Steve Mosher: On 'Population Control'

For many years we have been forcing population control programs on others that we would not wish for ourselves.We have poured billions of dollars into anti-people organizations.

FRONT ROYAL, VA (Population Research Institute) - "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," is a fundamental moral dictum of Western civilization.

But even Confucius in far Cathay had his "silver rule," the inverse of our "golden" one. "That which you do not want," his axiom went, "do not force on others."

For many years we have been forcing population control programs on others that we would not wish for ourselves.

We have poured billions of dollars into anti-people organizations like the UNFPA and IPPF. We have bludgeoned foreign governments, on pain of withholding development aid, into intervening in the fertility of their peoples.

And we have trained, at Johns Hopkins and other universities, as well as in-country programs, tens of thousands of doctors, nurses, and ordinary people in various abortion, sterilization and contraception techniques.

Now some of these medical workers, whom we trained to assault their own women are, in a strange turnabout, assaulting ours instead. They are emigrating to the U.S. and other developed countries, where they practice what we preached to them, namely, population control.

I don't mean to suggest that this is happening in any organized way. One can imagine the outcry in the U.S. if the South Korean or Mexican government funded a population control program within our borders.

No, it is we who attempted to control their population, not the reverse; it is our efforts to control natality overseas has born bitter fruit at home, as foreign doctors, trained in population control matters by USAID and is surrogates, open abortion clinics here in the United States.

Consider the case of abortion practitioner Jae-Hak Choe. This Korean-American abortionist for years operated an abortion mill in New York City called, bluntly, Abortion Services. As a result of prayer vigils held by the Helper's of God's Precious Infants, the facility was recently closed.

But the question remains: Would Choe, who was trained in Korea, have gone into the abortion business at all had his country, under pressure from the U.S., not embarked upon a full-blooded population control program in the 1960s? Would he have picked this "specialty" upon arriving on our shores had his own country not legalized abortion to control what it was told by U.S. experts was its "overpopulation problem."

Hamid Hussain Sheikh is another example.Sheikh, who is originally from Pakistan, emigrated to the U.S. and set up an abortion facility in Lexington, Kentucky. Sheikh recently had his medical license suspended and his abortion mill closed after the state's medical board alleged fraud, filthy conditions, and illegal abortions.

Here, too, we may have created a monster. The Pakistani Ministry of Health is virtually run by the UN Population Fund (which we no longer fund but many developed countries do). As far as the allegations of illegal abortions and filthy conditions are concerned this, too, may be a legacy of population control programs.

For years, USAID-funded international agencies have operated in operated in countries in flagrant disregard of local laws protecting women and life, and often undertook sterilization and Norplant-insertion campaigns where even elementary hygiene was neglected. Now these practices, too, have come back to haunt us.

This is not to say that there are not many good physicians in the thousands who are emigrating to the U.S. There are, and they provide vital medical care to millions of Americans. But, at the same time, there is little doubt that foreign-trained doctors are overrepresented in the abortuaries of this country.

There is, perhaps, a kind of tragic justice in this circle of viciousness. After all, they are only doing to us what we have first done to them.

If the U.S. Congress will not embrace the golden rule, and end such anti-life programs altogether, perhaps it will consider adopting the silver. Let us not continue to do unto others what we will not have them do unto us.

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Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute and the author of the newly published, Population Control: Real Costs and Illusory Benefits.

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