems. Rather, reducing births often creates grave problems. Take Social Security and Medicare, for example. In the United States and other industrialized countries, these programs are difficult to sustain unless each generation of taxpaying workers is larger than the one that went before it.

This is exactly the problem that we face now. Those who would reduce our numbers also forget that people are ingenious producers and problem-solvers, not just inert consumers.

In fact, population growth has been the primary driver of progress throughout history. Innovators and entrepreneurs can be drawn to extract resources and to produce and distribute more goods in ways that sustain the natural environment and contribute to human development. At the end of this creative process you will have more goods available at lower prices—precisely because of population growth.

People need to be understood as the answer to problems, and not the cause of all problems. Through efforts supporting sustainable development and economic growth, environmental indicators will also improve. As the late Julian Simon often remarked, children born today will lead longer, healthier lives than ever before.  They will live in a world where vast tracts of land have been set aside to preserve their natural beauty, and where the ugly scars of early industrialization have largely been healed. The world is not an overcrowded human ark, but it is—as it was designed to be—a beautiful horn of plenty. And people, the pinnacle of creation, are the ultimate resource.

But I was even more taken aback when the head of China’s National Population and Family Planning Commission, a woman named Li Bin, announced that China would continue to enforce this same Draconian policy for “decades” to come.

Decades? This is, after all, a policy that has led to a slaughter of the innocents of Biblical proportions. Hundreds of millions of women have been forcibly aborted and sterilized. Homes have been razed, livestock confiscated, and exorbitant fines levied. In all, 400 million people are missing from the Chinese population as a result of the one-child policy. Like previous Chinese Communist Party-orchestrated disasters such as the Great Leap Forward, or the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, this policy, too, has been a disaster for the Chinese people.

I should know. I was in China when the one-child policy began 30 years ago.

What I saw then, living in an agricultural commune in rural Guangdong, rivals anything that happened in Nazi Germany. One day in 1980 several hundred young mothers, all pregnant with second or higher-order children, were ordered to attend population control meetings. There they were told that they would all have to abort their pregnancies. Those who refused were arrested for the “crime” of being pregnant and locked up until they, too, buckled under the pressure and submitted to an abortion.

At that point they were taken to the local medical clinic and given a lethal injection into their uterus. If their bodies did not expel their dead or dying babies within two days, they were subjected to a cesarean section abortion. Most horrific of all, babies born alive were killed by means of an injection of formaldehyde into the ”soft spot” on the crown of their heads. Those few women who managed to escape arrest and had their babies in secret were assessed heavy fines.

Everything that I witnessed then, from the forced abortions of women in the third-trimester of pregnancy to government-sanctioned infanticide, is still happening now. Those women who manage to avoid the dragnet by going into hiding are now subjected to even heavier fines, which currently run three to five times the family’s annual income. Those who can’t pay this huge amount have had their homes destroyed and their possessions and livestock confiscated.

Moreover, such a child remains a “black child,” that is, one who does not exist in the eyes of the state. Such children are nonpersons, turned away from the government clinic if they fall ill, barred from attending a government school of any kind, and not considered for any kind of government employment later in life. They are not allowed marry or start families of their own, since the government has decreed that “black children” will not be allowed to reproduce. One generation of illegals is enough.

The Chinese government, supported by foreign population control zealots, believe that its program should be held up as a population control role model for the rest of the world. In reality, it should be roundly condemned for its widespread and systematic violations of human rights, especially the rights of women.

But even those who shy away from defending China’s brutal repression of its population sometimes argue in favor of the one-child policy on other grounds. China is often held up—by the UN Population Fund, for example—as a positive example of a county that has been able to slow population growth rates dramatically, and which has achieved prosperity as a result. But to praise the country that has become the ugly poster child of forced abortion and coerced sterilization for the economic growth that these inhuman policies have supposedly generated is not only inconsistent, but also wrong.

