A Paper Presented at the 74th Annual Education Conference

of the Catholic Medical Association

“Building a Culture of Life in a Society that has lost its sense of God: International Forces promoting an anti-natalist ideology

in a Secular Social Order”

by The Most Reverend John C. Nienstedt

October 22, 2005

I. Introduction

Shortly after the death of our late, beloved Pope John Paul II and the election of Pope Benedict XVI, an article appeared in the National Catholic Register that I thought was particularly perceptive and worthy of note.

On the editorial page of that issue, a columnist observed that there was a “profound difference” between the global society that confronted Pope John Paul II in 1978 and that which challenges Pope Benedict XVI today. As I read the analysis, it occurred to me that, without question, the Holy Spirit, acting through the College of Cardinals, has selected two Pontiffs eminently prepared, each in his own respective time, to face the major threats that would seek to undermine the Church’s mission of proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Let us think back to 1978, a year that began with President Gerald Ford in office and ended with the presidency of Jimmy Carter. It was then that the United States returned St. Stephen’s crown to Hungary, that Theodore Bundy killed two coeds at Florida State University, and Aldo Moro was kidnapped by the Red Brigade in Rome. The Dallas Cowboys beat the Denver Broncos 27-10 in the 12th Superbowl, the Montreal Canadians won the Stanly Cup, the New York Yankees beat the Dodgers in the World Series and Pete Rose was the 14th baseball player to get 3,000 hits. Communism dominated half the world and the threat of a nuclear holocaust was an ever present cloud that hung precariously over the world community.[1]

Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was elected Pope in October of that year. He was the first non-Italian elected to hold that office in 100 years. His Polish countrymen soon endorsed his world view which was rooted in the inherent dignity of the human person and they thus joined forces under the inspiration of Solidarinose to overthrow the tyranny of Communism. General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who presided over the demise of Communism in Poland, later said that the fall of the Soviet Union could not have happened without the Pope’s influence.

Now let us fast-forward to the year 2005. The Soviet Union has broken apart and Russia struggles to find its place in global politics. President Bush is in his second term in a post-9/11 society living under the threat of terrorism. The United States and her allies are waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq to spread the cause of democracy. The European Union is struggling to find common ground among its members but steadfastly refuses to acknowledge its past religious heritage. The United Nations, having proved ineffective in stopping the invasion of Iraq, strives to reform its image as a weak and corrupt leader in the cause of world peace. Civil violence in the Sudan, Chechnya and Zimbabwe along with the nuclear threat from Iran and North Korea and the long standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict that impacts daily life in the Middle East – all give rise to a fragile world-order wherein the wealthy nations grow more wealthy and the poor nations become poorer.

Onto that world scene, the Cardinals of the Catholic Church, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, elect a 78 year old theologian, who emerges from the highly secularized society of Germany wherein many of his fellow countrymen have already rejected the religious world view that the new Pope holds. It is said that only 15% of German Catholics regularly practice their faith. Having embraced a Western secular approach, German citizens today, like many of their European counterparts, have moved religious discourse out of the public market place and relegated it to the private sphere where it has little influence on society as a whole.

Commenting on St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians at the Mass celebrated before the recent conclave, Cardinal Ratzinger articulated in eloquent fashion the secular and relativistic challenges confronting our times:

“How many winds of doctrine have we known over the last few decades! How many ideological currents! How many schools of thought! The little ship bearing the thoughts of many Christians has frequently been shaken by these waves, thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertarianism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so on. Every day new sects arrive, and St. Paul’s’ words concerning the deception of man and the cunning that leads into error come true. Having a clear faith, according to the Creed of the Church, is often labeled as fundamentalism. While the relativism, in other words allowing oneself to be ‘small tossed to and fro with every wind of doctrine,’ appears as the only attitude appropriate to modern times, a dictatorship of relativism is being formed, one that recognizes nothing as definitive and that has as its measure only the self and its desires.”

