He taught me to be tenacious, to hold focus on what I knew and believed. At the beginning of this new century, we miss his leadership, but his legacy is alive and well. Joan Dunlop , former advisor to John D.
Resource Library. John D. Rockefeller 3rd, Statesman and Founder of the Population Council. Details Date September 1, Author Population Reference Bureau. Eugenics was the pseudoscience of trying to improve the population by preventing people thought to have inferior genes from having children.
Marginalized groups such as Native Americans were particularly vulnerable. In the s and s, one out of four U. Native American women underwent sterilization, with that figure rising as high as 50 percent between and Recent cases of forced sterilization in the United States have targeted prisoners, echoing earlier eugenic policies intended to eliminate criminal behavior.
Tennessee only banned the coercive sterilization of inmates last year. As disturbing as reports of coercive population control in the United States and Canada are, such abuses occur on a far larger scale today in India and China.
However, an investigation last year found that camps continue to thrive in the same way as prior to the ruling. And the U. The victims of recent cases of forced sterilization in the United States and Canada are marginalized groups: indigenous women in Canada, and incarcerated, often ethnically minority, women in the United States.
Every hospital in the country had a large portion of its facilities commandeered for sterilization and IUD-insertion activities. In Maharashtra province, 58 percent of women surveyed who received them experienced pain, 24 percent severe pain, and 43 percent severe and excessive bleeding.
But hospitals alone did not have the capacity to meet the quotas, so hundreds of sterilization camps were set up in rural areas, manned and operated by paramedical personnel who had as little as two days of training. Minimum quotas were set for the state-salaried camp medics — they had to perform vasectomies or IUD insertions per month each, or their pay would be docked. Private practitioners were also recruited to assist, with pay via piecework: 10 rupees per vasectomy and 5 rupees per IUD insertion.
To acquire subjects for these ministrations, the Indian government provided each province with 11 rupees for every IUD insertion, 30 per vasectomy, and 40 per tubectomy. Typical incentives for subjects ranged from 3 to 7 rupees for an IUD insertion and 12 to 25 rupees for a sterilization.
Faced with starvation, millions of impoverished people had no alternative but to submit to sterilization. As the forms of coercion employed worked most effectively on the poorest, the system also provided the eugenic bonus of doing away preferentially with untouchables.
The results were impressive. In , the total number of sterilizations vasectomies and tubectomies combined performed in India was , In , the yearly total shot up to ,, growing further to more than 1. No doubt LBJ was proud. It did not matter. They got them. By , the number of sterilizations in India reached three million per year. Then, in the fall of , OPEC launched its oil embargo, quintupling petroleum prices virtually overnight.
For rich nations like the United States, the resulting financial blow was severe. For poor countries like India, it was devastating.
In , conditions in India became so bad that Prime Minister Gandhi declared a state of national emergency and assumed dictatorial power. Driven once again to desperation, she found herself at the mercy of the World Bank, led by arch-Malthusian Robert S. She agreed. Instead of incentives, force would now be used to obtain compliance. Gandhi put her son Sanjay personally in charge of the new population offensive. He took to his job with gusto. Overt coercion became the rule: sterilization was a condition for land allotments, water, electricity, ration cards, medical care, pay raises, and rickshaw licenses.
Policemen were given quotas to nab individuals for sterilization. Demolition squads were sent into slums to bulldoze houses — sometimes whole neighborhoods — so that armed police platoons could drag off their flushed-out occupants to forced-sterilization camps.
In Delhi alone, , people were driven from their homes. Many of those who escaped the immediate roundup were denied new housing until they accepted sterilization. These attacks provoked resistance, with thousands being killed in battles with the police, who used live ammunition to deal with protesters. When it became clear that Muslim villages were also being selectively targeted, the level of violence increased still further. The village of Pipli was only brought into submission when government officials threatened locals with aerial bombardment.
Whether you like it or not, there will be a few dead people. The measures served their purpose. During , eight million Indians were sterilized. Far from being dismayed by the massive violation of human rights committed by the campaign, its foreign sponsors expressed full support. Reimert Ravenholt ordered 64 advanced laparoscope machines — altogether sufficient to sterilize 12, people per day — rushed to India to help the effort. World Bank president McNamara was absolutely delighted.
