U.S. Catholic Relief Services distributes abortifacients in Madagascar: on-the-ground investigation by Patrick B. Craine

MADAGASCAR, July 25, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) - An on-the-ground investigation in Madagascar has found that the U.S. Bishops’ relief agency is distributing contraceptives and abortifacients in the African country as part of a cross-country program funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The news comes as CRS scrambles to affirm its commitment to upholding Catholic teaching after LifeSiteNews revealed they had given over $13 million to the pro-abortion CARE in 2012, and are in the midst of giving a $2.7 million grant to the leading abortion-marketing firm Population Services International.

The Population Research Institute issued the first of a series of reports this afternoon after they sent an investigator to Madagascar for a month to interview officials and witness the Catholic agency’s work first-hand.

According to PRI’s report, the Catholic agency employs over 250 community health workers in the country who distribute contraceptives “under the name of Catholic Relief Services.”

See the Population Research Institute's report here.

PRI reports that USAID has divided the country into districts called “communes” which are each serviced by a different NGO. Each NGO is responsible for offering the “whole package of health activities” in its communes, including contraceptive and abortifacient drugs and devices.

PRI’s investigator interviewed USAID and CRS officials, who confirmed that CRS carries out the “same work” in its 125 communes as other NGOs do in theirs.

“We all [NGOs] do the same work, including in the area of family planning,” a CRS zone supervisor informed the investigator.

“For us, there’s nothing special with CRS: CRS works in family planning just like the others,” Jean Patrick Bourahimou, program manager for USAID-SantéNet, told PRI. “We, the USAID technical specialists, are there for that, precisely to assure that the implementers from the different consortium members are using the same approach.”

 A CRS business card in Madagascar includes CARE's logo.

Credit: Population Research Institute, pop.org

USAID officials also told PRI that CRS’ community health workers are given the same training as other NGO workers. According to the officials, “structural mechanisms were in place to ensure that all health workers used and promoted the same family planning programs, regardless of their NGO associations,” writes PRI.

The pro-life group points out that the head of one of CRS’ regional offices in the country, Andry Ramamonjisoa, used to work for the United Nations Population Fund. “Before this [CRS], I worked with UNFPA, mainly dealing with family planning,” he told them.

The pro-life organization also reports that the pro-abortion group CARE runs USAID communes in the country, and that CRS and CARE work so closely that CRS business cards have CARE’s logo on them in addition to CRS’ logo, and vice versa for CARE.

Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, who authored the report along with media coordinator Anne Roback Morse, told LifeSiteNews that their investigator has over 25 years of experience working with NGOs.

“Why would an ostensibly ‘Catholic’ organization decide to carry out such an objectively immoral program to begin with?” ask Mosher and Roback Morse in the report. “Was it the money? Was it pressure from USAID? Was it the progressive abandonment of its Catholic identity in favor of a comforting and undemanding view of itself as being merely one more secular humanitarian relief agency?”

“How many children have been aborted or contracepted out of existence by CRS?” they ask. “CRS should be able to tell us a number.  After all, all NGOs are required to submit periodic reports to USAID on their performance in increasing the ‘contraceptive prevalence rate.’”

“The Catholic Church teaches hard Truths, to be sure, but those individuals and organizations who would call themselves ‘Catholic’ are duty-bound to abide by them.”

Mosher and Roback Morse conclude by saying they hope the report “will be of assistance to the American bishops in carrying out much-needed reforms at Catholic Relief Services.”

LifeSiteNews contacted CRS for comment but did not hear back by press time.

Contact info:

Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
Piazza del S. Uffizio, 11, 00193 Roma, Italy
phone: (011) 39-06-6988-3357
phone: (011) 39-06-6988-3413
Fax: (011) 39-06-6988-3409
E-mail: cdf@cfaith.va

Find contact information for all U.S. Bishops here.

Readers may also comment on Catholic Relief Services’ Facebook page.

German Bishops “Approve” a Morning-After Pill that Does Not Exist - by Steven W. Mosher

In PRI 

According to a new statement by the German Bishops’ Conference, Catholic physicians and hospitals can now prescribe and administer the morning-after pill (MAP) in cases where a woman is a victim of sexual assault as long as it does not cause an abortion.

The trouble with this declaration is that the morning-after pill is a known abortifacient. While it acts in some cases by preventing conception, in others it prevents the implantation of an already conceived human being. The embryo is aborted. Because it is impossible to say in any given case how it will act, a MAP abortion is always a possibility.