But, the Cardinal went on to say, there is an alternative:

“We, nonetheless, do have another measure: the Son of God, true man. He is the measure of true humanism. An ‘adult’ faith does not follow the ways of fashion and the latest novelties; an adult and mature faith is profoundly rooted in friendship with Christ. . . . We must bring this adult faith to maturity, to this faith we must lead Christ’s flock. And it is this faith – faith alone – that creates unity and is realized in charity. . . . In the measure in which we approach Christ, so truth and charity come together in our lives too.”[2]

During this August World Youth Day held in his native Germany, Pope Benedict XVI offered a further analysis on the current world order: “In vast areas of the world today there is a strange forgetfulness of God. It seems as if everything would be just the same even without him. But at the same time there is a feeling of frustration, a sense of dissatisfaction with everyone and everything.”[3]

II. The “New Paradigm” of International Health Care

This notion of the world’s “strange forgetfulness of God” had already been observed by Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragán, president of the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers in an address to the Vatican sponsored World Day of the Sick on February 10, 2004. In that talk, the Cardinal sounded an alarm about the “New Paradigm” of international health care that was completely closed to the Transcendent. Because of its refusal to acknowledge a horizontal reference point, the subsequent value of human life fails to be given an absolute character of its own.[4]

The Cardinal acknowledged that proponents of the “New Paradigm” do accept some notion of a divinity, but this is only a “poetic and aesthetic god” that each individual makes up for him or herself. This is definitely not the God of the Bible.[5]

A new global ethic seeks to replace all previously known religions with a spirituality that is concerned with the objective global well-being of all human persons within a world order of “sustainable development.”

“By sustainable development is meant a development where the different factors involved (food, health, education, technology, population, environment, etc.) are brought into harmony so as to avoid imbalanced growth and the waste of resources.”[6]

As the Pontifical Council for the Family points out, however, it is the developed countries of the world that determine for other nations what the criteria for “sustainable development” will be. Thus certain rich countries and major international organizations are willing to help developing nations, but on the condition that they accept public programs that systematically control birth rates.[7]

In the New Paradigm, Cardinal Lozano asserts, “sustainable development” becomes the supreme ecological value. He said and I quote,

“It is a spirituality without God, at the secular level. Its ultimate objective is the viability of the present world, and man’s well-being in it.”

“Practically speaking, it is a new secularist religion, a religion without God, or, if one wishes a new god, that would be the earth itself, to which the name Gaia is given. This divinity would have man as a subordinate element.”[8]

The Cardinal went on to say,

“The series of values upheld by the New Paradigm are values subordinated to this diversity, which is translated into the supreme ecological value that it calls sustainable development. And within this sustainable development is the supreme ethical objective of well-being.”[9]

According to the Cardinal, the grave danger of this New Paradigm is its lack of an objective standard for truth. Consensus on what to do or not to do rests on subjective opinions, which in turn gives rise to an ethic or bioethics that has no consistency.

Christianity, on the other hand, offers a True Paradigm, based on an objective and universal ethics. The first principle of this ethics is that human life is created by God. And from this is derived the second principle, that human life is received, not as property, but as something to be cared for.

“The human person,” concluded the Cardinal, “is the synthesis of the universe and is the reason for everything that exists. Present-day biomedical sciences and technologies must be at the service of human life and not vice-versa. They are to construct man, not to destroy man.”[10]

The major forces behind the “New Paradigm” with its secular ethic, said the Cardinal, are the United Nations’ World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). These two institutions have allies in various Non-Governmental Organizations (referred to as NGO’s), which are prominent promoters of an anti-natalist global ideology, among whose number are: the Women’s Environment and Development Organization, Earth Council Green Peace and the International Planned Parenthood Association. The efforts of these organizations have had far reaching effects.[11]