China is clearly worse off economically as a result of eliminating from its population 400 million of the most productive and enterprising people the world has ever known. China’s astonishing economic performance—its annual GDP growth over the past three decades is close to 10%—is not only a tribute to the tremendous work ethic of the Chinese people, but also has led to labor shortages in China’s coastal provinces. Every baby born in China today is a net economic asset. How much more would China have been able to achieve with an even larger population?

Some would argue that adding people would overburden the Chinese environment, but the PRC has been an ecological disaster zone from the time of Mao’s forced-pace industrialization programs in the 1950s. The same remains true today, as the Chinese leadership remains far more concerned about the economic growth rate than about ensuring that the populace has clean air to breathe and clean water to drink. Witness the government-mandated shutdown of all factories in the Beijing region in the days leading up to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Once the athletes (and the foreign journalists) were gone, the smokestacks resumed spewing out their plumes of black smoke. Nothing had changed. This is to say that the sorry state of China’s environment has far more to do with misguided political decisions, and the lack of public accountability for the actions of both government and privately owned businesses, than it does with the number of people.

The one-child policy has been a social disaster as well. Two generations of Chinese have grown up with no siblings, no cousins, and no aunts and uncles. This radical shrinking of the boundaries of the family is, in itself, is a great poverty. Then there is a problem of female infanticide and sex selective abortion, which has eliminated tens of millions of little girls from the population, leaving an equal number of young men without brides to marry. Prostitution, homosexuality, and gang activity are on the rise as a result.

Finally, there is the demographic snare that the one-child policy has set for the Chinese people. Because of the radical cutback in births, the Chinese population is aging faster than any human population in human history. The worker/dependency ratio is unsustainable. How can an only child support two parents and four grandparents in retirement? I am afraid that this will lead the Chinese government to embark upon a “one-grandparent policy” in years to come, in which tens of millions of elderly Chinese will be urged to accept euthanasia, perhaps in return for their only grandchild being allowed to go to college. Forced abortion and forced euthanasia are two sides of the same debased coin.

For all its failings, I do think that the one-child policy has served one important purpose as far as the Chinese Communist Party is concerned: It has helped to maintain the muscular rigor of the one-party dictatorship that rules China. China is a police state, after all, and such a state, to remain strong, must have something to police. Economic controls have been loosened over the past 30 years, so control over other aspects of life must be tightened. The brutal one-child policy is one consequence of such a system’s relentless drive for control over people’s lives.

Do I think that the Chinese Communist Party really intends to continue, as Li Bin asserts, its one-child policy “decades” into the future? Absolutely. And it will certainly never admit that the policy was a mistake. One-party dictatorships don’t make mistakes of such consequence—at least if they want to stay in power.

Obama, who can be thin-skinned when people disagree with him, was downright irritated when the early polls showed that a majority of Americans opposed his health care “reform” bill. He criticized the polls as premature, saying “So before we find out if people like health care reform, we should wait to see what happens when we actually put it into place. Just a thought.” (President Obama, April 1, 2010)

The problem with his argument is that the more Americans find out what is actually in this monstrosity of a bill, the less they like it. Polls conducted by Rasmussen Reports show that 55 percent of the public supported the repeal of ObamaCare on March 25, just two days after its passage. Today, a half-year later, the number of those favoring repeal has grown to 61 percent.

I am not one to call the President a liar. I have too much respect for the office held by giants like George Washington and Ronald Reagan for that. But I do believe that much of what Obama has said about his own health care bill is simply not true. He claimed in Maine that people could keep their own health insurance, in Maryland that people could keep their own doctors. In Washington, DC, he promised that his plan would cut costs but would not lead to the rationing of care. He has consistently claimed that it would not fund abortions, and that its “end-of-life visits” would not lead to euthanasia.

Six months later, all of these claims are being questioned by taxpayers who see people losing their health care plans and paying more for health insurance. More and more Americans are realizing that they and their children will be stuck with the bill as healthcare costs rise, and that they will be paying for “family planning services” that include not just sterilizations and contraception, but abortions as well.

Obama has repeatedly reassured nervous Americans that “if you like your insurance plan, you will keep it. No one will be able to take that away from you. It hasn’t happened yet. It won’t happen in the future.” (President Obama, April 1, 2010) In reality, millions of Americans will lose their health insurance in the coming years as a direct result of ObamaCare.