How did the German Bishops’ Conference come to such a pass? The short answer is that it caved under intense media pressure.      

Last month in Cologne a woman who claimed to be a victim of sexual assault was given a prescription for the “morning after pill” by an emergency center doctor, Irmgard Maiworm. Maiworm later claimed that she had contacted nearby St. Vincent’s Hospital to do a follow-up exam on the woman but was refused.  Both the hospital and the Cologne Archdiocese later denied that potential rape victims were being turned away.

Pardon me for thinking the whole scenario was a set-up.  

Set-up or not, much of the German media seized the opportunity to attack Catholic hospitals and, by extension, the Church itself, for “refusing to treat victims of sexual assault.” At this point the German Episcopal Conference attempted to placate its critics by announcing that it had approved the use of certain kinds of MAP in rape cases.

It justified its about face by referring to a presentation by Cardinal Karl Lehmann (Mainz), the president of the Doctrinal Commission of the German Bishops’ Conference. Cardinal Lehmann called for the use of the “morning after pill” to be reevaluated in the light of new formulations of the pill which may only prevent conception, not implantation. The text does not identify these “new formulations,” however.

Now as far as we at PRI are aware, no MAP pill exists, whatever its chemical formula, that does not prevent implantation at least part of the time. The "new formulations" referred to by the German bishops that supposedly do not cause abortions do not, in fact, exist.

If such formulations existed, then Bayer Schering Pharma, the principal manufacturer of MAP, would surely be shouting it from the rooftops. The company would prevail on the FDA to stop calling MAP an anti-implantation drug. It would shut down its shadow MAP factories in Latin America, which it created in order to avoid having the abortion controversy negatively impact its other business there. But Bayer Schering is doing none of these things.

Instead, the company has this to say about its latest MAP, Levonelle:
 

The precise mode of action of Levonelle One Step is not known.

At the recommended regimen, levonorgestrel is thought to work mainly by preventing ovulation and fertilisation if intercourse has taken place in the preovulatory phase, when the likelihood of fertilisation is the highest. It may also cause endometrial changes that discourage implantation. Levonelle One Step is not effective once the process of implantation has begun. (italics added)

Not to mince words, but if you “discourage” a human embryo from implanting then you kill it, plain and simple, by denying it nutrition and hydration.

There have always been those who—whatever cocktail of chemicals a particular brand of MAP contained—have denied an abortifacient effect. Their usual tactic is to define MAP abortions out of existence.  They do this by claiming, falsely, that pregnancy begins at implantation, not conception. Thus they are able to tell women who have already conceived that “MAP can’t cause you to abort because you are not pregnant.”

To their credit, the German Bishops’ Conference does not rely on this “implantation deception” in approving MAP. But it is equally unscientific for the Conference to claim that “non-abortifacient” morning after pills exist in the absence of evidence of same.  

Where human lives are at stake, we must always err on the side of caution.   

As far as rape is concerned, the Church’s position is clear: In the strictest sense, rape is not a sexual act at all, but is rather a violent assault where the victim has the right to self-defense. To put it bluntly, the rapist has no right to have his sperm fertilize the eggs of the woman he has raped. It is therefore permissible to prevent his sperm from doing so by removing them from the body of a woman who has been thus violated. If there were a pill that acted only to prevent conception in cases of rape, then it would be licit to use it.

Once conception has occurred, however, the situation changes, since another human being has come into existence and, as such, is deserving of protection. The German Bishops’ Conference rightly rules out the use of “any methods that involve the death of the embryo.” To reiterate: every known morning after pill has abortifacient effects.

The German Bishops’ Conference has neatly boxed itself in. On the one hand it wishes, in cases of rape, to authorize the use of a kind of morning-after pill that does not exist. On the other hand it condemns the use of all kinds of morning-after pills that do exist.

 

This confusion has, not surprisingly, invited attack from those who wish to see the moral authority of the Church destroyed. A number of German media outlets have editorialized that the “approval” of MAP does not go far enough, and that the Church needs to accept abortion, at least in cases of rape. By the way, they add, it should also ordain women.

We hope the German Bishops’ Conference will reconsider its statement as soon as possible.

Europe as we know it is dying - by Steven Mosher

In PRI 

It’s happened before.

Writing a century and a half before the birth of Christ, the Greek historian Polybius observed “nowadays all over Greece such a diminution in natality and in general manner such depopulation that the towns are deserted and the fields lie fallow. Although this country has not been ravaged by wars or epidemics, the cause of the harm is evident: by avarice or cowardice the people, if they marry, will not bring up the children they ought to have. At most they bring up one or two. It is in this way that the scourge before it is noticed is rapidly developed.”

