Population Control’s Victims Demand Justice
By CHRISTOPHER MANION
“The first time nurses visited Gloria Basilio,” The Los Angeles Times reported in October, “she told them she wasn’t interested in sterilization surgery. She already had three children but wanted more.
“The nurses kept returning to her home in the remote Peruvian countryside. They told her the president himself had ordered the procedure for women with large families — women who they said ‘reproduced like rabbits’.”
(Before we continue, it comes to mind: “Like rabbits….” Doesn’t that phrase sound familiar?)
Back to the L.A. Times:
“With her husband away, Basilio finally conceded.
“She changed her mind in the operating room the next day, but nurses tied her arms and legs to a bed and blindfolded her.
“Basilio is one of untold thousands of women — mostly poor, rural, and indigenous — who were sterilized against their will under a family planning program that operated from 1996 to 2000 under the government of then-President Alberto Fujimori.”
Thus far the L.A. Times. While we commend the pro-abortion, pro-population control Times for covering the story at all, we should consider what the Times doesn’t tell us. To begin, the reader should take note of the dates of the Peruvian program — 1995-1999. Steve Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, was on the ground in Peru repeatedly during those years. Mosher was more than familiar with such programs — he’d already uncovered another population control atrocity as a researcher in the early 1980s. A Stanford University anthropologist at the time, he revealed to the world the details of the horrific forced-abortion program known as the “One Child Policy” that China had inaugurated in 1979.
Mosher’s revelations on China were not music to the ears of America’s ardent population planners. They supported China’s gruesome program in the 1980s and they supported Peru’s in the 1990s. “What the L.A. Times won’t mention,” Mosher tells The Wanderer, “is that the Peru program began only after Global Warming Activist (and sitting vice-president) Al Gore visited Peru and strong-armed its president, Alberto Fujimori. The Times also somehow forgets to mention the vital role played by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). Or that the fund served as the ‘technical secretary’ for the Peruvian sterilization campaign. Or that the UNFPA brought in its expert advisers from — of all places — China!”
Control, Coercion,
And Collusion
Mosher has dug deeply into the Peru atrocity ever since. In 2008, he devoted a chapter to Peru’s program in his book, Population Control — Real Costs, Illusory Benefits. The Peruvian program, he explains, was all too typical. It relied on bribes, browbeating, propaganda, and coercion to force women to be sterilized.
Mosher reports how “Dr. Hector Chavez Chuchon, president of the regional medical federation of Ayacucho, testified before the U.S. Congress that the central government was imposing sterilization quotas on medical workers throughout Peru. He produced Ministry of Health documents stating that each medical worker had to bring in (captar) two women for sterilization each month or risk losing their jobs. . . . Stories appeared in major Peruvian dailies like El Comercio and La Republica about ‘health promoters’ who were rewarded with special prizes for bringing in more than their quota of women for sterilization.”
And where did Peru find the expertise to conduct such a massive program? “To train Peruvian doctors and officials in how to structure and run a sterilization campaign,” Mosher wrote, “Dr. Eduardo Motta [head of the Peruvian Ministry of Health] brought in Chinese, Indian, and Colombian doctors who had carried out such campaigns in their own countries.”
Behind this all lies a dirty little secret. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) had used taxpayer funding to support Peru’s “family planning” programs for years. Those programs also received bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress, reflecting the broad consensus that had prevailed since the late 1960s, when Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb and the sexual revolution combined to send the country careening on an anti-life, anti-child course that continues to this day.
Were Ehrlich’s predictions correct? No, they were profoundly false. Today the United States is in a demographic winter, importing tens of millions of foreigners to replace the babies that have been aborted or prevented by, yes, “family planning.” But USAID is still in the population control business, and Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden — a Catholic who was once pro-life — now supports abortion up through birth.
In fact, Biden made an official visit to China in 2011, while millions of Chinese babies were being forcibly aborted under the government’s program. “Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family,” he told an audience at Sichuan University.
Well, speaking of “fully understanding,” we can fully understand Mr. Biden’s predicament: His boss Barack Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were the two most rabid pro-abortion senior government officials in America history.
But the fact remains: While Biden has been making some verbal flubs in his current campaign, he was in full possession of his mental faculties in 2011. He knew that he could not actively criticize the murderous Chinese program without causing an uproar among the pro-abortion forces on which the Obama-Biden ticket would depend as a core constituency in the 2012 campaign.
Even Mitt Romney, at the time a candidate for the 2012 GOP nomination, sharply criticized Biden’s remarks about China’s “gruesome and barbaric” program. “Vice President Biden’s acquiescence to such a policy should shock the conscience of every American,” Romney said.
“Instead of condoning the policy, Vice President Biden should have condemned it in the strongest possible terms,” he continued. “There can be no defense of a government that engages in compulsory sterilization and forced abortions in the name of population control.”
Justice? Maybe.
And Apologies?
Thousands of victims of Peru’s sterilization campaign may now finally have their day in court, Mosher wrote last week in The New York Post. “Their criminal complaint filed last year is before a Peruvian tribunal specializing in high-level corruption that will soon decide whether to charge former President Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) and other high-ranking officials with violating their human rights. At stake is justice for the nearly 300,000 women who were given tubal ligations, often in assembly-line fashion.
“The program is a classic case,” he continued, “of how foreign donors and international agencies push governments in the developing world into embarking upon ‘family planning’ programs, which turn out upon closer examination to be top-down, ethically challenged efforts to drive down the birth rate at all costs.”
“In Peru,” he continued, “what was originally sold to the country as an altruistic program aimed at helping poor women was, in fact, a targeted attack on the fertility of the Quechua-speaking women who live in the high Andes. The goal, to put it bluntly, was fewer indigenous children.”
USAID’s taxpayer-funded support of “family planning” is a vital ingredient in virtually every “humanitarian” sector of the foreign aid budget. Over the years — decades, really — the bishops of the United States have routinely lobbied for full funding of these programs, even though the budgets have included tens of millions of taxpayer dollars for abortion during Democrat administrations. In publicly and repeatedly advocating for these programs, officials at both the USCCB and Catholic Relief Services are simply reflecting our shepherds’ preference for funding over principle.
Fortunately for AID and the USCCB, Peru’s human rights tribunal does not have the power to charge foreign entities or individuals for their role in funding or supporting these barbaric programs. But at least some apologies might be in order.