Women Deliver Conference 2013: do women have a right to kill but no right to conceive?

Peter Singer: supports infanticide

The 2013 Women Deliver took place in Kuala Lumpur from 28th-30th May. It was attended by representatives of many organisations at the forefront of the culture of death, including the United Nations Population Fund, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, Marie Stopes International, the Ford Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the US administration of Barack Obama.

One of the speakers was infanticide advocate Peter Singer who suggested that rising population might make it necessary to forcibly prevent families from having children. (See here for consideration of the origins of the over-population myth.)

‘It is possible of course’ Singer told the conference ‘that we give women reproductive choices, that we meet the unmet need for contraception but that we find that the number of children that women choose to have is still such that population continues to rise in a way that causes environmental problems.’ He also suggested that it was “appropriate to consider whether women’s reproductive rights are 'fundamental' and unalterable or whether… there can be imaginable circumstances in which you may be justified in overriding them.” In other words, if abortion and contraception fail to reduce human population growth it would, in Singer’s view, be morally acceptable to forcibly prevent men and women from having children. The reality however is that population growth is already on the verge of collapsing in many parts of the world, with all the economic and social dangers which that entails, precisely because of the widespread legitimisation of abortion and contraception.

Kavita Ramdas, an Indian representative of the Ford Foundation, made similar points arguing that “you can force women to have less children [sic], you can force people to consume less”. Reversing the racism often shown by the population control movement she asserted that the United States and Europe ‘are truly putting an unsustainable load on the planet for all of us’ and suggested that ‘if Americans consume more than Africans, they should be forced into a one child policy’.

I wonder how the delegates attending the conference would have responded if a speaker had suggested that the so-called 'right' to abortion had to be overriden to deal with declining population growth? The right to kill seems to be unchallengeable but a woman's right to truly control her own fertility by conceiving children within the self-giving supportive union of marriage can be overriden to suit the political agenda of ideologues such as Singer and Ramdas.

These calls were addressed to representatives of the UN, national governments, and some of the largest NGOs in the world. The forces arrayed against the family, and especially against it’s most vulnerable member, the unborn child, are very powerful, very wealthy and very determined.

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The Life and Crimes of Margaret Sanger Part V: Birth Control and Abortion

Margaret Sanger in her later years

Margaret Sanger’s most concrete legacy is surely the International Planned Parenthood Federation which consists of 150 affiliated organisations working in 172 countries. Together they form the largest organisation in the world dedicated to the promotion of contraception and abortion.

Margaret Sanger’s name is therefore inextricably associated with abortion, yet during her lifetime the practice was illegal in most American states and in almost every country in the world. It will be of interest then to consider Sanger’s views on abortion and ask why the birth control organisations she led were to become the major abortion providers wherever abortion was legalised, and the major advocates for its legalisation in those nations where it was not. 

Sanger was in favour of abortion from an early stage in her career despite her reluctantance to support it publicly. In her 1920 book Women and the New Race she claimed that throughout history societies have feared overpopulation and therefore practiced abortion and infanticide. Accordingly she argued that only the widespread availability of artificial birth control could bring an end to such 'horrors'. Sanger gives examples of women who have been ‘forced’ into abortion because they could not afford any more children. She used the natural abhorrence of abortion to try to overcome the equally natural abhorrence of contraception. If she was sincere in her profession that abortion was something to be regretted she was nonetheless prepared to support it. In her book Family Limitation she stated baldly that ‘no one can doubt that there are times when an abortion is justifiable.’ According to Angela Franks there is evidence that her Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau referred at least seventy-five women for abortions.[1] Indeed Sanger’s criticisms of abortion seem to focus on the danger abortion procedures pose to the health of the mother rather than on the rights of the unborn child.

One of the major questions Sanger poses in Women and New Race is ‘Contraceptives or Abortion—which shall it be?’ Sanger’s commitment to radical sexual liberation, which admits no possibility of sexual abstinence or self-restraint, combined with her conviction that overpopulation is the cause of poverty, renders her unable to accept the possibility of any other solutions to the problems that she raises. This refusal to acknowledge that rational human beings can exercise self-control in sexual matters is very prevalent today. Young people are taught to consider themselves as subject to uncontrollable desires which will result either in ‘unwanted pregnancy’ or sexually transmitted diseases unless they allow themselves to be subjected to a variety of contraceptive methods.  Modern sex education therefore strips from young people any sense of self-respect or true understanding of their sexuality.

