Family Issues in Policy and Culture

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The Billionaire Bomb

Just look who's funding anti-population programs.

By Steven W. Mosher

Bill Gates ($63 billion), Warren Buffett ($28 billion), and Ted Turner ($9 billion) have billions on their minds, and not just in their bank accounts and stock portfolios. On a planet inhabited by 6 billion people, they claim that overpopulation is the greatest threat to survival in the 21st century — “the single most important issue facing mankind today,” according to Turner, founder of the Cable News Network (CNN).

Somehow these men overlooked The New York Times from Jan. 1, 2000, which listed overpopulation among the “myths of the 20th Century.” ¹ Yes, the Times, that bulwark of abortion advocacy, declared dead a way of thinking that had shaped elite opinion for two centuries, the “dismal theorem” of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), who said that growth in human numbers would eventually outrun food supply, is thoroughly discredited.

Two hundred years and five billion people later, human beings are living longer, healthier lives than ever before. The “gigantic inevitable famine” that would, Malthus predicted, “with one mighty blow, level . . . the population,” now seems as unlikely as a global flood. Every other year humanity sets new records in grain production. Caloric intake continues to climb. Incomes continue to rise, and now average $5,000 a year for every man, woman and child on the planet, up from $100 a year at the time of Malthus.

At the same time, because of longer schooling and other demands of modern life—and abortion and sterilization—birthrates continue to fall. The bottom line is this: The world’s population will never double again. Rather, population will peak at 9 billion or so in 2040, and then begin to decline. Our long-term problem, in other words, is not going to be too many children, but too few children.

Yet the billionaire boys club is diverting billions of dollars into population control programs to hasten this day. Why? The answer is as varied as the club members themselves.

Ted Turner: Anti-People Zealot

You know Ted Turner as the man who’s called Christians “losers” and “freaks,” and divorced Jane Fonda over her relationship with Jesus. And you may recall that in 1997, he gave $1 billion to the United Nations, making it clear that much of this money would go to population control.

And here’s where some of that cash ended up: “improv[ing] the reproductive health of adolescent girls in rural Bangladesh” ($1,063,705); social licensing of reproductive health clinics in Honduras ($2,513,338); and “voluntary confidential counseling and testing for HIV/AIDS, distribution of condoms, treatment of sexually transmitted diseases, family planning and HIV/AIDS and sexual education” in Mozambique ($2,751,000).

Translation: Bangladeshi girls as young as 10 years old will be given very explicit information about sex, that Honduran girls, both married and unmarried, will be encouraged to use contraception and (in case of contraceptive failure) to abort, and young men and women in Mozambique will have their cultural and religious traditions trashed by the blatant promotion of both homosexuality and unmarried sexual activity. All of which in turn drives down the birth rate.

Turner has said that China’s one-child policy should be adopted worldwide, and his contribution the closest he’s come to ream of a mandatory population control policy is bankrolling efforts to reduce the number of children born to refugees. His UN Foundation recently gave $5.9 million to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) “to develop and distribute emergency reproductive health information and services to refugees in emergency situations” in Central Asia and several regions in Africa.

The Population Research Institute has learned that the “emergency reproductive health information and services” include so-called morning after pills and manual vacuum aspirators, both of which are used to perform early-term abortions.

During the recent crisis in the Balkans, Turner’s UN Foundation was even more explicit about its aims. One award given to the UNFPA was for, in the foundation’s words, “emergency work in the Kosovo region, where about 10 percent of the 743,000 refugees are either pregnant women or newborns, and 1,000-1,500 births a month are expected among the refugees.” In the view of the Ted Turner’s of the world, refugees shouldn’t have any babies.

Warren Buffet: No Project Too Controversial

Warren Buffett’s business accomplishments are impressive enough. Beginning with an antiquated New England textile mill, he built his fortune as a stock market speculator. His company, Berkshire-Hathaway, Inc., based in Omaha, holds stock in Coca-Cola, Dairy Queen, newspapers and candlemakers. Wall Street holds him in awe; his stock trades at about $70,000 a share.

He may own newspapers, but Buffett isn’t a media hound. He’s said very little about his philanthropy. His foundation, meager compared to that of other billionaires at $22 million, must be judged on what it does. And what it does, mostly, is hard-edged, even fanatical, population control.

