No birth and no control: The IPPF formula for a brave new world

It is always a shock to have one's strongest suspicions confirmed. Thus, it was a shock, back in the summer, to be asked to comment on a leaked memo from the contraceptive giant International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). This memo, signed by IPPF worker Vicky Claeys, calls upon the company's European allies to put pressure on their governments to ratify sexual rights for children and to further marginalise parents in their efforts to protect their children.

Of course, this is precisely what most people who know and loathe this egregious organisation would have suspected would be their intention-but to see it spelled out in an official memo was, well, chilling. Organisations, particularly bureaucratic ones, have the unnerving ability to be much worse than any of the little drones who work for them would be capable of on their own. A fact which must owe something, as Lord Egremont said, to not having a soul to be damned or a backside to be kicked. Perhaps emboldened by this immunity to either heavenly or earthly retribution, the memo spells out what must be done.

Under the heading "Urgent Alert on Children's Rights," it draws the attention to what it considers to be the alarming fact that the traditional understanding of family as "based on a man and a woman united by marriage and their children" is reasserting itself in the wake of the Bush victory in the USA and "must be fought."

This view of the family is referred to throughout the document as "rightwing" and, in a naive double-speak reminiscent of 1984, it solemnly holds up to horrified scrutiny the fact that "Right-wing governments and groups are attempting to insert language into the documents of the forthcoming UN Special Session on Children that would strengthen parental authority and control, to the detriment of established children's rights."

It goes without saying that the "established children's rights" to which they are referring are not those established over time by the experience of countless millions of families, and enshrined in the word "tradition." The only "rights" which they want are those they have managed to secure through back-door access to governments in recent years, which have enabled them to acquire free access to children, unencumbered by parents.

They were clearly upset that, at a recent preparatory committee meeting in NewYork, the US delegation emphasised "the vital role the family plays in the upbringing of children." IPPF objects to this view and also to the similar UN Declaration on Human Rights, which refers to the family as "the natural and fundamental group unit of society entitled to protection by society and the state."

They are equally horrified by the absurd suggestion (made, of course, by "right-wing organisations") that the child in the womb should be protected, and recognition given to the fact that the "foetus is a basic phase of childhood." Such ideas, it says, could set a "dangerous precedent" for future agreements.

It is hard to imagine a more hilarious and grisly example of semi-literate salesmanship than this attempt to describe one of the central tenets of Western civilisation throughout time as a "dangerous precedent." Perhaps we can look forward to them describing the right to die naturally when one is old as a similar "dangerous precedent" when euthanasia has become established medical practice for thirty years!

Then again the memo is very agitated that yet more "right-wing organisations" are "aggressively promoting" the idea that "instead of teaching children how to protect themselves from HIV/Aids, we should teach them the culture of chastity and self-control."

This outrageous suggestion may be shocking to those contemplating the inevitable loss of business that would result from a culture of chastity, but it is clearly and unequivocally true. The fact is that no one on earth can offer complete protection from HIV/AIDS because no device yet invented can do that. The condom has a known failure rate of about 15% against pregnancy-- much higher amongst the young-and furthermore, even properly made condoms can have naturally occurring channels which are at least 50 times larger than the AIDS virus.

No doubt this is why the American Centers for Disease Control concluded in the 1990s that studies of the risk of HIV infection for condom users are "too dangerous to undertake ... for ethical reasons." In other words, you can't ask people to be guinea pigs in an experiment that could quite easily kill them, when they aren't even ill!

However, that doesn't stop the IPPF "aggressively promoting" condoms in Africa even though many thousands will most assuredly die because they thought they were safe. One has to ask whether the principal providers of the condoms and sexual advice in these countries are likely to inform children of the stark fact that they cannot protect themselves effectively against the deadly disease except by "chastity and self-control"? The answer is, as Eliza Doolittle said, "not bloody likely!"