Ann Furedi, Chief Executive of BPAS (British Pregnancy Advisory Service), has argued that we must either view abortion as a ‘problem’ or we must ‘allow people their moments of intimacy, we allow them to enjoy sex, and we allow them to make use of abortion as a back-up to contraception.’[2] In other words, as no limit can reasonably be placed on the pursuit of sexual pleasure (because the right to such pleasure is so fundamental and the desire for it so overwhelming) it is permissible to destroy the ‘unwanted’ results of such actions, even though they be unique and innocent human beings.

If we have learnt anything in this series of posts about Margaret Sanger it is surely that the origins of abortion lie in an erroneous ideology of sexual liberation which separates sexual pleasure from the procreative and unitive ends of the sexual act. Once this isolation of pleasure has taken place then it becomes ‘necessary’ for birth control to be used to allow for the maximum pursuit of this pleasure. The failure of birth control to prevent all ‘unwanted pregnancy’ then renders abortion equally ‘necessary’.  This is why the birth control movement was brought forth by the movement for ‘sexual liberation’ and why it has seamlessly developed into the abortion industry that we confront today.

Only by working tirelessly to restore a true understanding of human sexuality can the pro-life movement ensure that all human life will once more be loved, protected and welcomed.

You may be interested in reading the other posts in this series:

The Life and Crimes of Margaret Sanger: Part I

The Life and Crimes of Margaret Sanger II: From Marx to Malthus

The Life and Crimes of Margaret Sanger III: Eugenics and Birth Control

The Life and Crimes of Margaret Sanger IV: Eugenics and Race

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[1] Angela Franks, Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility, p11

[2] Ann Furedi, ‘Why rising abortion rates are not a problem?’, Spiked Online, (31/3/2008)

The Life and Crimes of Margaret Sanger III: Eugenics and Birth Control



A 1919 issue of the
 Birth Control Review  



Margaret Sanger established the first birth control clinic in the United States of America at Brownsville, New York in 1916. In 1921 she founded the American Birth Control League to advocate for the adoption of artificial birth control at the level both of public policy and of individual practice. She followed this in 1923 with the establishment of the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau which was the first legal birth control clinic and a centre of research into contraceptive methods. In 1928 due to an internal conflict she resigned from the ABCL and took full control of the BCCRB.  In 1929 she founded the National Committee for Federal Legislation on Birth Control. The ABCL and the BCCRB were reunited in 1939 as the Birth Control Federation of America, which became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942. Sanger did not lead the merged organisation but she was responsible for the founding of the International Committee of Planned Parenthood in 1948 which became the International Planned Parenthood Federation in 1952. Sanger was its first President and held this position until 1959.

The above narrative alone demonstrates the extent of Sanger’s commitment to the ideology of birth control. In the first part of this series we saw that Sanger was an advocate of sexual ‘liberation’ and saw contraception as a means of allowing women to pursue a promiscuous ‘liberated’ lifestyle while attempting to avoid the natural consequence of their behaviour. We have also seen, in Part II, that she came to adopt the Malthusian position that birth control was the only solution to the problem of poverty.  However Sanger had a much wider agenda than merely reducing the birth rate. She believed that a ‘qualitative factor as opposed to a quantitative one is of primary importance in dealing with the great masses of humanity.’[1]  In other words she saw the primary end of birth control as improving the ‘quality’ of the population rather than population reduction. In 1921 she stated that ‘The campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal with the final aims of Eugenics.’ She continued ‘The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective... Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupidly cruel sentimentalism.’[2] She considered certain human beings to be ‘human weeds’ who ‘clog up the path, drain up the energies and resources of this little earth’.[3] On another occasion she regretted that while ‘nature eliminates the weeds... we turn them into parasites and allow them to reproduce.’[4] Such sentiments are not original. Sanger is here expressing opinions which were identical in substance to those of other prominent supporters of eugenics such as Francis Galton, H.G Wells and Marie Stopes.

