Steven Mosher, the president of the Population Research Institute, will be speaking in Ottawa

The National March for Life in Ottawa is always an excellent opportunity to listen to distinguished pro-life speakers. This year Steven Mosher, the president of the Population Research Institute (PRI), will be the keynote speaker at the Rose Dinner on May 10. He will also give an address on the steps of Parliament Hill before the March earlier that day and he will lead one of the workshops for students at the Youth Conference on May 11.

Mosher is an international authority on Red China and population issues. In 1979, he was the first American social scientist to visit communist China. Invited by the ChiComm government, he had the opportunity to access government documents and was the first to document women undergoing forced abortions under the country’s new one-child policy. The experiences Mosher lived through in China changed him from a self-described “pro-choice atheist” to become a pro-life Catholic. His critical perspective on Red China affected his academic career. Mosher had completed all of his doctorate requirements in cultural anthropology at Stanford University, but he did not receive a PhD after the Chinese government complained about his research and publications.

Since then, Mosher has been widely published, made speeches, and appeared in the media. He has been a guest on Good Morning America, 60 Minutes, Fox News, and CNN. His many publications include the best-selling A Mother’s Ordeal: One Woman’s Fight Against China’s One-Child Policy, as well as articles for the Wall Street Journal, Reader’s Digest, Washington Post, National Review, and First Things.

PRI, the organization Mosher currently leads, was founded by Fr. Paul Marx, in 1989 as a part of Human Life International. It became an independent organization in 1996. According to its website, the PRI is “a non-profit research group whose goals are to expose the myth of overpopulation, to expose human rights abuses committed in population control programs, and to make the case that people are the world’s greatest resource.” This includes the mission to “expose the relentless promotion of abortion, abortifacient contraception, and chemical and surgical sterilization in misleadingly labeled “population stabilization,” “family planning,” and “reproductive health” programs” in hopes of defunding these initiatives.

The PRI, which is now active in over 30 countries, is currently spearheading projects to help stop population control in Red China (by working for the withdrawal of funding to the United Nations Population Fund, which assists the country’s coercive population control policies), debunking the overpopulation myth, stopping sex-selective abortions, and leading a petition to ban abortion.