III. The United Nations

As you will recall, 170 out of 191 member governments of the United Nations gathered last month in New York from September 14-16. Much publicity was given to President Bush’s speech on September 14 that addressed concerns of terrorism, the spread of nuclear weapons and curbing the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons. Other media reports focused on the reforms put forward by the Secretary General Kofi Annan and his lack of ability to achieve such reforms in light of the oil-for-food scandal that had recently tainted his administration with charges of corruption.[12]

The official agenda for the gathering, however, which did not gain much media notice, was the evaluation of the Millennial Goals, adopted by 189 World Heads of State in the year 2000 and which propose to end extreme poverty worldwide by the year 2015. The September gathering was meant to evaluate progress made on the goals and to determine how to move forward toward the attainment of those goals.[13]

There are eight millennial goals:

1. To eradicate extreme poverty and hunger;

2. To achieve universal primary education;

3. To promote gender equality and empower women;

4. To reduce child mortality;

5. To improve maternal health;

6. To combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases;

7. To ensure environmental sustainability;

8. To develop a global partnership for development.

The first seven goals concentrate on the specific techniques for eliminating poverty. The eighth goal implies that the accomplishment of those previous goals will be achieved by the investment of wealthy countries in delivering aid, providing debt relief and establishing free trade policies.

One of the underlying concerns behind the Millennial Goals, not explicitly mentioned but never very far from the surface, is the question of overpopulation. In terms of the “New Paradigm” of sustainable development, as described by Cardinal Lozano, overpopulation has a huge impact on the outcome of these goals.

The question of the world’s overpopulation has been a concern for the United Nations since its inception. Two years after its being chartered in 1945, the Population Commission of the Economic and Social Council was established for the following purposes: 1) to gather data concerning populations, 2) to analyze the influence of population policies; and 3) to study the interplay of demographics on social and economic factors.[14] This Commission helped formulate a World Population Plan of Action at its conference in Bucharest in 1974, continued to monitor its progress at the 1984 International Conference on Population in Mexico City, then again to render an update in Cairo at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development and ultimately to review its overall progress at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing.[15]

At first the Population Commission was only involved in the gathering and analyzing demographic statistics, their estimates and projections. By the mid-1960’s, however, its emphasis had shifted to a more aggressive agenda in providing governments with advisory services, as well as training and action programs,[16] including fertility and family planning.

While not the U.N.’s first International Conference on Population and Development (commonly referred to as ICPD),[17] the Cairo Conference in 1994 has been described by most commentators as a watershed moment for the advancement by secular forces to stem population growth in Third World countries, setting measurable goals for the year 2015, which were later incorporated into the Millennial Goals.

At the Cairo Conference, 11,000 registered participants representing some 180 governments and over 1,000 non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) agreed that population issues must be addressed more forcefully if development policies are to succeed.[18] They also agreed that population issues are not just a matter of numbers; that they are first and foremost about people – about human beings and their inherent right to development and to lead a decent life no matter where they happen to be born. But, a much greater emphasis was placed on the concepts of women’s empowerment and gender equality as the primary building blocks for population and development policies.

One begins to appreciate from the language used in the formulation of the Cairo agreement how the issues of empowerment and equality begin to impact on the moral decision-making of the persons who are said to benefit from such policies. The broad results aim at: 1) reduced mortality of infants, 2) broader life choices and opportunities for women, 3) the promotion of women’s rights, and 4) an increased financial investment in reproductive health and family planning. The result of these efforts, in reality, leads to forced, manipulative programs to promote sterilization, contraception, and abortion, all of which are justified under a rationale for achieving peace, economic development and social justice in the world. Nowhere in their official language do you find the United Nations speaking about the negative fallout from these radical anti-natalist policies.

