Malthus, call your office

Struggling to live after being nearly exterminated, Rwanda has learned that its "friends" offer the same kind of assistance as its enemies, insisting that fewer Rwandans are better than more.

Officials who are designing the new population control program said it would include a requirement that everyone who visits a hospital or health center for any reason be counseled on family planning. Women of child-bearing age will be offered free contraceptive devices including Norplant II, a small silicone pin that is inserted beneath the skin and is effective for up to five years. All schools will offer comprehensive sex education courses.

“The basis for this new campaign is already in place,” said Laura Hoemeke, director of the Twubakane Decentralization and Health Project, a community initiative that includes family planning. Though the Bush administration has often discouraged birth control, the United States government is financing this program.

God help us. Saying there are too many citizens for economic growth is a socialist lie, because economic growth stagnates without a rich and renewable labour market. Look at the difference between northern Europe (dwindling away except for immigration) and southeast Asia (booming in every measurable way). This is an insult to a long-suffering people and a medical travesty. Women ask for children and receive synthetic hormones; they want healthy families and get the sexual revolution in return.

In a sign of the changing climate, a government-sponsored newspaper, New Times, recently published a supplement with a front-page headline, “Rapid Population Growth: A Constraint on Resources.” Below was a photo of an idyllic landscape with the caption, “This beautiful scenery will diminish if population is not controlled.” An accompanying editorial said that Rwanda’s population “is already big enough” and that “drastic measures” were needed to keep it from growing.

Officials designing the population control campaign say they hope to produce a plan that could become a model for other African countries, and perhaps persuade a foreign philanthropy to pay its entire cost. They have already begun consulting specialists from the United States and other countries.

Hard to compete with Madison Avenue. If the airbrished photos and rigged statistics say sterile sex is better, who are real people to argue? Shame.

Comments

[Amy]

"a requirement that everyone who visits a hospital or health center for any reason be counseled on family planning. Women of child-bearing age will be offered free contraceptive devices including Norplant II, a small silicone pin that is inserted beneath the skin and is effective for up to five years"

Umm - how about women who haven't had children yet? Or women who have a child or children and *gasp* would like to have more? And what measures, pray tell, will be directed towards boys and men? And what will happen when the current population grows older and there are not enough younger people to care for them? And how can we be sure that people won't be have these or other devices implanted in them WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT OR KNOWLEDGE? How, exactly, does this NOT exploit women, especially those who are the most vulnerable, poor, and uneducated?

[Karen]

By now it should be apparent that proponents of "population control" are racist elites who have very definite ideas about who should and who should not be "populating."

Kinda like Margaret Sanger.

[Small]

Errr- really? Racist elites? I wouldn't put Sanger in that category- despite her unfortunate dalliance with eugenics.

[gsk]

How can anyone pretend Sanger was not a raving racist?? Have you read anything she wrote? I'm baffled, truly.