How could so much go wrong so swiftly? In the 1960s and '70s a strong consensus operated among intellectual leaders in the United States and other developed countries that the best way to help alleviate starvation and poverty in the less developed countries was to assist those poor people to limit their fertility to family sizes truly desired, improving their lives according to the basic social equation, resources divided by population equals the human condition.
Outstanding visionary leaders overcame religious opposition, and with the help of Congressional earmarking of funds the United States Agency for International Development led the charge to make the most effective means of fertility control readily available in many less developed countries - oral contraceptives, IUDs, condoms, and the surgical means for voluntary sterilization and pregnancy termination; resulting in achievement of great fertility control progress in Chile, Panama, Columbia, Mexico, Brazil, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Philippines, Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco, Kenya, Ghana.
But the family planning surge led by USAID assistance in many countries during the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Jerry Ford, was truncated by Catholic control of White House population policies under Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush I and II; leaving most of Africa and the Muslim Middle East impoverished and endangered by ongoing disastrous excessive fertility.
Perversely, philanthropic child death control programs providing immunization, antibiotics, potable water, and food - without balancing control of births - have caused such rapid population increases that they have aggravated the resources vs population disparity, generating killing fields and pogroms in dozens of countries. Surely, all organizations and agencies moving to prevent child deaths in Africa must ensure that comparable numbers of births are prevented - in the same time frame - or be justly accused of philanthropic malpractice. Without far more effective birth control there is no sound basis for expecting durable improvement in the inhuman conditions of Africa, as in Darfur.
The millions of desperately poor and starving women in Africa deserve access to legal abortion at least equal to that afforded wealthy American and European women. With respect to abortion morality, most
abortions done in this world are done not by physicians but by Nature's God: canceling embryonic flaws. Pregnant African women must be enabled to apply their God-given intelligence to improve their reproductive lives and the health and well-being of their families and nations. We can achieve higher moral ground by enabling African women to protect the well-being of their families by limiting child bearing to those truly desired. Religious organizations immorally opposing abortion, and philanthropic malpractice by increasing populations beyond available resources, have actually caused millions of child and adult deaths in Africa from starvation and hunger-induced warfare.
R.T. Ravenholt, MD, MPH
3156 E Laurelhurst Dr NE, Seattle, WA 98105, 206-525-0503,
ravenrt|AT|oz.net
(This writer directed the USAID Population Program, 1966-1979)
Comments
Tim Murray (not verified)
Sat, 2007-11-17 18:23
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Increasing the child death rate to balance the equation