INNOCENT KILLERS OF NON-WHITE MILLIONS Perhaps the proper term is "moral myopia". The compassionate hearts feel pain and express outrage when the government in the United States will not pay for a woman's abortion. This is seen as a violation of women's rights. But the same compassionate hearts raise no cry about the deaths of the newborn Tibetan babies that physician Blake Kerr's gives eye- witness evidence that the Chinese regularly kill. And it does not disturb these compassionate hearts that the human right of millions of couples in China whose human right to control their own bodies is abrogated by Chinese policies which include forced insertion of IUD's with subsequent X-ray surveillance to ensure that the IUD's have not been removed, and banning childbearing among those said to be "psychotic". Chinese officials routinely shrug off these facts as "rumors and fabrications", and many Americans seem happy to believe the Chinese denials. But repeated official statements in Chinese journals right up to the present day, and photographic evidence by Stephen Mosher of forciblr sterilization of women who get pregnant "illegally", are irrefutable corroboration that these practices not only occur but are established policy. It is time for academic demographers, population-control organizations, and U. S. government agencies -- as well as such prominent individuals as ex-World Bank head Robert MacNamara, President Faye Wattleton of Planned Parenthood, and such Congressmen as Sander Levin, James Scheuer, and John Porter -- to acknowledge their complicity in this tragedy. If they now renounce the faulty theories that they have promulgated, they can at least absolve themselves of further responsibility for the continuing inhumane coercive population control programs in Africa and other continents. More important, the withdrawal of intellectual support might slow these programs. And the withdrawal of U. S. government funds certainly would do so. Most (though not all) of these U. S. individuals and groups are innocent of any intention that their ideas and money would cause infanticide, forced sterilization, and coercion in the most fundamental choice a couple can make, the number of children it will have. But there is no question that their ideas and resources have helped bring about these horrors. If they do not now renounce their previous positions, which have by this time been scientifically discredited, they will be morally responsible for the continuing tragedy. And the victims certainly will blame the U. S. as a whole, as happened in India during Indira Ghandi's first reign. Until the 1950's, the United States would have nothing to do with population control abroad. Then we got rolling with a vengeance, with the supposed justification of a book by Ansley Coale and Edgar, Population Growth and Economic Development, which supposedly showed that population growth slows economic development. By 1990, however, the economics profession has turned almost completely away from the previous view that population growth is a crucial negative factor in economic development. There is still controversy about whether population growth is even a minor negative factor in some cases, or whether it is beneficial in the long run. But there is no longer any support for the earlier view which was the basis for the U. S. policy and then the policy of other countries. In 1986, the National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences issued an official report on Population Growth and Economic Development that almost completely reversed a 1971 report on the same subject from the same respected governmental institution. On the specific issue of raw materials that has been the subject of so much alarm, NRC-NAS concluded: "The scarcity of exhaustible resources is at most a minor constraint on economic growth...the concern about the impact of rapid population growth on resource exhaustion has often been exaggerated." Even though this U-turn is scientifically "official," there has been no public acknowledgement by the group of economic demographers who urged the Malthusian view with such vigor and success in earlier years. Rather, they have attempted to minimize the fatal damage to their intellectual position. Their original stand may be defensible as simple error. But to now refuse to acknowledge the error with lives at stake is, in my view, reprehensible. This academic damage control has provided cover for the private and public agencies that have fostered population-control activities abroad -- notably the Agency for International Development, the UN's Fund for Population Activities, The Population Council, and Planned Parenthood. AID has trimmed its population-control sails as slightly as possible, finding ingenious new ways to justify the same old activities. The U. S. pressure on less-developed countries to reduce birth rates began with India. Joseph Califano tells us that President Lyndon Johnson "repeatedly rejected the unanimous pleas of his advisors ... to ship wheat to the starving Indians during their 1966 famine. He demanded that the Indian government first agree to mount a massive birth control program." And L. K. Jha, the ex-ambassador of India to the U. S. recounts how Johnson's policies "had been adding to her [Prime Minister Indira Ghandi's] political difficulties...He...kept