In its Programme of Action, adopted at the end of the Cairo session and listing some 1,170 action items, “sustainable development” is described as those integrating efforts aimed at population control through economic and development strategies for the purpose of alleviating poverty and improving the quality of life for the world’s population.[19] The Programme charges that:

“Development strategies must realistically reflect both the short-, medium- and long-term implications of, and consequences for, population dynamics as well as patterns of production and consumption.”[20]

In this regard, the Programme calls on the developed countries, including the United States, to devote 0.7 percent of their GDP for development assistance. The Programme then lists its three major objectives for this assistance:

(a) To ensure that comprehensive and factual information and a full range of reproductive health care services, including family planning, are accessible, affordable, acceptable and convenient to all users;

(b) To enable and support responsible voluntary decisions about child-bearing and methods of family planning of their choice, as well as other methods of their choice for regulation of fertility which are not against the law and to have the information, education and means to do so;

(c) To meet changing reproductive health needs over the life cycle and to do so in ways sensitive to the diversity of circumstances of local communities.

The final draft of the Programme was challenged by the Holy See with reference to paragraph 8.25 which proposed that:

“In circumstances in which abortion is legal, such abortion should be safe.”

The Holy See objected to that sentence on the basis that abortion could never be properly “legal” since it is a violation of a person’s most basic human right. The Holy See was supported in its objection by the countries of Malta, Guatemala, El Salvador, Peru, Ecuador, Honduras and Afghanistan. The delegate from Guatemala remarked that referring to “safe abortion” “would be like talking about a ‘safe theft’ or a ‘safe robbery.’”[21]

It is only fair to point out that a positive consensus had also been reached by the Cairo Conference with regard to abortion, namely:

1) that abortion should not be promoted as a means of family planning;

2) that legal aspects relating to abortion are a sovereign matter;

3) that priority should be given to the prevention of abortion.

The 1994 ICPD in Cairo was followed up by the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing, China in September 1995. During the drafting of its Platform of Action, the influence of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) took on a decidedly pro-feminist perspective. Commenting on the outcome, Justice Robert H. Bork observes:

“At the Beijing conference, for instance, the word “family” was not to appear in the Platform. Instead, the word “household” was used. The significance of this is to be found in the feminist insistence upon use of the word “gender” [referred to 216 times in the text]. There being five genders [i.e. men, women, lesbian, gay and bisexual], unions or marriages involving any gender or genders are legitimate. These unions are called households. The traditional family is then presented as a household, just one form of living arrangement, not superior to any other. Indeed, since feminists view the family as a system of oppression, and since feminism contains a large lesbian component, the marriages of men and women are often seen as morally inferior to unions involving the other three genders.”[22]

In such a political context, it was also no surprise that the Beijing Conference also pushed for greater expansion of legalized abortion as a legitimate method of family planning.

This past February 2005, the so-called “Beijing +10” conference (i.e. ten years after the Beijing Conference) gathered governmental and non-governmental delegates in New York City to review the implementation of the action items agreed to in Beijing ten years before.

The United States delegation, now pursuing the pro-life position of the Bush administration, created a great deal of controversy by proposing a resolution affirmed that the Beijing documents “do not create an international right to abortion.” The reason behind the move was to draw attention to the pressure that had been placed on member countries since Beijing by courts, legislatures and NGOs to change abortion laws in accord with this supposedly agreed upon international “right.”[23] The amendment failed on the grounds that it was unnecessary. In point of fact, however, in July 1999, the U.N. General Assembly itself adopted proposals to curb the world’s population growth by means of allowing greater “access” to abortion. This proposal was hailed by pro-abortion groups as “a giant advance beyond what was agreed to at the landmark 1994 U.N. population conference in Cairo.”[24]

Since the February meeting of the Beijing +10, pro-life, non-government organizations (NGO’s) were barred by U.N. officials from speaking to or lobbying member states at the preparatory sessions for the Millennium Summit +5 Conference that was just held in September. At the same time, International Planned Parenthood Federation, the National Youth Network for Reproductive Rights, and Family Care International (all abortion proponents) were invited to speak to the participants. It is believed that this change of approach reflects the discomfort on the part of U.N. officials to the interventions of the United States and the Holy See representatives which affirmed the fact that abortion was not sanctioned at the Beijing Conference as an international right.