On September 21, 2010, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced 1.2 million seniors will be forced out of the Medicare Advantage or Medicare prescription drug plan that they currently enjoy next year. Add to this the news that nHealth has dropped all its customers because of ObamaCare and is going out of business, and that the American National Insurance Company will not sell health insurance to early retirees, self-employed workers, and small businesses because of ObamaCare. In fact, the worst blow of all may fall upon small businesses. Regulations issued by the Obama administration may cause up to 80 percent of small businesses to lose their current plans.

You will also be paying more for your health insurance in years to come because of ObamaCare. Obama continues to maintain that “This law will cut costs and make coverage more affordable for families and small businesses.” (President Obama, June 22) But the reality behind the rhetoric is that ObamaCare is causing health insurance prices to skyrocket. The Wall Street Journal reported that ObamaCare is causing rates to increase up to 20 percent for some buyers. In Connecticut, rates are increasing 18 percent for small businesses and 14.2 percent for the self-employed, early retirees, and others who buy their own coverage on October 1, 2010.

These increases are taking place not because of greed on the part of insurance companies, as Obama’s media minions like to claim, but because of the new mandates and regulations contained in ObamaCare, all of which cost real money to comply with.

The elderly will bear the brunt of Obama’s deceptions, such as his claim that “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” (President Obama, June 8, 2010) The reality is that doctors are already fleeing Medicare in droves. In Texas alone, more than 300 primary care physicians have stopped seeing seniors in the last two years. When ObamaCare cuts Medicare payments to doctors next year, even more doctors will bail out of a system that overworks and underpays them, leaving millions of seniors without a personal physician.

Costs are rising as well, flying in the face of Obama’s claim that “over time, costs will come down for families, businesses, and the federal government, reducing our deficit by more than $1 trillion over the next two decades. That’s what this reform will do.” (President Obama, April 1, 2010.) We now know that, according to President Obama’s own Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), ObamaCare will increase health care spending by 6.3 percent annually and will cause health care to consume almost 20 percent of the our nation’s GDP. In other words, ObamaCare will only pile more debt on the mountain of debt that Obama’s other forays into socialism have caused.

The easiest Obama claim to refute is his contention that ObamaCare would not fund abortions. This is because he refuted it himself by issuing an executive order explicitly forbidding the funding of abortions through ObamaCare.

When I first learned of this particular ruse, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Because it is a ruse; albeit very clever one that many people, apparently including “pro-life” Democrats like Bart Stupak, fail to see through.

You see, if ObamaCare had not funded abortion in the first place, then his executive order would be unnecessary. So the executive order constitutes evidence that, contra Obama, ObamaCare had funded abortion all along.

At the same time, however, since federal law always and everywhere trumps executive orders, Obama’s order is not worth the paper it is written on. As a Harvard-trained lawyer, the President surely realizes that his executive order will not stand up to the most cursory of judicial reviews. Obamacare will then be used as Obama, Reid and Pelosi intended, as a vehicle to promote and perform abortions.

It seems to me that our choice as Americans is simple: Either we euthanize ObamaCare before it is too late, or it winds up euthanizing us.

It is time to pay an “end-of-life” visit to ObamaCare.

Lee had earlier outlined his demands on his website, savetheplanetprotest.com, where he posted a 1,100 word manifesto aimed at the Discovery Channel. In it, he demanded that Discovery change its programming and focus on getting rid of people who are “polluting” the planet. “All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants…” Lee wrote, “…programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. … That means stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies!” It is because there are too many people, he exclaims elsewhere on the site, that “Global Warming is a reality. The massive extinction of animals is happening all over the world.”

Where did he get such wacko ideas?

From the mainstream environmental movement, that’s where, which early embraced the idea that the best kind of environmental protection was population control.

• Earth Day Founder Hugh Moore first popularized the idea, picked up by Lee, that people are a form of pollution. Moore invented the term “popullution,” short for population pollution, and chose as the theme of the first Earth Day in 1970 the slogan “People Pollute.”

