VATICAN BLUNDERS TRAGICALLY RE CAIRO POPULATION CONFERENCE The Roman Catholic church's reaction to the Cairo population conference is a monumental political blunder. The headlines say "At the U. N., Vatican vs. Birth Control". The church is allowing the opponents of true reproductive freedom to steal the issue of personal liberty and thereby look like the good people. By so doing, the Catholic Church is defeating its own larger - and admirable - goals. Intersecting the Church's blunder has been a new development in the population-control wars. The feminists have decided that while the Pope is trying to force them to have children they don't want, the U. N. initiatives are another sort of conspiracy plot by white males to control them. So the warm-up period for the Cairo conference has become a free-for-all. As always, however, the bureaucracy will get its way - which in this case is population control. The central theme of the Cairo conference is fewer births. This is crystal clear in the "Objectives" in the "draft final document" (written, of course, long before the conference even begins). "To achieve and maintain a harmonious balance between population and resources...". The "harmony" will be achieved by governments "curbing unsustainable population growth" along with "reducing excessive resource consumption". This aim, euphemistically called "population stabilization" cloaked under lots of verbiage about "family planning", is affirmed by Timothy Wirth, the State Department's point man. He bluntly talks about "population control". And Bill Clinton has explicitly backed this goal. Sugarcoat the matter as the U.N. functionaries try to do, attaining this goal means government policies that will propagandize, bribe, and coerce people to have fewer children than they would otherwise choose to have. The world's leading example of population control is China. Its official "family planning" one-child policy is pure coercion. It includes forcing IUDs into the wombs of 100 million Chinese women against their wills; mandatory X-rays every three months to ensure that the IUDs have not been removed, causing who-knows- what genetic damage; coercion to abort if women get pregnant anyway; and economical punishment if couples evade the abortionist. Aside from political mass killings, and the government-produced famines in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and in China in 1959-1961, the denial to perhaps 100 million Chinese couples of a second (or subsequent) child is the most horrible violation of human life. perpetrated by a government on its own citizens. The population establishment that runs the Cairo show applauds the coercive Chinese programs. The population-control advocates are forever saying that, Yes, there was coercion in the past, but the abuses were local, unauthorized, and no longer occur. Once again this is revealed as a lie by the recent Chinese law to prevent the "floating population" from having children. [The population activists also favor the Indian program of money incentives for sterilization, though its gross abuses forced Prime Minister Indira Ghandi out of office. And the activists have used their influence with the State Department to fund population-control programs in Africa with money of our aid programs, and bribe African governments into cooperating.] Now comes the Pope to get in a well-publicized argument with Bill Clinton about abortion and contraception. Non-Catholics - and even some Catholics such as Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice - interpret the Pope's statements as akin to coercion on Catholics to have more children than they would like to have. Kissling even nastily charges that the Church's interest is pecuniary. "[T]his is about money", she says. "The way church officials see it, the greater the percentage of foreign aid budgets that is allocated to family planning, the less money there will be" for the Church's social activities. Jane Fonda, who is - believe it or not - the U.S. "special good will ambassador" to the United Nations Population Fund, has decided that the Church is the bogeyman in the matter. Black headlines in the New York Daily News say "Good-will gal Jane vs. Catholics. Rips Church on Population". And Mother Jones writes that "The Vatican's dark marriage to Islam has kept birth control off the international agenda. Meanwhile, the population bomb is ticking". This contretemps has two tragic effects. First, the attack on the Pope deflects attention away from the real coercers - the Chinese, the Indonesians, formerly the Indians, and the United Nations Fund for Population Activities. which is putting on the Cairo conference. The second tragic effect is that the Pope's message against governmental coercion, and in favor of human life, is lost entirely. Instead of being heard as the defender of the most basic human values, he is seen as the bogeyman of the Cairo conference. There is a terrible irony here. The Catholic church is almost the only institution that celebrates human life as such, and