By BRIAN CLOWES
(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For an electronic copy of the updated booklet “Marie Stopes International Exposed,” e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)
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Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger were the primary influences behind the melding of the practice of eugenics and the development of contraceptive technology. These two forces in tandem inevitably evolved into the current population control movement.
Events of the past several decades have proven that population control programs are nothing more or less than eugenics practiced on a worldwide scale under several justifications, including environmentalism and “women’s rights.” Human rights abuses of massive proportions have always been an integral, if perhaps unintended, side effect of such policies.
The overall mission of the organization Marie Stopes International is “playing a central role in shaping international policies on population and reproductive health.” MSI has pursued this objective aggressively, and is now one of the largest population control groups in the world. It concentrates its activities in England and about 40 poor developing nations, deriving its funding in part with abortion money raised in the United Kingdom.
In addition to performing a huge number of abortions in the UK, Marie Stopes International maintains a paid staff of more than 4,000 in about 500 clinics worldwide. According to its web site, MSI also has “thousands of outreach sites that serve rural, hard-to-reach communities.” About 90 percent of MSI’s clinics are located in the developing world, including five in Bolivia, ten in Australia (primarily targeting aboriginals), 24 in South Africa, 25 in Kenya, 48 in Pakistan, and more than 100 in Bangladesh.
MSI’s own publications and statistics show that it is far more concerned with population control and abortion than with maternal health. In 2006, MSI says that it “delivered health services to 4.6 million clients; protected more than 9.86 million couples from unwanted pregnancies and unsafe abortion; provided over 400,000 safe abortions; distributed more than 125 million condoms and 10 million pill cycles; safely delivered over 8,000 babies; [and] launched three new country programs.”
These figures show that MSI is much more concerned with ending lives than helping begin them, with a ratio of 50 babies aborted to each baby delivered. In 2010, it announced that it performed 920,000 surgical and medical abortions in 43 nations the previous year — and this does not count the illegal abortions it commits all over the world.
MSI’s subsidiary Options Consultancy Services (OCS) was founded in 1992 and has operations in Cambodia, Nepal, Pakistan, South Africa, Syria, Turkey, the Caribbean, and India. OCS has announced its intention to set up 76 abortion clinics in Cambodia.
MSI’s Founding
Marie Stopes International was founded by Tim and Jean Black, wealthy Britishers craving adventure. Throughout the 1960s, they drove their specially outfitted DKW Jeep on long expeditions all over Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. After these experiences, Tim Black became convinced of the need to hold down the populations of Africans and Asians.
He subsequently received fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the Population Council to study population dynamics at the University of North Carolina. After completing his studies, Black moved his family to Kenya and set up the first U.S.-funded Contraceptive Social Marketing (CSM) Program there.
Upon their return to England in 1974, the Blacks founded the European branch of the Population Services Family Planning Program, which was renamed Marie Stopes International in 1976. Between raving about “the machinations of the Vatican” and offering $500 ten-minute “lunchtime abortions,” which he called “the most important development since the 1967 Abortion Act,” Black led MSI for 30 years, expanding it into one of the most influential population control organizations on Earth.
In 2006, Black turned over the reins to Dana Hovig, who led Marie Stopes International until 2012, raking in $1.9 million in salary and bonuses during his tenure. Then Hovig moved on to even lusher pastures, leaving MSI to join the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as director of Integrated Delivery in August 2013. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Gates Foundation began funding MSI in 2012, to the tune of a whopping $46.2 million that year.
Marie Stopes International raises tens of millions of dollars in the United States every year. MSI-US, based in Washington, D.C., exists only to gather this money and funnel it directly to MSI-UK in London; during the time period 2007-2011, it disposed of 100 percent of its income in this manner.
In turn, MSI-US is basically a subsidiary of the Buffett Foundation, which provided 90 percent of its 2007-2011 income of $187.4 million. Since MSI-UK’s income during the same period was $883.4 million, this means that about one-fifth of MSI-UK’s worldwide operations are directly funded by the Buffett Foundation.