India on tenterhooks in regard to PL-480 shipments of wheat which were desperately needed because of repeated droughts in the mid-'60's." Johnson's insistence that India adopt a birth-control campaign damaged the foreign relations of the U.S. The Coale-Hoover book plus U.S. pressure led to forced sterilization programs in India in the 1970's. For example, Government of India "motivated" employees with three children to undergo sterilization by threatening loss of subsidized housing, travel allowances, and free hospital treatment. Public outrage led to the downfall of Indira Ghandi in 1977. In 1989, however, we again read of sterilization outrages in India. Aisha Ram reported in Panoscope that women in Rajasthan - - he received such reports from 40 of them -- were offered $150 if they would be sterilized. Then, "after undergoing the operation, they have been cheated out of their money" by the local government. Please notice that we're not discussing true "family planning" services. Helping people achieve the family size they desire is a great human work. Many truly-voluntary U.S. programs are valuable and respectworthy. But coercing couples to reduce fertility with force, bribery, or group pressure, is something else. If you -- and especially you "pro-choice" readers -- find it difficult to identify with the extent to which such coercion is odious, imagine yourself being penalized by taxes and loss of your job if you refuse to have more children than you freely choose to have, or even are physically forced to have more children. The experience of Indonesia, whose "family planning program is considered a model of government-sponsored fertility control in a developing country," was recently analysed by Harvard professor Donald P. Warwick. "Heavy-handed social and administrative pressure had been applied" in the representative village that he studied. "In the presence of civilian, military and police leaders, women were taken to a house in which IUD's were being inserted. They were asked to go in one door and put under very strong pressure to accept an IUD before they could leave by another door. Whether this was coercion or heavy persuasion, it denied voluntary choice to acceptors...Today that approach is no longer followed, partly because of public resentment against its earlier use." The Indonesian Department of Home Affairs puts pressure upon regional officials to meet family-planning "targets," the regional officials put pressure upon village heads and religious leaders, and they in turn bring the full weight of the community upon individuals. The village officials' "positions gave them authority to call people together." Lectures and contraceptives are distributed at the meetings. Then, if an individual is "unresponsive to persuasion or accepted but later dropped out of the program, the village head, other administrators, their wives, or members of acceptors' groups were likely to stop by to talk about family planning." The Indonesian program runs against people's wishes all along the line. "If regional officials were freed from pressure to implement...the family planning program would be the first to be dropped," according to Warwick. The U. S. is directly implicated in Indonesian interference in the private lives of individuals, aiding and abetting the strong-arm government program. One can imagine the uproar if the subjects were our own citizens rather than the colored citizens of some other country. Section 104(f) of the Foreign Assistance Act forbids "any financial incentive to any person to undergo sterilization." But U. S. A.I.D. gives money to Bangladesh for population activities, and Bangladesh has made millions of dollars in payments to men who agree to be sterilized, according to William M. O'Reilly, who worked for AID and spent three months in Bangladesh which included visits to U. S. funded clinics. The illegal payments to Bangladesh are disguised in two ways. First, the term "incentive" is replaced in official communications with "compensation". Second, with the aid of dishonest accounting the funds for the incentives are labeled as coming from the UNFPA and the World Bank, leaving the U. S. to pay for non-prohibited family-planning activities. But this is mere slight-of-hand, since all the money goes into and comes out of the same pool of funds. Of the $68 million budget for Bangladesh's population control program in 1984, $27 million came directly from AID, $25 million came from the World Bank, and $6 million from UNFPA. Furthermore, both the World Bank and the UNFPA are heavily supported by the U. S., so their activities must be seen as extensions of U. S. actions. Clearly, the U. S. policy is to reduce Bangladeshi births by hook or crook -- a telling phrase in this case. The Chinese program -- in which anthropologist Stephen Mosher and a series in The Washington Post documented that China has forcibly aborted women even seven months pregnant -- is propelled by funds and doctrine from the United States by way of the United Nations Fund for Population Activities. UNFPA asks us to believe that the dollars it gets from the U.S. are not the same dollars that the UNFPA gives to Chinese programs. Nonsense. Money is fungible. To say otherwise is rhetorical slight-of- hand. Now the main target is Africa. For example, with respect to the Ivory