An American billboard promoting Eugenics

Margaret Sanger was a long term member and supporter of the American Eugenics Society and encouraged cooperation between organisations advocating eugenics and those advocating birth control. A majority of the AES’s ‘Committee on Eugenics and Dysgenics of Birth Regulation’ were in fact formally associated with Sanger organisations. A main aim of the eugenics movement at this time was to introduce forced sterilisation for those deemed ‘defective.’ Sanger openly advocated that ‘defectives’ should be segregated or sterilised. She expressed her frustration that eugenic programmes were not being implemented more swiftly: ‘We know, without doubt, that certain groups should not reproduce themselves. Why not say so... We cannot improve the race until we first cut down production of its least desirable members.’[5] In her ‘Plan for Peace’ published in 1938 Sanger called for segregation, sterilisation, and what amounted to slavery and forced labour for the ‘unfit’:

d. to apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.
e. to insure the country against future burdens of maintenance for numerous offspring as may be born of feebleminded parents, by pensioning all persons with transmissible disease who voluntarily consent to sterilization.
f. to give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.
g. to apportion farm lands and homesteads for these segregated persons where they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.



More than 30 American states practised compulsory sterilisation during the period from 1907 to 1964 leaving behind more than 63,000 victims whose suffering has never been adequately recognised. Around 60% of these sterilisation were performed on women, yet many of Sanger’s feminist biographers have been willing to ignore her complicity in this system, lest it force themselves or their readers to challenge the notion that Sanger was a great ‘liberator’ of women.

An objective assessment of her published writings leaves no doubt that one of Sanger’s primary aims in advocating birth control was bring about the creation of a future purified race that conformed more closely to those ideas of perfection that prevailed among her own circle. The freedom that Sanger advocated was merely the freedom to indulge in promiscuous sexual acts while frustrating their natural outcome. The freedom to pursue a normal family life was not something that Sanger recognised. Indeed any woman who preferred raising a large family in the normal context of marriage was deemed for that very reason to be ‘irrational’ and unworthy of the vision of sexually liberated womanhood that Sanger had set before them. Her successors in the abortion industry today are still implementing a eugenic programme though they hide behind the rhetoric of ‘choice’.  Parents of children with disabilities are often put under enormous pressure to have their children killed in the womb with the result that, for example, 90% of children with Down’s Syndrome are eliminated before birth. In a society still dominated by the eugenic principles which have been propagated among us for more than a century what kind of ‘choice’ will most parents feel ‘free’ make?

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[1] Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, 1922

[2] Margaret Sanger ‘The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda’, The Birth Control Review, October 1921

[3] Margaret Sanger, ‘The Need for Birth Control in America’ Birth Control: Facts and Responsibilities ed. Adolf Meyer, 1925

[4] Quoted in Angela Franks, Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy, p48

[5] Taken from a letter written to leading eugenicist Frederick Osborn in 1939 and quoted in Franks, Sanger, p11-12 

The Life and Crimes of Margaret Sanger II: From Marx to Malthus

“Birth Control is no new thing in human experience, and it has been practised in societies of the most various types and fortunes. But there can be little doubt that at the present time it is a test issue between two widely different interpretations of the word civilization, and of what is good in life and conduct. The way in which men and women range themselves in this controversy is more simply and directly indicative of their general intellectual quality than any other single indication. I do not wish to imply by this that the people who oppose are more or less intellectual than the people who advocate Birth Control, but only that they have fundamentally contrasted general ideas,—that, mentally, they are DIFFERENT. Very simple, very complex, very dull and very brilliant persons may be found in either camp, but all those in either camp have certain attitudes in common which they share with one another, and do not share with those in the other camp.”

…

We are living not in a simple and complete civilization, but in a conflict of at least two civilizations, based on entirely different fundamental ideas, pursuing different methods and with different aims and ends.

Margaret Sanger in 1922

These words of H. G. Wells', found in his introduction to Margaret Sanger’s 1922 work The Pivot of Civilization, clearly state the profound truth that of all the ideological conflicts of the early twentieth century the struggle for the control of human reproduction was to prove one of the most significant.[1] Those who advocated birth control wished then, and still wish today, to remould society according to their own ideological principles through ‘the control and guidance of the great natural instinct of sex’.[2] Control was central to Sanger’s philosophy. In The Pivot she stated “I [was] dominated by this conviction of the efficacy of "control,"' and decades later this conviction had not lessened. In 1955 she was to argue ‘I see no wider meaning of family planning than control and as for restriction…. [it] should be an order as [well as] an ideal for the betterment of the family and the race.’[3] This struggle for control has already claimed many millions of lives through abortion, euthanasia, genocide, embryo experimentation and artificial methods of reproduction. Margaret Sanger’s life, work and relationships exemplify the close interconnection between all the aspects of this struggle between two irreconcilable views of human civilisation.