Prime Minister Gandhi got her loans. She also got the boot in , when, in the largest democratic election in history, the people of India defied three decades of precedent and voted her Congress Party out of power in a landslide. Unfortunately, in most Third World countries, people lack such an option to protect themselves against population control. Equally unfortunately, despite the fall of the Gandhi government, the financial pressure on India from the World Bank and USAID to implement population control continued.
Since in rural India sons are considered essential to continue the family line and provide support for parents in their old age, this limit caused many families to seek means of disposing of infant daughters, frequently through drowning, asphyxiation, abandonment in sewers or garbage dumps, or incineration on funeral pyres. More recently the primary means of eliminating the less-desirable sex has become sex-selective abortion, skewing the ratio of the sexes so that boys are born for every hundred girls in India far beyond the natural ratio of to , with the ratio even more skewed in some locations.
A sense of the scale on which these murders were and are practiced, even just in the aspect of gendercide, can be gleaned from the fact that in India today there are 37 million more men than women. Because of their proximity to the United States, Central and South America have long been in the sights of population controllers from the American national security establishment.
Since the s, on the urging of USAID, brutal population control programs have been implemented in nearly every country from Mexico to Chile. In this article we shall focus on just one of them, that of Peru, because the criminal investigation of its leading perpetrators has provided some of the best documentation of the systematic abuses that have been and continue to be carried out under the cloak of population control across Central and South America.
Mountainous Peru features some of the most thinly populated regions on the planet. This fact, however, in no way deterred USAID planners from deeming these rural areas to be overpopulated, nor from funding programs designed to eliminate their people. Begun in , these efforts proceeded on a comparatively low level until the s, when strongman Alberto Fujimori assumed nearly dictatorial powers in the country. In , President Fujimori launched a nationwide sterilization campaign.
Prior to the arrival of the sterilization teams, Ministry of Health employees were sent in to harass local women into submission. If this did not suffice, mothers were told that unless they submitted to ligation, their children would be made ineligible for government food aid.
Both the government harassment squads and the members of the sterilization units themselves operated under a quota system, striving to meet the nationwide target of , tubal ligations per year. They were paid if they met their quotas but punished if they failed to capture the designated number of women for sterilization.
As a result, many women entering clinics for childbirth were sterilized without any pretext of gaining their permission.
While the government personnel performing the mass sterilizations were urbanites of Spanish derivation, the overwhelming majority of the victims were rural Quechua-speaking natives of Inca descent. This, of course, was no coincidence. When Fujimori was booted out in , the new president, Alejandro Toledo, asked the Peruvian Congress to authorize an investigation into the population control campaign. Accordingly, an investigative commission known as the AQV was formed under the direction of Dr.
Hector Chavez Chuchon. According to the report, in the course of a five-year effort the Fujimori government had sterilized , women. In June , Song Jian, a top-level manager in charge of developing control systems for the Chinese guided-missile program, traveled to Helsinki for an international conference on control system theory and design.
In no time at all, Song became a scientific superstar. Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping and his fellows in the Central Committee were also very impressed by the pseudo-scientific computer babble Song used to dress up his theory — which, unlike its Club of Rome source documents in the West, ran unopposed in the state-controlled Chinese technical and popular media. Deng Xiaoping liked what Song had to say, so those who might have had the power to resist the one-child policy were quick to protect themselves by lining up in support.
We cannot make them suffer further. If we implement this policy, he said, every working Chinese married couple will need to support four elderly grandparents, one child, and themselves — a clear impossibility.
None of the children will have any brothers or sisters, or uncles or aunts. None of the parents will have any relatives of their own generation to help out in time of need. The social fabric of village life will break down completely. There will be no one to serve in the Army. But such commonsense objections were of no avail. The word soon came down from the top: one child per family was now the policy of the infallible Party leadership, and no further disagreements would be tolerated.
Thus began the most forceful population control program since Nazi Germany. No more would the population controllers need to depend on tricks, bribes, denial of benefits, traveling ligation festivals, or slum demolition platoons to obtain their victims. They now had the organized and unrelenting power of a totalitarian state to enforce their will, holding sway over not only a massive bureaucracy, but gigantic police and military forces, secret police, vast prison facilities, total media control, and tens of millions of informers.
He ordered that all women with one child were to have a stainless-steel IUD inserted, and to be inspected regularly to make sure that they had not tampered with it.
To remove the device was deemed a criminal act. All parents with two or more children were to be sterilized.
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