The Buffett Foundation is known for funding projects that other foundations, even those similarly inclined to limit human numbers, keep well clear of, such as the deadly abortion drug, RU-486. Back in 1994 Buffet provided $2 million to the chief U.S. promoter of the drug, the Population Council, for clinical trials that led the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve the drug. ²

Another $2 million went to North Carolina’s Family Health International (FHI) for an equally questionable drug, quinacrine hydrochloride. Originally developed as an anti-malarial drug, quinacrine has in recent years been used to perform chemical sterilizations on women. Inserted into the upper part of the uterus, the quinacrine hydrochloride tablets dissolve to form a powerful acid which burns away the lining of the upper uterus and fallopian tubes. The resulting scarring usually renders a woman sterile. If her fallopian tubes are not completely blocked, any babies she subsequently conceives cannot implant.

Family Health International (FHI) initiated testing of quinacrine as a sterilization agent as early as 1976. But its 1981 application to the FDA to approve the drug for sterilizations (it had previously been approved to treat malaria) was rejected on the grounds that, as FHI later explained, “rigorous studies are needed to ensure the safety and efficacy of quinacrine.” ³ Buffet’s fresh infusion of cash will apparently jump start this process by enabling the testing to go forward.

In the meantime, quinacrine’s proponents are doing a brisk business overseas. The Vietnamese government has sterilized tens of thousands of poor women using this method, many without their foreknowledge or consent. Recent reports suggest that ethic minorities, such as the Hmong and Montagnard, are being specifically targeted. Although quinacrine sterilizations have been banned in India, New Delhi newspapers report that more than 30,000 impoverished, illiterate women have been subjected to the painful procedure. Informed consent is often lacking, and follow up care is nonexistent.

Buffet’s favorite charity, at least to judge by his giving, is an obscure entity with the studiously neutral name of International Projects Assistance Services (IPAS). According to a Business Week report, the foundation’s “1999 contribution of $2.5 million is part of a five-year, $20 million commitment, which will enable IPAS to double its capacity.”

Double its capacity in what? Aborting very small babies up to 12 weeks of age by means of a hand-held suction pump, that’s what. As it turns out, IPAS is the principal manufacturer and distributor of the manual vacuum aspirators, or MVAs, used by the UN Population Fund, and other groups. This deadly device is actually a manually operated suction pump that can be used perform, in IPAS words, ”elective abortion through the first trimester.” When the tip is inserted into the uterus, and the operator pulls the plunger on the 50cc syringe, enough vacuum is created at the tip to suck a tiny baby right out of her mother’s womb.⁴

Nor is IPAS’s abortion advocacy an anomaly.⁵ A list of Buffet’s charitable contributions read like a veritable rogue’s gallery of abortion promoters and providers. Such groups as the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, and Pathfinder International figure prominently. And in a particularly nasty twist, his funding to Planned Parenthood is specifically earmarked to enable particular clinics around the country to perform abortions. ⁶

What would possess a man of obvious intelligence and untold wealth to spend tens of millions of dollars to finance aggressive programs of sterilization and abortion? To put it even more bluntly, why is Warren Buffet obsessed with ridding the globe of “excess” baby humans?

Buffett’s biographer, Roger Lowenstein, reports that Buffet has “a Malthusian dread that overpopulation (will) aggravate problems in all other areas—such as food, housing, even human survival.” And like Turner, Buffet developed a strong antipathy to his parent’s Christianity.

Bill Gates: Billionaire in Conflict?

The youngest member of the Billionaire Boys Club at 44 — and also by far the wealthiest — Bill Gates would not appear to have much in common with the other two, either personally or professionally.

Unlike Ted Turner, who was diagnosed a manic-depressive in the 1980s, Bill Gates seems pretty normal for the world’s most famous computer nerd. He is, by all accounts, happily married to Melinda French Gates, who is a devout Catholic. And the pre-nuptial agreement that Melinda had Bill sign calls for their children (they presently have two) to be raised in the Christian faith.