In The Pivot of Civilization Sanger explains her ‘conversion’ from Marxism to the ideology of eugenic birth control. She argues that, instead of pursuing violent revolution, those who seek to realise ‘the glorious vision of a new world, of a proletarian world emancipated, a Utopian world’ should pursue eugenic birth control.[4] Sanger, as we saw in the first part of this series, began as a socialist revolutionary. In The Pivot she explains how she lost faith in the standard Marxist narrative and began to associate the problems of poverty with ‘overpopulation’. ‘In spite of all my sympathy with the dream of liberated Labor’, she writes, ‘I was driven to ask whether this urging power of sex, this deep instinct, was not at least partially responsible, along with industrial injustice, for the widespread misery of the world.’[5] She travelled throughout Europe meeting with leading revolutionaries, including some of the most extreme anarchists such as Enrico Malatesta. It was in Britain however, amongst members of the Neo-Malthusian League and writers such as H. G. Wells, that she found a philosophy most congenial to her tastes. “I was encouraged and strengthened in this attitude” she recalls, “ by the support of certain leaders who had studied human nature and who had reached the same conclusion: that civilization could not solve the problem of Hunger until it recognized the titanic strength of the sexual instinct.”[6] Indeed she dedicated the The Pivot of Civilisation to Alice Drysdale Vickery (see picture to the right), a leading figure in the Neo-Malthusian league. This dedication, taken with Wells’ foreword and the appearance of a quote by Havelock Ellis on the title page, supports our conclusion that eugenics, birth control, abortion and disordered forms of sexuality are all closely connected.

We saw in the last post that Sanger was given millions of dollars by wealthy industrialists, and particularly by J. D. Rockefeller III, whose assassination she had called for not many years earlier. This ‘conversion’ from Marx to Malthus might seem surprising but it is not in fact very remarkable if we look a little deeper. It is a very common phenomena for revolutionaries to pass from one ideology to another even when the latter stands in contradiction to the former on central points. This occurs because a revolutionary like Sanger is really seeking the formula that will enable mankind, of its own efforts, to create a paradise on earth.[7] When a revolutionary no longer feels that their current methods will achieve their ends they will simply move on to another ideological position, often excoriating those who were until recently their allies.[8] This political messianism obviously stands in stark contrast to the doctrines of Christianity, which most ideologues therefore vociferously reject.[9]

Why then did Sanger adopt this particular ideology? In The Pivot of Civilisation she tells us that she felt that the progress of the working class was being held back by ‘the burden of their ever-growing families’.[10] ‘Something more’ she realised ‘than the purely economic interpretation was involved.’[11] This ‘something more’ was the ‘driving power of instinct, a power uncontrolled’.[12] Sanger believed that the inability of the working classes to control their sexual desires was the main cause poverty. It could be argued that her language in the The Pivot manifests a fear or disgust of healthy sexuality.[13] We know that Sanger’s own promiscuity was notorious. Is it possible that Sanger is projecting her fears about her own lack of self control onto working class women? Her awareness of her own sexual conduct and her consequent ‘need’ for birth control perhaps drove her to advocate that other women subject themselves, or be subjected, to the same control. It is surely of interest that her lover H. G. Wells presents a similar paradox. He also was a notorious adulterer, with at least one illegitimate child, and yet he argued that the reproduction of others needed to be controlled and that people who lacked ‘self-control’ were a threat to society. It has also been suggested by E. Michael Jones that Sanger’s zeal in advocating birth control was partially the result of the guilt she felt at having abandoned her daughter to the care of others while she was in England. [14] Peggy died shortly after Sanger returned to America and Jones argues that it was by convincing herself that she was working for the greater good of future generations of women that she was able to ease the pain suffered by her conscience, which accused her of betraying her own daughter. In any case, it is certainly true that many more mothers and children were about to suffer as a result of the life and crimes of Margaret Sanger.

To be continued…

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[1] Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, (New York, 1922)

[2] Ibid

[3] Quoted in Angela Franks, Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility, (Jefferson, 2005) p5

[4] Sanger, Pivot

[5] Ibid

[6] Ibid

[7] In The Pivot of Civilization Sanger argues that men and women must ‘light their way to self-salvation’, the Catholic Church being ‘organized to exploit the ignorance and the prejudices of the masses.’ She saw birth control as a way to ‘triumph finally in the war for human emancipation.’