Coast: AID informed the comptroller general that it planned to assign a full-time "population officer" to Abidjan in order to "help create awareness of the impact of population growth and foster greater private and government involvement in supplying family planning services." Translated from bureaucratese, AID intends to tell the Africans that they had better get cracking or else. And in many countries we have made our other development assistance contingent on their efforts to reduce population growth, by requiring a "development project population impact statement" before funding. In other words, if you want our help, you've got to have fewer children. A key instrument of AID policy in the 1980's is a project called RAPID. In an AID consultant's words, "At the bottom line, RAPID seeks to influence public policy in countries where the U. S. provides significant assistance." RAPID provides to African countries computers and a computer program which purports to prove that fewer children being born will benefit African economies. In the words of the AID report, RAPID is "designed to create a sensitivity to the adverse consequences of rapid population growth among political leaders responsible for setting national agendas and creating public policies." AID officials recognize that population control is a sensitive issue in Africa, and sentiment for large families is very strong. Therefore, AID has been very careful not to repeat past public-relations blunders made in other countries. Despite AID's careful language chosen to avoid arousing hostility, however, "Some wonder whether you are just trying to get them worried," according to one African involved in the project. He says that RAPID "clashes with traditional African norms of large family, even among educated and affluent classes." But African university professors and government officials are induced to accept and promote RAPID with the promise of free computers and software. Why is the United States promoting population control abroad? There are three main reasons: 1) humanitarian concern, 2) belief that lower birth rates in other countries are in the economic and political self-interest of the U. S., and 3) racism. It is difficult to determine which motive is operating in any particular instance, partly because racism is taboo nowadays and must operate in other guises. As the official Commission on the Organization of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy, established by Public Law 92-352, said in 1975 about the motives of the "constituency supporting American [population] activies:" "this view [that "nonwhite populations ...represent a threat... and..."are less desirable"], for obvious reasons, is never publicly expressed, and this is difficult to capture empirically". Evidence abounds that supposed self-interest fuels population program. The just-mentioned Commission opened its section on population with "Excessive rates of population growth in underdeveloped countries aggravate conditions that frustrate the achievement of American foreign policy objectives." Later on it said, "the persistence of high population growth rates in under-developed countriews represents an adverse condition for American foreign policy interests." Reimert Ravenholt, the first and long-time director of AID's population activities, justified population control as "needed to maintain the normal operation of U.S. commercial interests around the world," according to a newspaper interview. "The self- interest thing is a compelling element," he said. Ravenholt is a physician, not an economist, and his statement is arrant economic nonsense. But it does reveal an underlying element of official thinking. U.S. policy clearly is not wholly selfless. Though the racist motivation sometimes is difficult to discern, it is certainly part of the picture. The same official Commission put it this way: "Rapid population growth occurs in nonwhite societies, and its continuation represents a threat to values inherent in western civilization as we know it. Nonwhite populations are less desirable because they are less capable and less productive..." It attributed this motive to "key members of the Congress responsible for foreign aid authorizations and appropriations, and some of the private citizens who have been associated with activities to curb rapid population growth". We can also learn about mixed motives from domestic experience with birth-control programs. The date of opening state-supported birth-control clinics was closely related to the concentrations of poor black people in various states. As of 1965, 79 percent of the state-supported clinics in the U.S. were in the ten states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, which have only 19 percent of the country's population. Analysis that allows for per capita income shows that the proportion of blacks in a local population is closely related to the density of family-planning clinics. Can one be surprised that many white people in the U. S. want there to be fewer black people in the world? In sad truth, it is no more surprising than Hindus in India and Christians in Lebanon fearing a high Moslem birth rate, blacks in Uganda tossing out Indians, and so on throughout the world. But in this age when prejudice is not publicly acceptable, racist acts are justified on the