Like many other well-funded population control organizations, Marie Stopes International considers its own objectives to be supreme, and therefore not to be limited in any way by the laws of its host nations. Its brand of forthright imperialism ignores local ordinances, abuses women, and arrogantly tramples on local customs and beliefs.
Paul Cornellisson, Marie Stopes program director for South Africa, publicly demonstrated MSI’s contempt for the law when he boasted that “we do illegal abortions all over the world” at the October 2007 Global Safe Abortion Conference in London. The primary theme of this conference was the danger posed by illegal and clandestine abortions, which is odd, since MSI does untold thousands of illegal and clandestine abortions annually itself.
Cornellisson was certainly not exaggerating when he claimed that MSI simply ignores laws all over the world.
MSI’s Widespread
Human Rights Abuses
For example, MSI coerced HIV+ Kenyan women into being sterilized, threatening to withdraw their lifesaving antiretroviral drugs or food for their children if they did not consent. MSI-Kenya also admitted to doing many illegal abortions.
Cyprian Awiti, program director of Marie Stopes Kenya (MSK), said: “We do abortions, but we don’t like to talk about it. We offer it, but it is not legal [here in Kenya].” As in other nations, MSI uses manual vacuum aspirators (MVAs) to “complete illegal abortions,” but instead performs them under the cover name of “menstrual regulation,” or ME. MSI also committed hundreds of illegal abortions in Zambia in 2012 before being shut down by the government.
MSI operated at least six large abortion clinics in Sri Lanka, where the procedure is prohibited except to save the mother’s life. A police investigation found that MSI charged exorbitant fees for abortions in squalid mills — exactly the conditions that MSI pretends to abhor in its advocacy for “safe abortion.”
In 2005, pro-life activists in Tanzania investigated the Marie Stopes clinics in the country and found internal documents admitting that MSI performs thousands of illegal abortions annually there. Pro-life women pretending to seek abortions for convenience reasons at four MSI clinics were accepted for “treatment” every time they applied.
According to recorded testimony provided by dozens of women, the MSI center in Tororo, Uganda, advertised shots for malaria prevention — but gave women Depo-Provera shots instead. MSI gives women injectable and insertable methods of birth control for free, but without the slightest trace of informed consent.
When women began to suffer severe side effects and returned to MSI for help, staffers told them that they would have to pay consultation and treatment fees running into hundreds of dollars. This is usually more than a year’s earnings for a poor country family. MSI also does many surgical abortions in Uganda; in fact, abortion is known as the “Marie Stopes procedure” in that nation.
Even though South Africa has one of the loosest abortion laws on earth, MSI refused to get its abortion clinics licensed by the government, claiming that it was exempt from even the lax standards imposed by the government. The director of a Marie Stopes clinic in Tamatave, Madagascar, admitted that the organization does many illegal abortions there. Dr. Anicet Andrianandrasana said: “If a woman comes in here with post-abortion problems, looking for post-abortion care, for a termination, I send her to Marie Stopes.”
In addition to operating family planning clinics as a part of China’s forced abortion and contraception program, MSI hosted and treated as an honored guest Li Bin, China’s top family planning official, in May 2010. Li, overseer of China’s brutal one-child program, gave a talk at MSI’s London headquarters.
MSI not only hosts Chinese “family planners,” it operates a number of abortion clinics in China and plans on opening many more. These include the You&Me Centre in Qingdao, opened in 2003, an abortion clinic in Nanjing, opened in 2005, and one in Nanning, the capital city of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, opened in 2006.
Marie Stopes International has elevated abortion to almost the status of a sacrament, even holding it to be more important than the health of the women it claims to care about so much. When MSI was denied United States funding under the Mexico City Policy, it shut down its “health centers” in the poorest areas of Ethiopia and Kenya because it refused to commit to only providing non-abortion services to the women in those nations.
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Next article: “Profile: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.”
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