• Population Bombster Paul Ehrlich went on to narrow the focus to human babies, frequently exhorting people to “Join the environmental movement, stop having children, and save the planet.”

• By 1971 most of the leading environmental groups had signed on to the anti-natal agenda, having been convinced that reducing the human birthrate would greatly benefit the environment. Lee obviously made their agenda his own.
• Coercion in matters of birth control, suggested by Lee above, has been widely and openly endorsed by radical environmentalists. “Voluntarism is a farce,” wrote Richard Bowers of Zero Population Growth in 1969. “The private sector effort has failed… [even the expenditure] of billions of dollars will not limit growth.” Sterner measures were required, said Bowers, who proposed enacting “criminal laws to limit population, if the earth is to survive.”
• And then there is Al Gore who, however cartoonish he now seems, continues his overheated rhetoric about the dangers of global warming. According to Lee’s own account, it was a viewing of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” several years ago that first spurred him to environmental activism. I note also that Gore, in a post on his personal blog two weeks ago, called for major protests against the failure of the U.S. government to act against global warming.
• Lee was particularly affected by reading Ishmael and My Ishmael, environmental cult books by Daniel Quinn that tell the story of a sentient gorilla with a Jewish name (Ishmael), who castigates humans for having too many babies. Reducing human numbers and returning humans to a tribal existence (Quinn is also no fan of industry) are recurrent themes of the books, and are cited by Lee as a major inspiration.

Now, if a book by Glenn Beck had in any way, however remotely, inspired a gunman to take hostages at MSNBC and demand that they reorient their programming to promote the pro-life, pro-family cause, you can bet that the lamestream media would be howling hate crime, not just at the criminal, but also at Beck himself.

Instead, we see the media in full-throated denial of any connection between the anti-people words of their environmental icons and the anti-people acts of James Lee. The Huffington Post has already reached the conclusion that Lee was mentally ill, the implication of which is that neither he, nor his intellectual progenitors, can be held accountable for his actions. I am not a psychologist, but it seems to me that you have to be functioning pretty well to write long essays, maintain a website, and plan an assault (complete with bombs) on a major media center.

Those who inspired Lee’s ravings are taking a different approach. While Al Gore is maintaining a discrete silence, Daniel Quinn is babbling to all and sundry that his books had absolutely nothing whatsoever—zip, zilch, nada—to do with James Lee’s actions. “This James Lee has been inspired,” Quinn concedes, “but in a destructive way. He’s doing what he can do — which is a crazy stunt. I wish I could understand what he’s trying to do, and what he’s trying to say. It’s hard to connect it with my book.”

Really? It seems rather easy to connect the dots to me. Perhaps Quinn has not yet read Lee’s manifesto, the ideas of which, although put more crudely, bear more than a passing resemblance to his own. Both of them want industrial civilization to self-destruct, taking with it most of the people on the planet, but Quinn wants to do it … democratically.

As he explains, “The solution has to come from a consensus of the majority of the humans in our planet, and say ‘Yes, this is what we must do, painful as it will be, to ensure the survival of the race.’ … And it will be painful. There’s not going to be any painless solution.”

Lee’s solution was to speed up the achievement of consensus by inflicting pain and terror on innocent people to force the Discovery Channel to broadcast an endless series of anti-baby, anti-people documentaries.

“It’s hard to imagine how he got from reading this book to his current behavior,” Quinn now says. “It certainly puzzles me.”

What puzzles me is how obtuse otherwise intelligent Leftists can be when they are in denial. They endlessly advocate “radical action,” and “radical social change,” and then when someone takes them seriously they throw up their hands in pretended astonishment.

It is also clear that Daniel Quinn and others feel a certain twinge of sympathy for James Lee. After all, the taking of hostages in the environmentalist cause is not a mere “crazy stunt,” as Quinn put it, it is a brazen act of eco-terrorism, and should be described as such.

Do not hold your breath.

