Birth Control: A Plot or a Beneficence
Epstein, David G.
A full-page advertisement in a recent New York Times suggests that the answer to crime in the streets is birth control. A shock photograph of a hairy youth attacking a middleclass, middle-aged...
...government money is going on an increasing scale to basic research and action programs aimed at cutting population growth rates in countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, India and Egypt...
...The sponsor of the ad, the Campaign to Check the Population Explosion, is only the latest in an array of powerful institutions that are adopting population control as an important weapon in social engineering...
...This area is very much underpopulated -about one person to the square kilometer, the largest well-watered world region as yet unsettled...
...extractive and consumer goods producers might stand to gain from population control...
...George Varky, an East Indian economist who works for Planned Parenthood, insists that 70 per cent of the U.S...
...They hire small numbers of people at relatively high wages, and in the case of consumer goods, they concentrate on luxury items protected by high tariffs that were formerly imported...
...Education is non-technical, and the upper and middle classes disdain practical tasks...
...The NACLA NEWSLETTER is published ten times year by the North American Congress on Latin America...
...Brazilian senator Mario Martins says Americans plan to use the area either for resettling U.S...
...A less bizarre critique of population control observes that in peasant societies large families are one of the main sources of self-esteem and prestige people have...
...Black people in the United States are another target...
...irth controllers like Kangas and Varky contend that they favor other programs to combat poverty, but that birth control is an essential element, since cheap death control (vaccines, antibiotics) has cut into the balance between deaths and births...
...Put together in Mexico City by Margaret Randall and Sergio Mondragon, this quarterly of poetry and prose communicates a flood of doubts, agonies and celebrations...
...and James Conant, formerly of Harvard...
...does not depend upon foresight in the heat of passion, nor does it require literacy skills like counting or reading a calendar as do the rhythm method and the pill...
...allege that a woman wanting to have a baby can remove the device b herself, Planned Parenthood clinics in New York instruct patients to have it removed by clinic MD's...
...government aid program is budgeting about $35 million on population control...
...It would also deprive poor nations of their most formidable weapon: masses of people in movement and rebellion...
...Birth-controllers, it should be emphasized, do not see themselves as Dr...
...Expenditures are high in such tightly controlled U.S...
...This leads to rates of growth higher than any in history.Page 4 Others contend that it is not overpopulation, but exploitation and inefficiency that cause underdevelopment and poverty...
...Is there an answer...
...And in the last decade the Eastern Establishment seems to have come to a consensus that birth control should be a major focus of U.S...
...The reason: to check the rapid growth of the black population...
...Many underdeveloped countries export capital to the United States even as thousands are unemployed in country and city...
...Ford, which sees its programs as "seed money" to promote certain policies and projects, is very pleased...
...In fact their advocacy is never lacking in a touch of missionary zeal...
...Part of this group later escaped in a Presbyterian mission plane which picked them up on a highway near a red-light district outside of Brasilia and took them to the United States utilizing a network of clandestine airfileds in the frontier region...
...Lewis Strauss, Eisenhower s Atomic energy Commission chief, rejected by the Senate as Secretary of Commerce...
...According to one clinic patient, insertion is so painful "it's like having a baby all over again...
...1 USAID Spurs Population Relocation in Northeast razil...
...bombs now effect a more direct check on population growth...
...Minimum contribution for 1-yr...
...speculators are buying seemingly poor land and holding it for possible rich mineral deposits...
...Brazilian nationalists charged U.S...
...poor to whom subsidized birth control sould be directed are white...
...Sixteen per cent of South Korean women of child bearing age have been sterilized by this method...
...satellites as South Korea and Taiwan, and in India, "showcase of democracy" where food production per capita is 30 per cent below that of socialist China, due in part to an archaic land tenure system...
...Blacks, like the poor countries in general, don't need more people, says Kangas, out healthy, educated, emotionally secure people - which won't happen unless pcpa-ion growt is limited...
...Now the U.S...
...On the other hand, large families are encouraged by landlords because they tend to keep labor costs at rock bottom, while early marriage binds people to the soil...
...Though Brazilian advocates of the I.U.D...
...6 Agents for Dollars...
...Ford, Rockefeller, and now U.S...
...policy in the "developing" neo-eolonial countries...
...Arable land lies fallow or is used for high-profit, low calorie products like meat...
...columnist James Reston...
...and John Cowles of the magazine and newspaper family...
...Poor countries are denied access to technology, as in the case of the nuclear test-ban treaty, which would subject non-nuclear powers to inspection, even for peaceful projects, but would result in no disarmament or inspection of nuclear powers...
...When inserted into the opening of the womb, this device, a foreign object, somehow - the precise mechanism is not known - causes sterility, supposedly reversible if the coil is removed...
...Technological breakthroughs hoped for include a 'morning-after" pill, oncea-month pills, and reversible one-shot sterilization injections...
...In best Eastern Establishment style, they are liberals who talk the language of humanitarianism...
...This outfit's board, headed by John D. Rockefeller III, includes such luminaries as Ellsworth Bunker, United States envoy to Saigon and formerly to Santo Domingo...
...These items are not accessible to most people, u w.Lth smaller families people might have more money to spend on them, while less population growth means less discontent which breeds the "instability" so feared by investors...
...Birth control is thus a cheap way of keeping things from getting bad, avoiding the desperation that leads to action...