He concluded by urging his fellow Greeks to return to their historic love of family and children. “The remedy is in ourselves,” he wrote. “We have but to change our morals.” His advice, unfortunately, went largely unheeded.

The demographic winter of the Greek city-states led to economic stagnation and military weakness, which in turn invited invasion and conquest. After a century of increasing dominance in the Eastern Mediterranean, Rome finally annexed the Greek city-states in 146 B.C.

Will a Europe in the grip of a similar demographic winter come to a similar unhappy end? Certainly Europeans of today, like the Greeks of old, are barely having children. The birthrate across the entire continent is far below the replacement level of 2.1 children per couple. Italy, Spain, Austria, and Germany have total fertility rates, or TFRs, of only 1.4 or so, while Poland and Russia languish at 1.32 and 1.2 respectively. The more or less generous child allowances these countries pay the prolific has scarcely caused these numbers to budge. The birth dearth continues to widen.

Meanwhile, adherents of pro-family sects such as Islam are moving in, having children, and repopulating historic Christendom. Is this process likely to continue? And to what end?

Most Muslim countries in North Africa and the Middle East have fertility rates two or three times as high as Europe. Afghanistan and Somalia, whose fertility rates are above 6 children (6.62 and 6.4 respectively), may be outliers. But other Middle Eastern countries with above-replacement TFRs include Iraq at 4.86, Pakistan at 3.65, and Saudi Arabia at 3.03. Even immigrants from the most Westernized Muslim countries such as Turkey and Tunisia average nearly twice as many children as the extant populations of most European countries.

While falling fertility may be humanity’s general fate, it is this differential fertility that will determine Europe’s destiny. Although the birthrates of Muslim immigrants to Europe are far lower than they were just a generation ago, they are still far more open to life than highly secularized Europeans. Moreover, these immigrants, once in place in Germany, Italy, Spain, etc., tend to maintain their relatively high fertility for a generation.

As a result of this potent mix of immigration and procreation, the number of Muslims will continue to grow. Europe as a whole, some demographers suggest, will have a majority Muslim population by 2100.

What a strange twist of history! Over the centuries, various Muslim armies have repeatedly attempted to conquer Europe. Time and time again, at Tours, Vienna, at Lepanto, at Malta, they were thrown back. Yet now what their forebears were unable to accomplish by force, their distant descendants will achieve by peacefully winning the Battle of the Cradle.

Whether they will be radicalized or secularized Muslims is the central question. If they are radicalized, then we can expect efforts to impose Sharia law in country after country, along with the growing persecution of the Christian minority. Catholics in Germany, for example, may come to be treated in largely the same way that Coptic Christians in Egypt have been for the last few centuries, that is to say, as second-class citizens, to be maligned, taxed and beaten almost at will.

If, on the other hand, the second- and third-generation Muslims are largely secularized, then the Christian minority will be, presumably, treated somewhat better, though still subject to some level of discrimination. As everyone knows by now, the Secular Left preaches a tolerance that it generally does not practice.

Either way, believers in once-Christian Europe will probably find themselves living in what might be called a pre-Constantine moment. In others words, they will be living under regimes that punish, even persecute, them for their beliefs.

At the present moment, Europeans still control their own destiny. As Polybius, were he alive today, would surely remind them: “The remedy is in yourselves. You have but to change your morals.”

NEW Report on China Threat by Steven Mosher and Chuck DeVore

In PRI

PRI President Steven Mosher and Defense Expert Chuck DeVore have teamed up to write an exclusive Human Events report entitled Growing Chinese Power—to What End?

 

As the voracious Chinese economy grows, say Mosher and DeVore, so does China’s military and its appetite for conquest. Even more dangerous than the old Soviet Union, the new China (Fascist rather than Communist) is building the strongest economy on the planet as the basis for a growing (albeit secret) military build-up and ever-wider territorial claims. 

The report begins by outlining how China’s historic grievances against Japan and the West form the basis for an aggressive military policy based on revenge. Then, says DeVore, who has served in the Defense Department and as a U.S. Army intelligence officer, and Mosher, “We detail China’s gradual evolution from communism to state-capitalism, known, in another time, as fascism; we detail the intrigues for power within the insular Chinese Communist Party—a modern-day Game of Thrones with nuclear implications; we discuss the democratic pressures building within China for real political reform and the Communist Party’s planned response of repression.” 

