The influence of the International Planned Parenthood Federation makes it a subject of debate in a wide range of publications. The most recent issue of Catholic World Report (January, 1997) for example, features the say, The War on Population, Continued by noted economist and Professor Jacqueline Kasun.

Kasun’s central argument is compelling, not only for its references to Planned Parenthood, but for reminding readers of the dangers posed by population control advocates. She argues that for the past 30 years, the population-control movement has come to dominate relations between the industrialized world and Third Worlds nations.

A major step in this new direction occurred in 1968, when the World Bank committed itself to the cause of population control, using over-population and poverty as its chief supports. By the mid-1970s, U.S. foreign policy embraced the population-control objective by stipulating that all countries receiving U.S. foreign aid must accept some form of population control. This thinking was expressed in harsh realities in the secret NSSM 200 document (1974), which called for mandatory two-child families throughout the world by the year 2000.

Naturally, any discussion of world population control efforts is bound to involve Planned Parenthood.  Contraception and fertility control have been goals of the organization since its creation in 1952, and they were long-held ideals of Planned Parenthood patron saint, Margaret Sanger.

Kasun points out that in addition to its $100 million (U.S.) annual income and its 140-country affiliated network, Planned Parenthood has other was of dominating policy-making on the international level. “The group’s trump cards are networking and exercising political leverage,” Kasun writes. “IPPF officials cycle from job to job in the high echelons of international officialdom –now at the United Nations, now at the World Bank, next at the Rockefeller Foundation or one of its fiefdoms. In short, the IPPF has demonstrated its mastery of empire building.”

Planned Parenthood’s influence in international circles is so pervasive, Kasun argues, that much of the language appearing in the United Nations population-related documents, is lifted from Planned Parenthood publications. Phrases such as “sustainable development, reproductive health” and “safe motherhood” appeared in PP writings long before they were popularized at U.N. gatherings in Cairo, Rome and Beijing.

Kasun sounds a more ominous note when discussing the effort to have each nations’ laws conform to the vision and spirit espoused at these international conferences. Planned Parenthood makes to secret of its aim to pressure world governments to change laws in the areas of family planning, contraception services and reproductive/ sexual orientation to its particular vision. In makes no difference to Planned Parenthood if its view in these areas is at odds with national laws or even local community values.

Pressure on government

“IPPF has consistently supported and financed what it calls ‘the right of access to abortion’, including abortion in late pregnancy,” Kason says.  “It maintains it has a duty to ‘exert pressure on governments’ to guarantee this right. Thus in Northern Ireland, for example, the Federation pursues its goal of full and free access to abortion under the guise of ‘clarifying’ the existing laws which restrict abortion, and fighting to eliminate ‘unsafe’ abortions.”

What is perhaps even more enlightening –and disturbing –about Kasun’s research into Planned Parenthood is the situation in mainland China. Here, the government’s coercive one-child per family policy has been held up as a “Third World model” by the China Family Planning Association, one of the Planned Parenthood’s affiliated groups.

According to Kasun, China has received billions of dollars in foreign aid money –much of it supplied by taxpayers in the industrialized world –to maintain its anti-family programs. And despite ample evidence of human rights abuses and severe penalties imposed on families which violate the one-child policy, the IPPF continues to “shower praise” on China.

“Throughout the years of the ‘one-child’ campaign, with all its horrors, the Chinese government and the China Family Planning Association have enjoyed cordial relations with the major nations of the world and the most prestigious international organizations,” Kasun says. “The constant allusions to ‘overpopulation’ have provided a handy excuse for the ruling clique to explain the misery of the people; they have also been a means of expanding the power of the IPPF …China may be a model of what lies in store for any nation which allows IPPF to have its way.”