[8] Much of The Pivot of Civilization is dedicated to attacking Marxism, but see Chapter VII in particular.

[9] For a classic example see Sanger’s attack on the Catholic Church in Chapter IX of The Pivot of Civilization.

[10] Sanger, Pivot

[11] Ibid

[12]  Ibid

[13] E.g. ‘blind and irresponsible play of the sexual instinct’, ‘sex as a factor in the perpetuation of poverty’,  ‘the fundamental relation between Sex and Hunger’, ‘the sexual and racial chaos into which the world has drifted’, ‘chance and chaotic breeding’, ‘the trap of compulsory maternity’, ‘the mother remains the passive victim of blind instinct’, and so on.
[14]   E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control, (2005)

The Neo-Malthusian League and the origins of the birth control movement

We have previously considered the influence of the ideas of Thomas Robert Malthus on the pro-abortion movement. In this post we will consider the way in which the population control ideology developed after his death.

Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891)

In 1877 an organisation called the Neo-Malthusian League was founded in the aftermath of the prosecution of Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant. Bradlaugh, founder of the National Secular Society, and Besant, a political radical, were prosecuted for republishing a book entitled Fruits of Philosophy, written by an American called Charles Knowlton, which described various methods of birth control. They were found guilty of publishing obscene material but were later acquitted on a legal technicality. The Neo-Malthusian League was founded to campaign for the right to publish information about contraceptive methods without fear of prosecution, and to advocate for the reduction of the birth rate by limitation of family size. It grew in influence under the leadership of three members of the same family, George Drysdale, his brother Charles Robert Drysdale and the latter’s son Charles Vickery Drysdale.

The League argued that war and poverty were caused by overpopulation and that it was therefore essential that the birth rate be reduced. Unlike Malthus, the League advocated artificial birth control as the best means of bringing this about. Celibacy and abstinence were rejected as ‘unhealthy’; sexual pleasure divorced from procreative responsibility was the end they sought. In his book Elements of Social Science, George Drysdale argued that ‘there could not be greater error’ than monogamous marriage.  The ‘laws of nature’ required ‘a variety of objects’ for sexual desire. Many members of the League believed that the poor must be put under pressure to reduce the number of children that they had. Annie Besant said that the first phase of their campaign must aim to ‘stamp with disapproval every married couple who selfishly overcrowd their home, to the injury of the community of which they are a part.’ This is certainly an attitude which prevails in our society today.

By the time the league was dissolved in 1927 many of its aims were well on their way to being met. Numerous influential members of the Labour Party were supporters of the League or of other population control groups such as Marie Stopes’s Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress. Activists such as these, supported by many Labour MPs, were successful in persuading the Labour Party to adopt a pro-birth control policy in 1926. There was initially some successful resistance from Catholics in the party but soon both the Labour and Conservative parties succumbed to the birth control agenda. From 1930 onwards it was permissible for birth control advice to be given at public health clinics. Birth control ‘clinics’, founded by organisations such as Marie Stopes and the Family Planning Association, began to spread, with the express intention of inducing women from poor backgrounds to use birth control. This was the beginning of a network of ‘clinics’ which now not only seek to prevent new life coming into existence but to destroy it during its earliest and most vulnerable stages. The organisations which now perform thousands of abortions every year are often the very same organisations that began by advocating birth control. 

Further Reading

Ann Farmer, Prophets and Priests: The Hidden Face of the Birth Control Movement,  (London, 2002)

The British government thinks a manual vacuum aspirator in the hands of an abortionist counts as development aid for mothers

SPUC recently held a very successful conference in London on the topic of abortion and maternal health in the developing world. You can read a full report with photos on the SPUC website. SPUC also has a briefing on these issues, and the texts of the presentations will be available shortly.

One of the key issues looked at was the funding given for promoting and doing abortions in the developing world. The Department for International Development (DFID) gives hundreds of millions to organisations like International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), Marie Stopes International (MSI) and  International Projects Assistance Services (Ipas) who specialise in killing unborn children. This funding usually takes the form of a  Partnership Programme Arrangement (PPA) which lasts several years, but funding for individual and country-specific programmes can also be given under initiatives like the Civil Society Challenge Fund (CSCF).