Who then, is most likely to do so? The answer is, clearly, those who love them-their parents. Hence Ms. Claeys' urgent appeal to prevent parental involvement in the counselling of children and their provision with contraceptive advice in every country where their policies hold sway; which is, unfortunately, everywhere except possibly Afghanistan and the Antarctic. As sexual disease levels are rising to unprecedented levels in our own country, due in large part to the promiscuity that is encouraged by an industry that profits from untrammeled sexual activity, her attempt to rally the salesmen of the "easy lay" is, from their point of view, as she says, "crucial."

Will we fall for it? As the biggest abortion provider in the world, IPPF is indeed a mighty exterminator of human life and a power in almost every land. Together with its close associates-the UN population fund, UNICEF, the World Health Organisation and the World Bank-it is in a good position to exercise tremendous influence on governments everywhere.

Amidst this darkness, it is good to see the little light represented by Ms. Claeys' chief bogeyman, President Bush. Here is an extract from his speech to a Cultural Centre's opening ceremony on March 22 of this year, which went almost completely unreported in our media and goes a long way towards explaining the rabid detestation and mockery of him by liberals everywhere-at least until the shattering events of 1I th September changed the world.

The culture of life is a welcoming culture, never excluding, never dividing, never despairing, and always affirming the goodness of life in all its seasons.

In the culture of life we must make room for the stranger. We must comfort the sick. We must care for the aged. We must welcome the immigrant. We must teach our children to be gentle with one another. We must defend in love the innocent child waiting to be born.

I love that last sentence. As eloquent as it is short, it sealed Mr. Bush's fate with media opinion on both sides of the Atlantic, in the world in which we all lived at that time. It is strangely and wonderfully true that, when things begin to go seriously wrong in a decadent society, the most useless people of all-from every point of view-are those who are governed by the profit motive, to the exclusion of everything else. It takes virtue to fight the good fight and you wouldn't expect to find IPPF in there with the goodies. True to this form, their response to the calamity in New York was to blunder forward offering free "reproductive health care, including medical and surgical abortion."

One can only gape in astonishment at such a crass, ill-judged response. Yet it was almost perfectly characteristic. Even when faced with the fact of so many cruel deaths, their only response was to offer more of the same. Such is the character of this monstrous organisation to whose tender mercies we have consigned the education of so many hapless children all over the world.

"To defend children from harm at all stages of their development" is simply unthinkable to the parasites who feed off the ills of decadent societies. On social matters, the media would have to have a collective brain-transplant before it could convincingly use a vocabulary of restraint and morality again-even if it could remember the words. As for film-makers, they have shunned real virtue-as opposed to virtual reality-for so long that it is difficult to believe they could even act it with conviction if they were called upon to do so. For organisations like IPPF, and their thousands of related employees, it would be the death knell of all their freebies, their salaries and their bonuses.

And yet, in truth, we are going to have to confront and oppose the commercial ethic embodied in the IPPF agenda and deployed by a brain-washed media, if we are to rescue our own younger generation from calamity. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that today's generation-which listened to the IPPF's anti-parent message and followed its advice for the last 20 years or so-must be the most diseased generation of young people in history. With half a million cases of chlamydia-just one serious sexually transmitted disease, actually reported from clinics in Great Britain, and not including those cases recorded by family doctors, for which ten times that figure is realistically estimated-we should hang our heads in shame at what we have allowed our young people to be led into.

So the real question is, why have so many otherwise sensible people not grasped the elementary fact that the message of the contraceptive salesmen is essentially a salespitch that time and experience has shown to be completely wrong? They promised that if they were allowed a free hand in schools, they would reduce both the number of illegitimate babies born to young people and the abortion rate. They also claimed that more sex-education would reduce the number of young people who became promiscuously sexually active and, consequently, the amount of sexually transmitted disease amongst the age group. None of these promises have been fulfilled and the situation has got inexorably out of hand.

To give the situation some sort of historic context, the illegitimacy rate in 1952, when the present Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne, was the same as it had been in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in the late 1500s; about 10% of births. In other words, it remained more or less stable for four hundred years. Then someone with the authority decided to let the wolf in among the lambs. The latest figures show the illegitimacy rate as being close to 40% and still climbing.