asserts that another human being enabled to enjoy life is a good in itself. The Church does not urge people to have more children than a couple want and can afford. It recognizes the very human limitations of a family's resources and energies. It does, however, hope that people will decide to have additional children. And most important, it recognizes that one family having more children does not make another family poorer in the world's goods. The Vatican's problem is that no matter what it says about other matters, a few words about abortion and contraception get all the attention. "Catholic Bishops in U. S. Decry U. N. Birth Plan...Contraception, Abortion Stance Called 'Morally Unacceptable'" was the headline in the Washington Post, though the bishops had much to say about other aspects of the population conference. In the United States' position paper at the 1984 Mexico City population conference, there were just a few sentences on abortion, but for all practical purposes they were the only sentences that mattered. This is what the Vatican is up against. The Church is up against a deep-rooted anti-Catholicism which seems to distort the thinking of even the clearest-minded people, and which seems to be triggered by the issue of population. For example, Paul Bairoch is one of the world's great historians, a meticulous scholar who documents his work voluminously. But in his book Economics and World History, published by the very correct University of Chicago Press, we find him writing that "In the 1950s and 1960s a very paradoxical informal alliance was formed between the Catholic Church and the Marxists" with respect to population control. Documentation for this inflammatory statement? None. The Church's great message about the value of human life is getting lost amidst these quarrels and recriminations about abortion and contraception. The Pope also is the only participant in these proceedings who is not wrong about the economics of population growth and economic development. The Vatican should not have mentioned abortion and constraception. It should have stuck to the subject of the conference - population control. The Pope could simply have said that human life is the ultimate value, and interfering with reproductive liberty is a crime. But the Church, like its opponents, is drawn to the abortion wars like a moth to a flame. The supposed rationale for "population stabilization" is that lower population growth brings about faster economic growth. But the shocking fact is that this proposition - the entire intellectual basis for population control, and the mainstream wisdom for decades - now has been proven false. In order to project this message at Cairo, the UNFPA tactic has carefully prevented the mainstream population economists - whose subject of study this is - from being heard in the preparations for the conference. In the 1980s there was a U-turn in the consensus of thinking of population economists about the effects of more people. In 1986, the National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences almost completely reversed its "official" view away from the earlier worried view expressed in 1971. It noted the absence of any statistical evidence of a negative connection between population increase and economic growth. And it said that "The scarcity of exhaustible resources is at most a minor restraint on economic growth". This shift by the scientific consensus of experts on the subject has gone unacknowledged by the press, the anti-natalist environmental organizations, and the agencies that foster population control abroad. And though the Reagan administration built this body of scientific fact into its 1984 stand at the World Population Conference in Mexico City, the Bush administration did nothing to carry it into policy, and the Clinton administration turns a blind eye to these scientific findings. So what will we get in Cairo? Lots of acrimonious feminist rhetoric against the Catholic church and white males, providing an enjoyable occasion for the women and fine sound bites for the media. Heartburn for the Vatican, and maybe a lesson for the future. And quiet success for the population controllers and UNFPA bureaucrats who want to force women in poor countries to have fewer children than they want to bear, with no benefit to the economies and environments they claim to care about. Julian L. Simon teaches business administration at the University of Maryland and studies the economics of population, is the author of The Ultimate Resource, second edition forthcoming in 1995. page 1 /article4 popcairo/August 19, 1994 "At the U. N., Vatican vs. Birth Control". , WPost, April 16, 94, B7 NY Daily News, Sept 21, 93, Mother Jones, Mar/Apr 1993, pp 20-23, 69-73, from Don Bishop's File Notes on Populaton and Human Rights, 9/19/93, p. 15-3. "Catholic Bishops in U. S. Decry U. N. Birth Plan... Contracep- tion, Abortiln Stance Called 'Morally Unacceptable'" was the headline in the Washington Post", April 16, 94, p. B7. page 2 /article4 popcairo/August 19, 1994