In late August of this year, the Holy See had to issue a warning that a document entitled, “Religious Declaration on the MDG’s, Women’s Rights and Reproductive Health,” was being circulated prior to the September U.N. meeting for the purpose of broadening the terms, “reproductive health” and “reproductive rights” to include abortion, contraception and other illicit means of family planning.[25] The Holy See raised public awareness of this initiative because it knew that, if adopted, these resolutions would render useless the Church’s efforts to defend the value of human life. Again, the forces behind the “New Paradigm” continue to push hard for their secular agenda.

Speaking to the 60th Session of the U.N. General Assembly on September 16, 2005, the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, raised a question surrounding the ambiguity of U.N. nomenclature, when he commented:

“. . . we cannot offer an ambiguous, reductive or even ideological vision of health. For example, would it not be better to speak clearly of the “health of women and children” instead of using the term “reproductive health”? [Or] could there be a desire to return to the language of a “right to abortion”?[26]

Certainly among his listeners there were many present who prefer ambiguous language in order to mask their desire to promote abortion as a tool in the campaign for “sustainable development.”

Overall, then, when reading the rhetoric employed at the Cairo, Beijing and now the Millennial international conferences, one finds three assumptions underlying their overall message. The first is the relative value afforded the lives of poor people in the world. The second is a presumed link between food production and population. And the third issue redounds on the use of coercion to obtain the desired population results. All three of these assumptions need to be challenged.

I. The Relative Value of Life

The question of population control is inevitably one that overwhelmingly concerns wealthier nations in that it is an agenda item of the “haves” rather than the “have-nots.” While not saying so directly, the question of “too many people” comes to mean “too many poor people for the comfort of the rich.”[27]

First World countries fear that by the year 2010, 80% of the world’s population will live in the Third World. Such a concentration of humanity may well shift the balance of the world’s power and influence, encroaching, if not eventually overwhelming, the developed nations. As one researcher concluded, “demographic imperialism thus arises out of a sense of demographic marginalization.”[28]

The question of population is one that is quite different from asking how many pairs of shoes are too many to have in one’s closet, or how many cars are too many for a city to tolerate. When it comes to the human person, one has to admit that the question of “how many is too many?” implies a value judgment. When the seven Russian Naval officers were trapped last August in a submarine on the floor of the Pacific Ocean, no one stopped to ask the question, “What is the value of their lives?” “Can we afford to rescue them?” The presumption was that their lives had an absolute value, worthy of worldwide technological assistance at whatever cost was required.[29] However, when it comes to the question of global population, the value given to the human life of a poor person becomes seemingly expendable.

Consequently, when governments and non-governmental organizations speak of “population control” they reflect, consciously or not, a non-Christian, even an anti-Christian mentality; a mentality which presumes that human existence is not an absolute value, but rather a quantifiable one. It is one thing to speak about the problems people have, it is quite another to speak about the problem that people are.[30] When one begins to use such language, the slide to a totalitarian way of thinking is not far away.

The Christian holds the conviction that only God has dominion over life and death. Yet, it is precisely this concept of God that the population policy makers seek to avoid, relegating control over the world-wide situation to themselves and their own judgments. The Church, on the other hand, insists that people are more than statistics and that they have fundamental rights because of their inherent dignity. The Church is called to promote and defend human life against all attacks and to reject contraception, sterilization and abortion as solutions to the population problem.[31]

As Pope Paul VI once said, “All population policies and strategies, in the judgment of the Holy See, must be evaluated in light of the sacredness of human life, the dignity of every human being, the inviolability of all human rights, the value of marriage and the need for economic and social justice.”