The report also documents how China has stolen $1 trillion of U.S. intellectual property over the past few years, and how they aim to steal more through a network of 90 Trojan horse institutes based on major American university campuses in 33 states. 

Mosher and DeVore conclude with a sobering look at the People’s Republic of China’s grand strategy, which can be said with no exaggeration to be one of hegemony over the entire planet. 

(To receive a free copy of the report, click here.)

PRI: Bebé siete mil millones es una bendición para el mundo

WASHINGTON, 28 Oct. 11 / 06:28 am (ACI/EWTN Noticias)

El Presidente del Population Research Institute (PRI), Steve Mosher, afirmó que el nacimiento del bebé siete mil millones, previsto para este 31 de octubre, es "una bendición para todos" y no algo malo como quieren hacer creer los promotores del control poblacional a nivel mundial.

"El bebé 7 mil millones, niño o niña, blanco o negro, cobrizo o amarillo no es un problema sino un recurso. No es una maldición sino una bendición para todos nosotros. El problema a largo plazo de la humanidad no es que vaya a haber demasiados niños sino que va a haber muy pocos", afirmó Mosher en el último boletín del PRI.

En el documento, el líder pro-vida criticó las políticas del Fondo de Población de las Naciones Unidas (UNFPA), "que apoyada por grupos ambientalistas radicales y por organizaciones asociadas al control natal y aborto", usa este nacimiento "para promover el mito de la sobrepoblación y recolectar fondos para proyectos antinatalistas".

Dijo que "la mentalidad antinatalista es arrogante y elitista", porque "el mensaje que los líderes de países ricos le ofrecen a los africanos, asiáticos y latinoamericanos es claro: ‘Hay suficientes de nosotros y demasiados de ustedes’".

Mosher recordó que "el problema más agobiante que existe para la mayoría de países no es la sobrepoblación, sino el despoblamiento".

Dijo que "en una época que debería estar caracterizada por la austeridad fiscal, la última cosa que necesitamos es gastar los recursos del Estado para bajar las tasas de natalidad. De esa manera lo que provocamos es reducir el monto del capital humano disponible y hacernos más pobres a todos en el largo plazo".

Por ello, afirmó que "en el PRI estamos muy contentos con la llegada al mundo del bebé 7 mil millones".

Críticas a la UNFPA

El PRI también criticó "los sesgos ideológicos del Informe sobre el Estado de la Población Mundial 2011 de UNFPA". Indicó que este organismo de la ONU está "en riesgo de perder los fondos que recibe del gobierno norteamericano por su permanente apoyo a la imposición de la política de un solo hijo en China".

"Las investigaciones del PRI han demostrado reiteradamente que UNFPA es cómplice de una política que se lleva a cabo por medio de esterilizaciones y abortos forzados y que a la fecha ya ha eliminado a 400 millones de chinos", señaló.

China's One-Child Policy Toll Reaches 400 Million - by By Steven W. Mosher

In answer to a question from Congressman Tim Huelskamp, a Chinese official has admitted that China’s population control program has cost 400 million lives, a number greater than that of the population of the United States.

In PRI

Over the years, I have been asked many times to estimate how many lives have been lost in China as a result of the one-child policy. Given that the policy has been in place for 30 years, I respond, and given that each year the government aborts between 10 to 15 million women, the total number of unborn children whose lives have been sacrificed is somewhere between 300 and 450 million. It is impossible to be more precise, I add, because of the Chinese Communist party's penchant for secrecy about such sensitive matters.

Now, thanks to Congressman Tim Huelskamp, a pro-life Kansas Republican, we have shocking confirmation of these numbers from a senior Chinese government official.

During a meeting yesterday with members of the House Budget Committee, Congressman Huelskamp asked Gao Qiang, who served for two years as the Party Secretary for the Ministry of Health of the People's Republic of China, about the country's population control policy.

Through an interpreter, Party Secretary Gao responded that the population of China is 400 million less than it would have been had the Party not adopted and enforced a one-child policy. He went on to say that China had prevented more births than the population of the United States, which currently stands at 312 million.

"I was shocked to hear a Chinese official admit how many people have been lost as a result of the country's population control policy," Congressman Huelskamp later remarked. "The fact that this policy has resulted in the loss of more people than the overall population of the United States is an eye-opening figure. Think about the demographic consequences of this, particularly the fact that a disproportionate number of these losses are baby girls. But, even if this policy were to be ended today, impacts would be felt for years to come."

