In the article on UNICEF you mentioned the Helms amendment which prohibited US AID funds being used to support abortion. What did it say?
The Senator Helms amendment was an effort to curtail the abortion activities of the US Agency for International Development (AID) which proposed an amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. The original amendment was altered and a weaker one which passed said: “Sec. 114. None of the funds made available to carry out this part shall be used to pay for the performance of abortions as a method of family planning or to motivate or coerce any person to practice abortions.”
The original amendment was much stronger. “Section 116. Prohibiting Use of Funds for Abortion. None of the funds made available to carry out this part shall be used in any manner, directly or indirectly to pay for abortions, abortifacients drugs or devices, the promotion of the practice of abortion, or the support of research designed to develop methods of abortion.”
Helms was farsighted. In introducing his amendment (Oct. 1, 1973) he described the programs which he intended to prohibit, and these included: “AID-funds research both in the United States and abroad aimed at developing cheap methods of abortion, principally through so-called abortifacients drugs, that is, chemicals which induce abortion. The research in this third category is envisioned by AID as developing a pill or self-administered drug which will become the primary method of population control throughout the world.”
Twenty years later we have RU-486.
What exactly was the Malthusian theory of doom? M.N. Toronto
It was the theory of Thomas Robert Malthus who in 1798 published the first edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society. Later editions expanded the pamphlet into a book.
The fundamental thesis was that population, if unchecked, expands at a faster rate than the food supply. Population, Malthus said, always increases up to the limits of the means of sustenance and is only checked by war, famine, pestilence or the miseries of a very low standard of living. A century of development of new lands led to the Malthusian theory being disparaged but by the late 1950s there was a revival of the paranoia about over-population.
How and when was the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) founded? C.N. Halifax
IPPF was founded in 1953 but its historic roots go back to 1916 when Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and then founded the American Birth Control League. Her influence spread beyond the USA, and as a result an International Malthusian conference was held in New York in 1926. This conference resulted in the International Federation of Birth Control Leagues, and by 1930 this Federation was taken over by the London-based Birth Control International Information Centre.
That same year, Margaret Sanger organized an International Conference in Zurich, which later led to the IPPF.
Like her English counterpart, Marie Stopes, Margaret Sanger was both a racist and a eugenicist. Her slogan was “Birth Control to create a race of Thoroughbreds.” She had a Plan for Peace which included this recommendation: “To apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring…”
Before this program could be initiated they knew the world’s reaction to the Nazi attempt to breed an “Aryan master-race.” Both eugenics and birth control had unpleasant connotations. The term “family planning” replaced birth control. And when, at long last in 1953, Margaret Sanger founded International Planned Parenthood Federation she discovered that ‘overpopulation in the Third World’ could substitute for eugenics to provide a motive for population control.