He went on to say, “Surely each person and couple has a responsibility to the local and world community; but to see all progress as dependent on the decline and population growth betokens of shortness of vision and a failure of nerve. Economic aid for the advancement of people should never be conditioned on a decline in birth rates or in participation in family planning programs.”[32]

Given such a moralistic rationale, it is easy to understand why the Vatican in 1996 suspended its annual donation to UNICEF, citing evidence of the organization’s involvement in abortion and pushing contraceptives on teenagers. A study released in 2004 by the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute cited numerous documents in which UNICEF appears to endorse abortion or has sent funds to a group that markets the RU-486 abortion pill.[33]

II. Linking Food Production to Population

Secondly, it was Thomas Malthus, an Englishman, who was the first to raise the question of population control in 1793. In his research, he directly linked the problem of over-population to that of adequate food production. Malthus estimated that populations would grow at a rate that would outpace food production. Malthus summed up the problem by saying,

“Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increased only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers would shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.”[34]

Malthus’ dire predictions, however, did not come true. Food production easily kept up with population growth and the increasing population brought improved health care, better food production, lower mortality rates, increased economic development and longer life spans instead of the increased poverty and starvation that he predicted. This pattern continues today. Economist Dennis Avery explained in 1975 that, “Food production was more than keeping pace with population growth since the world had, more than doubled world food output in the past thirty years. Food supplies have risen 25% in the populace Third World.[35] Recent data from the United Nations and the U.S. Department of Agriculture demonstrates that world food output continued to match or outstrip population growth every year since 1977.[36]

For example, rice and wheat production in India during the year 1983 was almost 3 ½ times as great as it had been in 1950.[37] That was twice the percentage increase of its population growth during that same period. Yet, despite Malthus’ mistaken calculation, the presumption continues that “sustainable development” directly ties the question of food production to that of world population.

In speaking at the United Nations Population Award gathering in 2004, United Nations Deputy Secretary, Louise Fréchette, reaffirmed that the UN’s policy continues to rest on that fallacy:

“A decade after Cairo, there remains an urgent need to integrate population factors more explicitly into economic and development strategies, in order to speed up the pace of sustainable development and poverty eradication. As the Secretary General has said, ‘Unless questions of population and reproductive health are addressed squarely, the millennium development goals will be much harder – or even impossible – to achieve.’”[38]

A year prior to that, Thoraya Obaid of the U.N. Population Fund in a press release was less subtle:

“We cannot confront the massive challenges of poverty, hunger, disease and environmental destruction unless we address issues of population and reproductive health.”[39]

In contrast to this assertion is the statement made by Dr. Rafael M. Salas, UNFPA director in 1984,

“We have always been able to produce more food than population. The problem is in the distribution of food. There will always be periodic areas of crisis, as is happening now in African, but in global terms, “No.”[40]

The main point here underlines the U.N.’s assumption that the chief way of eradicating poverty in the world and providing development for the world’s poor is by curbing the number of children produced.

A representative for U.S. Women of Color (an American NGO) at the Cairo Conference proposed an alternative plan of action:

“Industrialized countries should reduce poverty by tackling social and economic imbalance, not just by pushing contraceptives. We don’t want to wait until the single, unmet need, for contraceptives has been satisfied before realizing that we have utterly neglected to boost social and economic progress and failed to alleviate poverty.”[41]

Social and economic imbalances, however, are realities that protect the “haves” from the “have nots” in a global society. A greater willingness to curb the excessive consumption of the industrial nations in order to support the well-being of poorer nations is what is required. But at present, there seems little motivation within the secular vision of the First World for doing so.

In his encyclical letter, Mater et Magistra, Pope John XXIII underlined this very point:

“A provident God grants sufficient means to the human race to find a dignified solution to the problems attendant on the transmission of human life . . . besides the resources which God in his goodness and wisdom has implanted in Nature are well nigh inexhaustible and He has at the same time given man the intelligence to discover ways and means of exploiting the resources for his own advantage and his own livelihood. Hence, the real solution of the problem is not to be found in expedience, which offend against the divinely established moral order and which attack human life at its very source, but in a renewed, scientific and technical effort on man’s part to deepen and extend his domain over nature. The progress of science and technology that has already been achieved opens up limitless horizons in this field.”[42]

The U.N. and world governments must not wait for a resolution of the population question before they begin working in partnership to raise the standard of living in poor countries. The U.S.A. spends nearly thirty (30) times the amount of money in producing armaments as it does in tackling the problem of poverty. One can only wonder what might be accomplished if those priorities were inverted.