I am reminded of the British labor leader who balked at comparisons between Communism and Nazism. Nazism was pure evil, this social democrat said, while Communism was merely deformed. However much Lee and other radical environmentalists may have disagreed about means, they shared the view that people are a pestilence on the planet. And so they are soul mates

Now let me tell you the frightening details of the new Obama-backed abortion legislation … why your Petition is so urgent.

Worse than anything Obama’s done before

Officially called the “Global and Sexual Reproductive Health Act of 2010,” this Obama-backed legislation will …

• Provide global sex “education” — and abortion — to children as young as ten! (see Sec. 10, “Definitions”)
• Train and equip new abortion “doctors” throughout the world
• Establish world-wide abortion referral services
• Remove any remaining restrictions that came from the Helms Amendment, the 1973 legislation outlawing U.S. funding of abortion as a means of family planning
• And give away $715.7 million of our hard-earned tax dollars to pay for these “population control” nightmares

In fact, if this legislation passes, it will be the biggest single U.S. abortion giveaway in the entire history of American abortion funding. This is why the bill must be defeated.

Abortionists are mobilizing to pass this Obama-backed abortion bill

As you read these words, major pro-abortion groups are pulling out all stops to get this new abortion legislation through Congress …

• Planned Parenthood trumpets it as “… a critical piece of legislation.”
• “Americans for UNFPA applauds … the introduction of HR 5121, the Global and Sexual Reproductive Health Act of 2010.”
• International Women’s Health Coalition lauds the introduction as “… an important step in securing a just and healthy life for women and girls…”

“Can we really beat this new abortion bill?”

Excellent question, and the answer is YES! …

You see, even though pro-lifers don’t have control of the House or Senate, pro-abortion legislators are scared of losing their lucrative Congressional jobs this November. They’re justifiably afraid not only of pro-lifers, but all voters who are furious at government spending. These Members of Congress will do whatever it takes to keep their high-paying jobs in Washington — and that includes paying very careful attention to our Petition to Stop Obama’s Massive New Abortion Giveaway!

So we can beat this new Obama-backed abortion bill, BUT we must have your signed Petition right now!

After you sign the petition, send a message to 7 family members and 15 friends asking them to do the same. Together we can send a clear message to Representatives in Washington DC that we want the U.S. out of this miserable business.

Zavidova’s story has become unfortunately common in Uzbekistan. According to news sources in the area, Uzbekistan’s “president” (read: Soviet-era dictator) Islam Karimov has revisited an old mass sterilization campaign, bringing thousands of women in to be sterilized like farm animals. The Times Online reports:

Activists say mass sterilisation began in 2003, but was eased after two years following an outcry. It is said to have restarted in February this year, when the health ministry ordered doctors to recommend sterilisation as an “effective contraceptive”. Critics claim every doctor was told to persuade “at least two women” a month to have the procedure. Doctors who failed faced reprisals and fines.

“We estimate that since February, about 5,000 women have been sterilised without consent,” said a local human rights campaigner who fears detention if she is named.

In many cases, doctors opt for delivery by caesarean section and then perform a sterilisation without telling the woman. Widespread rumours of the practice have resulted in women opting for home births to avoid the risk.

Although news of this shocking campaign has reached the West via outlets like the Times Online and LifeSiteNews, reaction from most major human-rights groups has been, well, nonexistent.

At PRI, we think we know why.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the five former Soviet Central Asian Republics (the “stans:” Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) finally achieved independence. Naturally, the United States was quick to offer a diplomatic relationship with these countries. However, with these diplomatic ties came U.S. foreign aid dollars—and a now-infamous U.S. foreign aid agenda.

In a 1997 report, PRI reported on how USAID quickly made population control their highest priority in all 5 central Asian nations—with a vengeance. USAID’s “assessment team” was sent in to decide what was most needed by the Central Asians, but before they set foot on Asian soil, the assessors had already decided what the answer would be.

“Predictably,” PRI reported, “the assessment team discovered that there was a critical need for birth limitation and large quantities of contraceptive supplies were required throughout the region again, even though it is one of the least densely populated places on the planet. Indeed, since USAID officials had already begun planning a seminar on dealing with the alleged deficiencies, what was the purpose of the ‘assessment’ trip? Typically, the basic decisions had already been made as to how to address the ‘needs’ yet to be discovered.”