That senior Chinese Communist Party officials continue to tout how "successful" their brutal population control policy has been in eliminating people reveals their absolute contempt for international standards of human rights. After all, these numbers were achieved by forcing young women, some in the final months of pregnancy, to have abortions, an act that was declared by the Nuremburg Tribunals to be a crime against humanity.

But it also reveals a fundamental disconnect with the demographic reality that they themselves have created, namely, a rapidly aging population that is disproportionately male. Thanks to family planning run amuck, China is a country where unborn baby girls are selectively aborted, where young men cannot find brides and where young women are trafficked across borders to meet this demand.

Then there are the economic implications.

There is an old book, written in the 1920s by an American businessman, Carl Crook, called 400 Million Customers. He saw China then, as many people still do today, as a huge, untapped market.

I thought of this book when I learned that Party Secretary Gao was bragging about having reduced China's population growth by 400 million over the last 30 years.

Think about China's astonishing economic performance — its annual GDP growth over the past three decades is close to 10% — once the Communist Party stopped trying to control all economic activity. Think of the tremendous work ethic of the Chinese people and their dedication to educating their children. Think of the labor shortages that are now cropping up across the country because of the one-child policy, where many factories cannot recruit enough workers.

Think on these things, and then ask yourself: Is China really better off because its leadership has eliminated 400 million one of the most intelligent, hard working, and entrepreneurially minded peoples the world has ever seen?

Has the Chinese Communist Party lost its collective mind? It has eliminated 400 million customers.

A dying nation: must-see video lifts veil on Russia’s abortion crisis

New NASA Data Disproves Global Warming

U.N. Climate Models Flawed - Grossly Exaggerate Warming Effect

By Steven W. Mosher Weekly Briefing: 2011 (v13)

In Population Research Institute

We have all heard, ad nauseum, about the so-called “greenhouse effect.” Even little children can tell you how the build up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps heat by increasing humidity and thickening the cloud layer.

Except that it doesn’t — at least to the degree that the U.N climate models have been programmed to “believe.”

Instead, as soon as the climate begins to warm, the Earth’s atmosphere begins releasing much of this energy into space.

How do we know this?

Two University of Alabama scientists, Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. Danny Braswell, compared eleven years of data from the real world with U.N. climate model predictions — and found the models grossly flawed. The study, rather pointedly called On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth's Radiant Energy Balance, appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, Remote Sensing, in late July. (Remote Sensing. 2011, 3, 1603-1613.)

As Dr. Spencer stated in a press release, “The [NASA Terra] satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show. There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.”

This new study supports earlier National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA data showing that humidity and cloud cover did not increase the way that the flawed U.N. computer models predicted.

James M. Taylor, managing editor of the Environment & Climate News, also notes that “The Terra satellite data also support data collected by NASA's ERBS satellite showing far more longwave radiation (and thus, heat) escaped into space between 1985 and 1999 than alarmist computer models had predicted. Together, the NASA ERBS and Terra satellite data show that for 25 years and counting, carbon dioxide emissions have directly and indirectly trapped far less heat than alarmist computer models have predicted.”

This may sound to some like an abstract question of scientific research. It is not. There are many, including the President’s science czar, who would like to make fundamental changes in our way of life — even dictating how many children we can have — in order to combat the threat of “man-made global warming.”

To such anti-people ideologues we may add the profiteers. The United Nations, joined by dozens of nonprofits, has literally raised billions of dollars by frightening both politicians and ordinary people with the specter of the planet overheating. It is safe to say that there are thousands of people who, one way or another, profit from climate alarmism.

In a sane world, the Spencer-Braswell study should sound the death knell for the theory that, by releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we are making the planet unlivable.

Unfortunately, radical environmentalist and population control groups are largely immune to facts. For example, they continue to propagate the myth of overpopulation even as the populations of country after country age and die. Why should the myth of man-made global warming be any different?

Then, too, the Global Warming establishment has built up considerable forward momentum by this point. Movements with millions of adherents and billions of dollars in resources simply do not go quietly into their graves.

Still, while Global Warming alarmists like Al Gore continue to hyperventilate over the supposed danger of increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — and call for increased funding for abortion and fertility reduction programs — the rest of us can breathe easier.

It’s becoming abundantly clear that the only thing “man-made” about Global Warming is the hoax itself.

Steven W. Mosher, M.S. Oceanography, M.A. East Asian Studies, M.A. Anthropology, is the President of the Population Research Institute and has a research interest in historical climate change.