...He defended the idea that black grievances in the United States should be redressed, and denied any anti-black intent in birth-control programs...
...In the absence of social security systems, children also provide the only hope for support in old age...
...In the same region, a group of Americans had been arrested while using a converted B-26 bomber to smuggle radioactive minerals out of Brazil...
...Condemnation of birth control was a theme of one of the resolutions at the 1967 Black ower conference in Newark...
...groups with using birth control to keep the region depopulated and ready for future exploitation and settlement...
...iary Bunting of Radcliffe...
...Heavy outlays for research reflect birth-controllers' dissatisfaction with current hardware, unsuitable, except for the I.U.D., for use among people who lack middle-class skills and outlook...
...BEazilian bishops oined leftist students in protesting the sterilization of women in the underdopulated Amazon region where U.S...
...Population is poltical...
...Orders for the translations and subscriptions ($3 a year): E Comrno Eaplumado, Apartado Postal 13-546, Mexico 13, D.F., Mexico...
...Southern states in the United States have relatively liberal laws on birth control, sterilization, and now abortion - the Georgia legislature is the fourth in the United States to pass a law widening grounds for legal abortion...
...Birth control would prevent the growth of a local population whose displacement might lead to long-term bitterness like that of Palestine Arabs displaced by Israel's expansion...
...A NOTE ON EL CRNO MPLUMADO In its seventh year, El Corno Enplumado (The Plumed Horn) is an extraordinary expression through poems and drawings of the world in revolution...
...buyers, including Texas ranchers and Indianapolis investor Stanley Amos Sellig were buying land in the region, often through forged titles and bribery of deed registrars...
...Interests represented on the Finance Committee include AT&T, General Electric, and Chase Manhattan The Ford Foundation, with a program similar to that of the Population Council, has spent about $100 million on population control...
...A shock photograph of a hairy youth attacking a middleclass, middle-aged man at knife point tops the ad, which says "the quality of life in this great country of ours is deteriorating before our eyes...
...The use of birth control devices is not immoral in itself...
...Yesbirth control is one...
...In his tastefully appointed officed in the Foundations East Side New York headquarters he spoke to me of population control as a basic means of cobating underdevelopment and poverty...
...Using the I.U.D., a mobile team can enter a village and indefinitely sterilize as many women as can be pressured into permitting insertion of the inexpensive device by class deference to white-coated medical personnel, petty rewards, propaganda or coercion...
...subscription: $5 In This Issue: Birth Control: A Plot or a Beneficence...
...9 IPage 2 The basic instrument in the overseas campaign is a small plastic device called the coil, the Lippes loop or the I.U.D...
...A later proposal by think-tank Hudson Institute to create a series of inland lakes on the Amazon added fuel to the flames...
...Unauthorized experiments with the I.U.D...
...A parliamentary inquiry revealed that U.S...
...intra-uterine device...
...One of the proposed lakes would flood Manaus, the Amazon valleys second city and capital of Amazonas state...
...In contrast to agriculture and other high-labor industries, U.S...
...caused a row in Brazil last year...
...Israeli leaders call on their Jewish citizens to have more babies as "internal immigration" to match the rapid growth of the Arab populations in the newly occupied regions...
...Nearly $10 million has bee: pent on field programs in South and Southeast Asia, where U.S...
...Unlike condoms and the diaphragm, the I.U.D...
...A Rockefeller-dominated group called the Population Council spends $5 million annually on grants in bio-medical research, demography and action programs...
...Control of their own bodies is a pre-condition for the liberation of women...
...Monocrop agriculture for export distorts the rural economy...
...Lyndon Johnson says that every five dollars spent on population control in poor countries is equal to a hundred dollars spent on economic development...
...And the Ford Foundation subsidized BEMFAM, the local planned parenthood group.Page 3 Four big institutions man the front lines of this battle against population growth...
...But like any other technological innovation, birth control devices can be used for many purposes...
...4 Language School and Institute in Cuernavaca...
...Currently Margaret Randall is translating the complete works of a Guatemalan poet, Otto Rene Castillo, who was exiled at the age of seventeen...
...Frank Abrams, ex-head of Standard Oil of New Jersey...
...blacks or as a refuge for use after a nuclear war...
...He studied in Europe and returned to Guatemala to fight with the F.A.R., was captured, tortured four days, and killed a year ago...
...Medical students from the University of Goias discovered Presbyterian medical missionaries inserting the devices in women in small settlements near the strategic Belem-Brasilia highway...
...7 Oil for Troubled Waters...
...8 Suggested Readngs...
...Half of the blacks, however, are in this poor group, so any such program would have a disproportionate effect on black population, whose grow h some black radicals think will enable them to control many central cities in the next decade...
...Strangeloves plotting the course of the world toward some macabre future...
...In Brazil, for instance, Ford sells Gallaxies for $6,000 while industrial workers earn about $35 a month...
...For Foundation Population Program Officer Lenni Kangas, for instance, is a well-dressed, professionally open-minded economist...
...Granddaddy of the population control agencies is the Planned Parenthood Feration, which operates domestically, and urges a $100 million Federal program o get poor women to have fewer children...
...Included among the sponsors of the are are Eugene Black, ex-head of the World Bank, Dixi Cup executive Hugh Moore, long a bankroller of birth-control activity...
Vol. 2 • March 1968 • No. 1