As a result of this “investigation,” USAID proceeded to sterilize women. Lots of women. In fact, one USAID report claimed that USAID officials had implanted IUDs (intrauterine devices) in more than one million women in 1991 alone.

However, according to PRI’s documentation, this is not only appalling, it is impossible. “Inasmuch as the total population of Uzbekistan was some 21 million,” PRI reported. “there were less than five million women of reproductive age in the entire population. No matter how ‘aggressively’ pursued the task, is it credible that health officials could possibly have inserted IUDs in more than 20 percent of the relevant female population in just one year’s time? Such an IUD ‘success’ story was all the more improbable in view of the outdated and creaky health care systems in the CAR, complicated by severe shortages of basic drugs and medical supplies, including IUDs.”

Whatever the number actually was, USAID turned out to be far less of a primary care provider than a militant contraceptive/sterilization pusher. The numbers of women permanently scarred and broken from their campaign remains unknown, but undoubtedly it remains tragically high. PRI’s report concluded that “unfortunately, in Central Asia, deliverables to USAID will include much more than pounds of useless reports and wasted monies. Permanently sterilized women and victims (including deaths) from Norplant, Depo-Provera, IUDs and birth control pills will also be delivered up by USAID’s population control henchmen.”

To this day, USAID has a presence in Uzbekistan, albeit a more restrained one. Their FY 2011 Congressional budget justification allocates about $12 million for use in that country, including $146,000 on “reproductive health.”

Which brings us to this year’s news about massive sterilizations. It seems clear that, even if USAID is no longer directly involved with sterilizing tens of thousands of women, their legacy lives on. It is highly doubtful that a nation like Uzbekistan, emerging from the murk of Soviet oppression and being only lightly populated, would prioritize population control in this way. And yet, it mysteriously continues to do so.

And worse, there is practically no public outcry in the West. Organizations like USAID count on their own silence, and the brevity of the public consciousness, to make these human rights scandals go quietly into the night. Rarely is there any press fanfare, or any collective public outrage.

The rationale is simple: if overpopulation is an issue, then the suffering of thousands is just collateral damage for the cause of saving the planet. And, as far as many of these groups are concerned, the sterilization of the faceless, nameless poor in faraway lands is an acceptable alternative to visiting the same measures upon women in the West.

Which brings us back to the core of the matter: that “overpopulation” is just another way to say “poor people,” and “reproductive health” is often just another way to say “ethnic cleansing.”

Steven W. Mosher

Prophecies of Humanae Vitae

by Fr. Paul Marx, OSB

On July 25, 1968, Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae re-affirmed the Catholic teaching on life, love and human sexuality. In that document, he listed the consequences of life lived outside Catholic teaching.

He predicted that:

1. Contraception would lead to conjugal infidelity.
2. Contraceptive practice would lead to a “general lowering of morality.”
3. Contraception would lead men to cease respecting woman in their totality and would cause them to treat women as “mere instruments of selfish enjoyment” rather than as cherished partners.
4. And finally, widespread acceptance of contraception by couples would lead to a massive imposition of contraception by unscrupulous governments.

In other words, Pope Paul VI predicted that contraception would evolve from “a lifestyle choice” into a weapon of mass destruction. How dreadfully his prophecy has been vindicated by population control and coercive sterilization programs, fertility reduction quotas and the promotion of abortion literally everywhere in the world.

Contraception’s destruction of the integrity of the marital act—as unitive and procreative—has dire consequences for society and for our souls. Contraception, in other words, is a rejection of God’s view of reality. It is a wedge driven into the most intimate sphere of communion known to man outside of the Holy Sacrament of the Mass. It is a degrading poison that withers life and love both in marriage and in society.

By breaking the natural and divinely ordained connection between sex and procreation, women and men—but especially men—would focus on the hedonistic possibilities of sex. People would cease seeing sex as something that was intrinsically linked to new life and to the sacrament of marriage.

Does anyone doubt that this is where we find ourselves today?

