HISTORY OF INDIAN POPULATION CONTROL - reported by Dr. Brian Clowes, October 2008

India was the first developing nation to impose an active population policy on its people. The program began in December 1952, just a few months after the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) was formally established in Bombay.  India's first Five Year Plan set out to stabilize the country's population at "a level consistent with the requirements of the national economy," a fuzzy objective tailor-made for manipulation by aggressive population controllers.

India soon became a prime example of how massive human rights violations are always integral parts of any population control program.

Sanjay Gandhi initiated a forced sterilization program in the mid-1970s.  Sterilization teams conducted dragnets, rounding up villagers and performing the operations on them against their wills.  Many villagers slept in fields at night to avoid being forcibly neutered.  They also avoided public markets since those were favorite targets of the roving sterilization teams, which rounded up everyone, regardless of how many children they had.  In a single year, the Indian government performed 8.2 million sterilizations, and thousands died because the operations were often done in assembly-line conditions in unsterilized environments, such as tents.  Police fired into crowds protesting the mandatory sterilizations and killed dozens of people.

India legalized abortion in 1971, and more than 11 million abortions are committed in the country each year, a rate two and a half times higher than in the United States.  Pro-life OB-GYNs who refuse to do abortions are occasionally murdered by boyfriends and families who do not want to support a child.  The National Family Health Survey motto is "We Are Two and We Have Two."  In certain states, such as Kerala, there is a 10,000 rupee fine ($200) for a third child.

THE WAR ON BABY GIRLS

A practice called "female feticide" kills more than half a million preborn girls a year in India simply because they are female.  India is a male-dominated society, and, although it is illegal, parents still pay dowries when they marry off their girl children.  This is an especially strong impetus for poor parents to abort their preborn girls, and UNICEF estimates that more than 20 million girls have been aborted or killed shortly after birth in the past 35 years.  Money-grubbing doctors and nurses with portable ultrasound machines advertise with the slogan "pay 600 rupees now, save 50,000 rupees later."

The normal sex ratio at birth is 105 girls for every 100 boys in most of the world; in India it is only 93 girls for every 100 boys.  As gynecologist Punit Bedi says, "All kinds of famines, epidemics, and wars are nothing compared to this.  In some parts of India, one in every five girls is being eliminated at the fetal stage.  It is a genocidal situation."

To show how hard the people's hearts have become, newborn baby girls are usually killed by forcing them to inhale coarse rice grains, after which they suffer painful suffocation.  In other cases, husbands plant a poisonous madar plant upon learning that their wives are pregnant.  By the time the wife delivers, the plant will be ready to kill the baby if it is a girl.  One 26--year-old woman told India Today, "If I and my husband have the right to have a child, we also have the right to kill it if it happens to be a daughter and we decide we cannot afford it.  Outsiders and the Government have no right to poke their noses into this."

India banned gender-selection abortions in 1994, but abortionists, as they do everywhere, ignore laws they don't like in pursuit of cash and are almost never prosecuted.  The only doctor convicted over the past four years of performing sex-selective abortions was fined ten dollars.

Through all of this, as always, there is not a peep from the feminist groups who claim to stand for "women's rights."

TEACHING THE TRUTH

After Dr. Angela Lanfranchi and I had given our talks at the ASPAC (Asia-Pacific Conference) in Goa, we traveled to Bangladesh for a whirlwind speaking tour consisting of a dozen talks in four days.  We were met by Sister Mary Annunciata, RGS, who has been Secretary of Respect for Life India for 20 years.  She is a great pro-life champion struggling against almost impossible odds.  Sister Annunciata has attended five of HLI's ASPACs and is a dynamo of energy at the tender age of 75. She has been the mother superior of three convents, the principal of five different schools, and a youth counselor for more than 20 years.  The homosexuals and pro-aborts absolutely despise her with unholy passion for preaching chastity and fidelity.

During our time in the beautiful city of Bangalore, we spoke to a wide variety of over 1,000 people, including seminarians, doctors, law students, nurses, high schoolers, and Catholic social workers.

We primarily talked about the international abortion situation, the abortion-breast cancer link, the failure of condoms to stem the spread of HIV/AIDS, population control, and homosexuality.  We had long question and answer sessions at the end of each talk, and we provided information that most people had obviously never heard before.  For example, I frequently pointed out that the population density of India is significantly less than the population densities of either New Jersey or Rhode Island -- but when was the last time you ever heard a population controller gripe about there being too many people in New Jersey or Rhode Island?  I always went back to NSSM-200, the "Kissinger Report" of 1974, which established official United States population policy and states that the USA has to hold down the populations of developing countries in order to obtain better access to their natural resources.

CONFRONTING ABORTION EXTREMISM

Of all of these talks, one really stood out.  I spoke to about 120 law students at Christ Junior College about international abortion law and how more than 100 nations have legalized abortion-none with the consent of the people.  Then I opened the discussion up for questions.

Never in more than 20 years of Q&A sessions have I encountered such industrial-strength ignorance and inflexible thinking.  As most people tend to do, the law students focused solely on the one-half of one percent of abortions that are true "hard cases"-life of the mother, rape and incest, and birth defects (eugenics).  These students were different from any I have ever talked to before.  They defended pro-abortionism fanatically-even claiming that they would give their lives for it!

One student asserted that abortion should not be limited because this interferes with a person's "freedom to choose."  I asked him to name me one single law that does not limit "freedom of choice" in some way.  Laws limit my "freedom of choice" by telling me that I can't drive like a bloody maniac on the roads.  They tell me that I cannot sell illegal drugs.  There are even signs painted on the walls all over Bangalore that forbid public urination.  Do these laws limit my "freedom of choice?"  Of course they do, because they support the public good!  I told him that he was in the wrong line of work if he wants unlimited "freedom of choice," because without laws, who needs lawyers?

The silliness only got worse after that.  One young female student said that there was a "stigma" associated with being the child of rape, so I asked the class if they would rather be born with a stigma or die.  Most of them answered that they would rather die!  What a cowardly attitude!  What about homosexuals, who suffer stigma in India?  Should they all just kill themselves?  Nobody said a word in reply.

Of course, there was the popular argument that we must always keep the "public sphere" and the "private sphere" strictly separated.  I asked why, and the students lapsed into baffled silence.  I then explained why this is simply an illogical and impractical notion.  The example I gave angered them greatly-that promiscuous homosexuals lose more time off their lifespans than a person who is morbidly obese and abuses alcohol, tobacco, and illegal drugs.  Who pays for the expensive treatment these people need over the last several years of their lives?  Why, the public, of course.  I told the students that unhealthy private behavior always impacts the public sphere, but I could tell from their shaking heads that they refused to even think about what I said.

The pro-abortionists would be delighted with this crop of future lawyers.  If this is typical of the quality of "thinking" among students in Indian law colleges today, I cringe when thinking what the state of jurisprudence will be in the nation 30 or 40 years from now.

I didn't expect to get any positive comments after this Q&A session, but one young man wearing a taqiyah smiled and gave me a thumbs-up sign.

COMMITMENT TO LIFE

Sister Annunciata certainly kept Dr. Angela and me busy!  Our last talk was just an hour before we left for the airport, and we returned to the United States with heavy hearts, knowing that the population controllers have a very good friend and incomparable "sugar daddy" in President Barack Obama.  Once again, the United States will lead the way in funding coercive and destructive population control programs all over the world and, once again, authentic economic development will take a distant back seat to programs that will do little more than make large poor families into small poor families.

But, whatever atrocities the population controllers commit in nations like India, Human Life International will be there to expose them to the world.

You have our word on it.