III. Coercive Influence

Finally, in most U.N. documents concerning “sustainable development,” statements are generally included which oppose coercive tactics in order to achieve population control. Married couples, it is said, should be free to make their own decisions about the number of children they wish to produce.

Nevertheless, for all its lip-service regarding the “voluntary” nature of a couple’s decision to beget children or to choose their own form of family planning methods, the question must be raised as to how free couples really are in the face of the enormous financial outlay to make family planning methods of contraception, sterilization and abortifacients available in Third World countries.

As one commentator points out,

“It has been adequately proven that poor people without economic security are forced to have more children. To force them to have few children or no children, without changing the socio-economic conditions of their life that make it rational for them to have more children is not a politics of choice; it is a politics of coercion. Similarly, to push hazardous contraceptives on Third World women against their will also does not reflect a politics of choice.”[43]

Unfortunately, the amount of monies devoted to family planning services provides heavy pressure on the moral decision-making of those couples. Government aid packages require that all who receive public assistance be given family planning education. Personal statements by recipients indicate that they believe they must practice birth control in order to continue receiving such aid.[44]

In his encyclical letter, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, Pope John Paul II describes the situation clearly,

“On the other hand, it is very alarming to see governments in many countries launching systematic campaigns against birth, contrary not only to the cultural and religious identities of the countries themselves, but also contrary to the nature of true development. It often happens that these campaigns are the result of pressure and financing coming from abroad, and in some cases they are made a condition for granting of financial and economic aid and assistance. In any event, there is an absolute lack of respect for the freedom of choice of the parties involved. Men and women are often subjected to intolerable pressures, including economic ones, in order to force them to submit to this new form of oppression. It is the poorest populations that suffer such mistreatment, and this sometimes leads to a tendency toward a form of racism, or the promotion of certain equally racist forms of eugenics. This fact, too, which deserves the most forceful condemnation, is a sign of an erroneous and perverse idea of true human development.”[45]

In contrast to “sustainable” development, the Catholic Church speaks of “authentic” development. Again in his encyclical, Solicitudo Rei Socialis, Pope John Paul II describes such development as being intrinsically connected with respect for human rights, “In conformity with the natural historical vocation of each individual.”[46] Such development does not subject the human person and his deepest needs to the demands of economic planning and selfish profit. It is not attained by exploiting the abundance of goods and services or by having available perfect infrastructures. The Holy Father writes:

“When individuals and communities do not see a rigorous respect for the moral, cultural and spiritual requirements, based on the dignity of the person and on the proper identity of each community, beginning with the family and religious societies, then all the rest – availability of goods, abundance of technical resources applied to daily life, a certain level of material well-being – will prove unsatisfying and in the end contemptible. The Lord clearly says this in the Gospel when he calls the attention of all to the true hierarchy of values: ‘For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?’ (Mt 16:26)”[47]

“True development, in keeping with the specific needs of the human being – man or woman, child, adult or old person – implies, especially for those who actively share in this process and are responsible for it a lively awareness of the value of the rights of all and of each person. It likewise implies a lively awareness of the need to respect the right of every individual to the full use of the benefits offered by science and technology.”[48]

To give an example of just how such economic and social pressures are orchestrated, I would like to site the situation that has occurred in Singapore over the past three decades during which the government adopted strikingly different policies in its attempt to control fertility and, at the same time, to provide an adequate supply of labor to its working force.[49]

Here family and futility policies were carefully tailored to facilitate economic growth. In the 1960’s, the Singapore government found it necessary to incr