He has proposed what he calls a “targeted set of changes” to the Senate-passed bill, which have the effect of making a bad bill for babies even worse. (An 11-page summary is available on the White House website here).

Bear in mind that the Senate bill (H.R. 3590) already promotes abortion in multiple ways, making it the most pro-abortion legislation since Roe v. Wade. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), a cautious critic at best, posted a study of the anti-life provisions of the Senate bill that ran no fewer than thirteen (13) pages.

Now comes Obama’s version, ladling on $11 billion for “Community Health Centers.” Planned Parenthood will be the beneficiary of much of this money, as the President helps his friends at the abortion organization get even richer off our tax dollars.

Obama also wants to subsidize private health insurance that covers abortion, and to mandate that even non-subsidized plans to cover abortion, in effect forcing all of us to pay for someone else’s abortion.

The House bill (H.R. 3962), on the other hand, has no place in Obama’s plan, patently because it was stripped of its abortion language by the Stupak-Pitts Amendment.

There are plenty of other problems in Obamacare: Lifesaving medical treatment will be rationed, costs will be raised, and more bloated federal bureaucracies will be created, including a federal commission that will decide what kind of health care Americans are entitled to. Fines will be levied on those who do not join a government-approved plan.

Next the government will order that we all eat arugula on Tuesdays—for our own good, of course.

But for us, the Right to Life is the paramount issue. We cannot let the government of our beloved country get into the abortion business.

We remain, after all, a democracy. We elected the men and women who are determined to promote and perform abortions using our tax dollars. We would all be complicit in the abortions that follow.

Now would be an excellent time to contact your congressman and senators and tell them that you do not want to pay for someone else’s abortion.

They can all be reached through the congressional switchboard at (202) 224-3121.

The Senate “health care” bill trashes that principle. According to Senator Sam Brownback, “Despite the promises of the Obama administration and the Democratic leadership that the health care bill would maintain the status quo on the issue of abortion, the legislative language revealed by Majority Leader Harry Reid late last week radically changes that status quo and sets the tragic precedent of providing federal funding for abortion.”

How can this be so? Most of the press accounts, following Democrat talking points, have intentionally obscured the truth. They have portrayed Harry Reid’s efforts to bribe various senators into supporting the bill as a process of “compromise” and “give-and-take,” especially on the issue of abortion. They have claimed that the bill maintains “neutrality” on the issue of abortion, and does not change the status quo.

This is nothing more than a rhetorical smokescreen. While the House bill, thanks to the Stupak Amendment, prohibits federal funds from being used to pay for elective abortions, the Senate bill actually allows funds to be expended for this purpose.

Let me explain.

It is true that the bill allows each of the fifty states to “opt out” of providing insurance coverage of abortions. But if even one state decides to provide insurance coverage for abortions, all taxpayers, regardless of where they live, will see their tax dollars used to fund elective abortions in that state. In other words, as Senator Brownback makes clear, “even taxpayers in states that opt out of providing abortion coverage cannot opt out of paying for elective abortion.”

This provision effectively kills the Hyde Amendment.

Nor is this the only abortion problem with the bill. Each state will have the authority to provide access to two multistate plans through the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), but only one of these can exclude abortions. None of the federally administered health programs, like OPM’s, Medicare, Medicaid, TriCare and the Children’s Health Insurance Plan, currently cover elective abortions. If Reid’s bill becomes law, a federally funded and managed health care plan will cover elective abortions for the first time.

Moveover, since federal law trumps state law, the bill would also overturn existing state laws restricting abortion. Looked at this way, the “health care” bill is kind of a back-door Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA).

The bill also gives enormous power to the executive branch, which will be able to force private health plans to cover abortion by the simple expedient of defining them as “preventive care.” If you don’t believe that Obama’s health czar won’t use this authority to promote abortion, you haven’t been paying attention.

A final flaw in the current bill is its lack of protection for freedom of conscience. Language prohibiting discrimination against health care providers who decline to provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions is nowhere to be found.

The Senate bill is an abortion bill masquerading as a “health care” bill. And it must be stopped.