Though this figure is the highest in Europe, it does not give a clear picture of anything except the fact that some other countries have handled the problem differently. For instance, the French have been giving the so-called "morning after" pill to girls in school (from the age of eleven) for several years now and still have a higher abortion rate for the age-group than Great Britain, and the highest venereal-disease rate in Europe. So they, at least, have nothing to be proud of.

The Dutch situation, much cited as a brilliant example of the effectiveness of sex-education, is also not what it seems. Nobody knows what their conception rate is amongst the young since they specialise in "menstrual extraction" as a means of preventing pregnancy, and this procedure, which removes all evidence of premature sexual activity, is not registered in official statistics. Several other factors are also never mentioned in the Dutch context, as-for example-the fact that sex-education there is not obligatory in schools, contraceptives are not handed out free by the school nurse, and no financial support is offered to any girl who becomes pregnant when unmarried. They are simply handed over to the care of their families.

In truth, the only countries where you can be fairly certain that young people are protected from the dangers of premature sexual activity are those "backward" countries like Greece and Portugal where pornographic sex-education of the type our young people are subjected to is unheard of. They too have a low illegitimacy rate; but they are never mentioned when this subject is discussed.

It was not the advent of contraception itself that set off the tidal wave of juvenile sexuality. Contraceptive devices had been available to adults and married people for decades before then. It was the introduction of these things directly to young people by methods that have become ever more graphic, crude, and provocative. Under the auspices, very often, of the contraceptive industry itself, any moral implications in human sexual behaviour have been simply written out of the agenda; young people have been told that sexual behaviour has almost no moral dimension and few dangers "if they use a condom."

This flagrant lie has seldom been seriously challenged in the media for reasons that are best described as "cultural." Those in the media who do not profit directly from the licentiousness of mass culture still uphold it through fear of seeming old-fashioned and reactionary. They still continue to pontificate at the drop of a hat against smoking and its effects in later life, but the health of young people before they have even embarked upon adult life is a widely ignored subject.

However, to anyone with an interest in social history, this collective blindness on the part of the educated public in general, and professionals in particular, is not new. There have been fashions in the past that were quite as lethal in their effect as the puerile dream of sexual liberation that has predated the sorry mess we are in today.

A particular hero of mine, Dr. William Cadogan (1711-1797) wrote an open letter in 1748 to the Governors of the Foundling Hospital in London, setting out the "unwholesome and indeed lethal" procedures of child-care that were then favoured by the educated class and begging that the regime at the hospital not use them.

Of course, out of deference to his profession, he makes a small attempt to blame grandmothers for the kind of advice that was followed by the nurses employed by the middle-classes, but even he had to admit that: "these grandmothers were taught by the physicians of their unenlightened days, when physicians, as appears by late discoveries, were mistaken in many things; being led away by hypothetical reasonings to entertain very wild conceits, in which they were greatly bewildered themselves, and misled others to believe." Now that sounds familiar, doesn't it?

The central problem he was addressing in his open letter was the fact that, amongst the educated classes he was addressing in London, 50% of their children died before their fifth birthday. This was quite unnecessary, he said, because it was far higher than amongst the rural poor, and even the urban poor, if they were lucky enough not to be able to afford the services of a doctor. "Health and posterity are the portion of the laborious poor," he said, "the want of superfluity confines them within the limits of nature."

So what were these practices which killed 50% of children who were not poor or disadvantaged in any way (except, perhaps, in their choice of parents)? It must surely have been something vastly unforeseen and sneaky, so that even the "people of good sense and easy circumstances" that Cadogan describes his readers to be could not have been expected to understand or avoid it. But no; the truth is quite the opposite. The nursing practices that he describes as being fashionable amongst the educated classes included: constantly force-feeding infants, 10 or even 12 times a day; and strapping them into corsets to give them a "sugar-loaf" shape that savagely constricted all their organs, then loading them with clothes so that they could scarcely breathe. Diapers were changed as infrequently as possible since the urine needed to be re-absorbed into their skin.