basis of supposed economic, political, sociological and environmental considerations. South Africa campaigns for its blacks to reduce their fertility because -- yes, they really say it -- South Africa is so short of water that it cannot support additional people. If you suggest that there may be a smidgin of racism in that policy, South African officials seem as offended as do AID officials if you suggest that racism may be involved in U.S. population policies. Writing about the politics of population control, Thomas Littlewood sagely noted that "humanitarian and bigot can find room under the same tent." But even "humanitarian" population- control efforts are misplaced because they are based on a faulty assumption. The population establishment justifies its activities with the proposition that slower population growth leads to faster economic growth. But since 1967 there has been solid statistical evidence of the absence of such a connection. A large body of concurring studies, the earliest by Simon Kuznets who won a Nobel prize and was the greatest-ever statistician of economic-demographic history, has been entirely ignored by the population controllers. The situation reminds one of the tobacco industry pretending for so long that there was no evidence on the health effects of smoking. This is the first time I have written this sort of "J'accuse" publicly. When I have made these accusations privately, friends and non-friends have said, "Simon, you can afford to say these things because you don't depend upon research grants and you don't have to worry about the effect upon graduate students or upon worthy research of losing the grants." That is true, and it will take a better moral magician than I am to explain why their position is unsatisfactory, as I intuitively believe it is. They also said, "Simon, you have no respectable reputation to lose, and therefore you don't have to pay the price of saying these things publicly." True again. By not seeming neutral, and by criticizing such organizations as AID and Planned Parenthood and the World Bank for urging a doctrine that is not founded in fact I have managed to stay unencumbered of position and honor. And I suppose that such "freedom" can be considered to be a blessing. So I was embarrassed into silence. But I no longer will refrain from accusing those people, though I recoil from putting labels on the failures of character of which I accuse them. So -- will any of you, you eminent population establishmentarians publicly denounce the population control activities of the Chinese now, of the Indians a decade or so ago, of the Americans who keep the fringes of our garments clean by only urging and applauding and providing the money for such activities in various continents? Will you say publicly that the doctrines on which these activities are based and justified are scientifically unfounded? And you need not fear so much for your careers, you honor-laden academics. A few have done the right thing and lived to tell the tale -- for example, Samuel Preston of the University of Pennsylvania, though his institution seems to have lost a Mellon Foundation grant on account of his lead authorship of the NAS report. And Nobelist Theodore Schultz, who had been a member of the United Nations committee that took the action, resigned and publicly denounced the U. N. for its procedure as well as its choices when it chose eminences in China and India to receive the first UN honors for "family planning" programs. (However, the eminent economist Colin Clark may have lost the Nobel prize by carrying the flag for this position for many years.) Only the three monkeys could continue to be unaware that skin color and intended (but misplaced) national self-interest are at the root of U. S. "family-planning" activities abroad, along with misplaced humanitarian impulses. No one should be surprised if U. S. zeal comes back to haunt us in the future, just as the sterilization issue brought down Indira Ghandi's government. Unless you speak out, these disasters will be upon your heads. page 1/article9 killers/December 23, 1990 Elihu Bergman, "Organizing the U. S. Government Response to Global Population Growth: A Persepctive on Interests, Capabilities and Structures", in the report of the Commission..., June 1975 GPO L. K. Jha, "Indo-US Relations: Changing Perspectives", Darshan, Vol. 5, March, 1988, pp. 1-4. Donald P. Warwick, "The Indonesian Family Planning Program: Government Influence and Client Choice", Population and Development Review, 12, September, 1986, pp. 453-490. My question then is before us: Why do such agencies as the State Department's AID and the U.N.'s Fund for Population Activities continue to urge the old view, and why do countries such as China implement such policies? After twenty years of ... תת Ironically, that report appeared in the same newspaper as the report about Fang Lizhi being turned away from dinner with President Bush and others in Beijing. There was much hue-and-cry about Mr. Feng being prevented from attending the banquet of state. There has been no hue-and-cry about the tens of millions of people the Chinese prevent from joining the "banquet of life" with the one-child policy. Nor did the April 16 The New York Times Magazine devoted to "Human Rights in China" mention page 2/article9 killers/December 23, 1990