The latest project launched by DFID is called Preventing Maternal Deaths from Unwanted Pregnancy (PMDUP). DFID will give £67 million pounds over 5 years from July 2011 to June 2016 via MSI and Ipas, to carry out and promote abortion and contraception in 14 countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Pakistan, DRC, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. In its Business Plan (2011 – 2015) DFID committed ‘to embed in every relevant bilateral programme specific plans to take forward the promotion of choice for women over whether and when they have children’ - i.e. DFID will make sure abortion and contraception are part and parcel of any funding and aid they offer, as far as possible. 

Reading through the PMDUP business plan reveals that MSI and Ipas will be responsible for collecting the programme data, and Options - the consultancy firm wholly owned by MSI - will provide consultancy for the PMDUP programme and be linked to the impact evaluation. Options will also be involved in providing evidence to shape PMDUP implementation strategy. Not only is DFID leading the way in killing unborn children in the developing world, they are getting the abortion organisations to collect the programme data for the programmes they themselves will be carrying out, provide consultancy to DFID, and influence the impact evaluation of the programme they have been asked to do.

To use an analogy, it's a bit like a firm making landmines being given tens of millions to make and plant landmines in the developing world, and allowing that same firm making the landmines to collect data on the impact of landmines, advise the government on the safety and effectiveness of their programme to promote landmines, and then allowing the firm to evaluate themselves. The mind boggles. 

Some charts are provided in the business plan about "growth forecast" for the PMDUP programme. The 2 charts below detail the hoped for number of women having abortions and receiving contraceptive devices by MSI and Ipas. The second chart details the future increase in the number of MSI and Ipas facilities conducting abortions - usually using misoprostol or manual vacuum aspirators. 

For MSI 2,866,880 mothers are expected to undergo an abortion or post-abortion "care", and for Ipas the figure is 519,535. It's very probable that Options or MSI and Ipas themselves came up with these figures, considering how much of a free rein they have been given by DFID.

The term "post abortion care" (PAC) is deceptive. PAC is part and parcel of the abortion promotion agenda of organisations like IPPF, WHO, DFID, MSI, and Ipas who in 1993 together with IPPF founded the PAC Consortium. In 2007 pro-lifers and religious leaders rejected proposals by the Guatemalan Ministry of Health to introduce post-abortion care into public health, citing the reason that such measures are tactics to further the abortion agenda.

One of the uses of PAC is getting the abortion drug misoprostol into countries for post-abortion and incomplete abortion "services", as seen from the PAC Consortium misoprostol resources pages of their website. The devastating effect of misoprostol on a developing country has already been presented by Dr. Susan Yoshihara, following the 2010 Women Deliver Conference. Several years ago the World Health Organisation changed its policy to include misoprostol on its list of essential medicines. This move was supported by radical pro-abortion organisations such as Gynuity and MSI. This is noted by the pro-abortion Center for Reproductive Rights, and used as another prong to further abortion and avoid maternal morbidity and mortality.

PAC is a cover for introducing abortion into countries where it is illegal or highly restricted, as noted by Dr. Ideh at the SPUC maternal mortality conference. We have also seen this recently in the case of Rwanda. The radically pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute produced a study citing the lack of post-abortion care as a reason for abortion-related morbidity and lack of family planning, always discussed and offered following an abortion, as reasons for liberalising Rwanda's law on abortion. Guttmacher is supporting the lobbying efforts of Rwanda's IPPF affiliate in the country. PAC is a useful cover, as it allows abortion organisations to train people, from doctors to community health workers, to conduct abortions using MVA and misoprostol, and promote contraceptive devices, better know as post-abortion family planning. It also reinforces the canard of safe v unsafe abortion by claming that abortion is safe where post-abortion care for complications is easily available. PAC is part of a strategy which seeks to normalise abortion at the level of public opinion and medical consensus, and persuade legislators that a country's abortion laws need to be changed in favour of abortion.

What this chart above sets out is the increased number of abortion and contraception facilities that MSI and Ipas hope to establish by 2016. The total for MSI is 2563 and 1024 for Ipas.

These are desperate times for mothers, babies, and families in the developing world, where our taxes are being used to kill unborn children and harm the health of mothers. Money is being diverted away from the real causes of maternal morbidity and mortality, and instead being used to serve the ideological agenda of DFID and its partners IPPF, MSI, and Ipas. We now live in a world where the manual vacuum aspirator in the hands of an abortionist counts as aid to developing countries. 

"international aid for the poor"