Mothers played their part in this child-care disaster by almost never feeding their infants themselves, on the grounds that their own bodies needed their milk! Experts of the type that we are familiar with today obviously played a part in this madness because, as Cadogan points out, doctors regularly made holes in the breasts of new mothers "to let out the superfluity." Whilst the mothers suffered the genuine damage of breast mutilation at the hands of their doctors, the infant was farmed out to a poor woman to feed; the child might contract tuberculosis from her, as Samuel Johnson did (it lasted all his life, in the form of scrofula).

It is also, obviously, the medical profession that dreamed up the pseudoscientific nightmare diet prescribed for newborn infants. "The general practice is, as soon as a child is born, to cram a dab of butter and sugar down its throat, a little oil, boiled bread and sugar, or a thin gruel mixed with wine or ale." By this means, he said, perpetuated throughout their infancy, countless thousands of healthy, strong infants are brought to the grave; killed by the ministrations of doctors under the complacent eyes of their parents.

Cadogan's letter was very influential in bringing about the demise of that particular fashion in child-care, and it went into at least ten editions before the end of the century. However, by the middle of the next century, this barbaric treatment of children by educated people had been replaced with another permutation of foolishness that has a more modern ring about it.

Child labour in the mines and collieries of Britain was widespread, with children as young as six years old being employed to work coal seams that were less than two feet high.

When the great Lord Salisbury made his impassioned plea to Parliament to end the degradation and exploitation of these children, he was attacked by all sorts of interest groups, always in the name of the children themselves, and on their behalf. "It is their freedom the pious Lord wants to take away," they said, "these children know what they want. They want money and the liberty to sell their labour on the market." They were not interested in the desperate state of health of these young workers, the fatalities among them, nor the state of their health in later life.

Nor was it only pit owners and other employers who supported the rights of children to be used as little more than slaves in someone else's moneymaking game. Civil libertarians too found common cause with the silk-- hatted millionaires of the industrial revolution. A Member of Parliament referred to Lord Salisbury's proposed legislation as "an attempt to bring back the barbarism of the Middle Ages." It was the spirit of the age they were representing, even those who were not directly enriched by the profitable exploitation of the children.

This much at least can be deduced by the fact that, despite having abolished slavery some years before, Parliament only raised (to ten) the age at which it was legal to employ boys down in the mines. Women and girls, on the other hand, were forbidden to work underground and an inspection system was established to make sure that the new law was complied with.

These two examples give a good indication of how easy it is to overlook the welfare of children in the interests of articulate, powerful, exploitative bodies. The media, by their nature, are influenced by the rich and powerful-they want to associate with them, they benefit from their approval and patronage. Children, on the other hand, are largely voiceless. The so-called "children's rights" groups that have sprung up in the last few years are almost completely bogus in the sense that, far from representing the needs of children, they exist to give prominence to what certain adults think children should want-and to crush all other adult, particularly parental, opposition to them. Thus children's real rights are about as safe with them as they were with Lord Londonderry who, in 1842, opposed Lord Salisbury's bill on the grounds that the education a six-year old child received underground was superior to the "reading education" it would get in school!

One day soon we are going to have to face the waste of time and life involved in children not yet out of their teens having to visit genito-urinary clinics as if they were seasoned soldiers or dirty old men. And both young men and women discovering that they are infertile because of a silent disease they were never even told about when they were being encouraged to read "The Good Grope Guide." Or the loss and regret involved in aborting a child; or the sudden onset of breast-cancer years before it was ever known in the past, as a result of that fatal choice. Or even experiencing the magic of first motherhood in a rabbit-hutch provided by the local council, ten floors up in an inner-city tower-block-and alone. All these things are the price that has been paid to keep Ba'al in business.

There is so much that is blighted in the lives of the hundreds of thousands of young people who have been inveigled into a world of premature sexual activity, principally by cynical commercial interests aided, as always, by the deeply foolish. They didn't need it; they could have done without it; if they had been told about the real risks and urged to heed them by the pop-idols they worship, they might have been saved. Their ongoing miseries should be branded on the conscience of the generation that raised them, and failed them. Again.

Lynette Burrows is a well-known English educator and journalist. This article appeared in somewhat different form in the August 17, 2001 issue of the (London) Catholic Herald.

Copyright Human Life Foundation, Incorporated Fall 2001
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