But Gates appears to be of two minds when it comes to population growth. Gates the Entrepreneur believes, as he said in a 1996 interview with Forbes magazine, that “Julian Simon [population growth advocate] is right and Paul Ehrlich [population doomsayer] is wrong. . . I think the world is progressing. . . Resources are becoming more abundant. I’d rather go into a grocery store today than to a king's banquet a hundred years ago.” ^7,8

Just three years after this ringing endorsement of human progress, however, the associate director of William P. Gates Foundation was claiming that her chairman held much more pessimistic views: “Bill Gates . . . has a very legitimate concern over the burgeoning population of the world. Within the month the population of the world will reach 6 billion people, with nearly two-thirds of them malnourished, uneducated, and lacking the skills and training necessary to cope with their lives.” ⁹

That gloomy outlook is evident in some of the grants made by the Gates Foundation:

• The German Foundation for World Population (Deutsche Stiftung Weltbevolkerung) received a $545,000 grant to help bring about “a humane decline in world population growth.” ¹⁰
• Population Communications International also benefited from a grant, and went on to produce a video called Jam Packed, a pessimistic commentary on world population. Gates may like American grocery stores but, in Jam Packed, they are a symbol of American decadence.¹¹
• The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) affiliate in the Dominican Republic, PROFAMILIA, has received Gates funding. Cardinal Nicolas Lopez Rodriguez, the Archbishop of Santo Domingo, recently compared PROFAMILIA’s sterilization campaign against local women to the work of “death squads.”
• The Peruvian Institute of Responsible Fatherhood, INPARRES for short, has received a grant. The organization, another IPPF affiliate, has collaborated with the Peruvian government's coercive sterilization campaign, in which women were sterilized in unhygienic conditions under a quota system.
• Tanzania’s state family planning organization, UMATI, has also received funding from the Gates Foundation. Tanzanian women complain that UMATI routinely violates human rights, injecting contraceptives such as Depo-provera and Norplant without informed consent, and has performed forced abortions and sterilizations.

Yet Gates and his wife recently announced that the Gates Foundation will put up $750 million to establish the Global Fund for Children's Vaccines. Their goal is to immunize every child in the world against diphtheria, measles, polio, tetanus, tuberculosis and whooping cough. If they are successful, they will save one and a half million children each year from these deadly but vaccine-preventable diseases. And in years to come these diseases, like smallpox, will exist only in memory.

Which Bill Gates will ultimately prevail? Will it be the Bill Gates who sees the value of human life in the form of a child spared from polio, or the Bill Gates whose foundation funds forced sterilization?

There is a lot riding on the outcome. About $63 billion, in fact.

Steven W. Mosher is president of the Population Research Institute in Front Royal, Va.

Endnotes

1 http://www.junkscience.com/july99/malthus.htm.

2 “The Buffett Foundation has helped finance research on the abortion pill, RU-486,” http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~jtownsen/zpg-boston/turner.html.

3 Report in Celebrate Life, originally from the Omaha World Herald.

4 http://www.ipas.org/ipas/mva/index.html

5 “The availability of safe, effective and acceptable technologies for pregnancy termination is an important component of women's reproductive health. Approximately 1.5 million abortions are performed annually in the United States, making legal induced abortion the most frequently performed, and one of the safest, surgical procedures in this country. Despite the documented safety of the procedure, many women have limited access to abortion services because of logistical, administrative, legislative and social obstacles. A recent survey by the Alan Guttmacher Institute found that 84 percent of counties in the United States have no abortion provider, limiting access for many poor or adolescent women and for women living in rural areas (Forrest and Henshaw, 1993). “This document examines the usefulness of an array of technologies to offer early abortion services; to expand access to services; and to increase women's satisfaction with the services they receive. Specific focus will be given to how manual vacuum aspiration (MVA) can be used as a convenient and acceptable early abortion alternative and an effective back-up technology to medical abortion.” “Early Abortion Services: New Choices for Providers and Women,” by Judith Winkler, MEd; Paul D. Blumenthal, MD, MPH; Forrest C. Greenslade, PhD, Advances in Abortion Care Volume 5, Number 2.

6 http://www.plannedparenthood.org/ABORTION/Default.htm. Buffett money has enabled dozens of Planned Parenthood clinics to add abortion services.

7 http://www.forbes.com/asap/120296/html/bill%5Fgates.htm, Forbesmagazine, 12/2/96.

8 On Simon, see "http://www.fumento.com/simon.html"

9 3 September 13, 1999 letter from Gates Foundation to American Life League, http://www.billgateseducate.com/steps06.htm.

10 http://www.dsw-online.de/objectives.html", German Foundation web site.

11 http://www.gatesfoundation.org/pressroom/release.asp?PRindex=55, Gates Foundation web site; http://population.org/pub2.htm" \l "3" , “Jam Packed.”

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