International Aid for Birth Control

Some bad stuff has happened because of “population control”

According to a study by the Government Accounting Office during the 1970s, widespread sterilization abuse was found in four areas served by the HIS (Indian Health Services). In 1975 alone, some 25,000 native American women were permanently sterilized - many after being coerced, misinformed, or threatened. One former HIS nurse reported the use of tubal ligation on “uncooperative” or “alchoholic” women in the 1990s.

In India, the experiment with the forced population control in the mid-1970s led to the collapse of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s government. The memory of millions of people being hauled off to sterilization camps has since left a lasting negative image of birth control among the public, according to S. Ghosh, the current population official.

Source: http://speakout.com/activism/issue_briefs/1241b-1.html

Human rights abuses are endemic to population control
China’s national population control policy, the ongoing persistence of its one-child policy and the compulsory abortion which is its enforcement mechanism, have become almost a truism. But China is not an isolated incident. To date, 38 countries are recorded as having human rights violations occur within the enforcement of their population policies.
The latest example of such violations is Peru. In July 1995, President Alberto Fujimori announced that family planning would become a major priority for the government. Shortly thereafter, the Congress legalized sterilization as a method of family planning, and by the following spring, targets had been set. The effort to meet the regionally allocated targets has resulted in the deaths of an as yet unspecified number of women, coerced sterilization, sterilization in exchange for food or clothing, and sterilization without knowledge or without informed consent.
That such abuses abound in other countries as well comes as no surprise when the mechanism of governmentally promoted population reduction programs is understood. Almost without exception, the success of these programs is evaluated with reference to set targets or quotas for contraceptive use, sterilizations, or reductions in fertility among the national population. Historical precedent shows us that these quotas are enforced with little regard for human rights considerations, such as informed consent, or in many cases, without consent at all.

Source: http://www.ask.com/main/metaAnswer.asp?t=ai&s=a&MetaEngine=directhit&en=te&eo=1&o=0&frames=true&url=http%3A%2F%2Fask.directhit.com%2Ffcgi-bin%2Fredirurl.fcg%3Furl%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.pop.org%2Fstudents%2Fbcrcont.html%26qry%3Dwhat%2Bare%2Bthe%2Bproblems%2Bof%2Binternational%2Baid%2Bfor%2Bbirth%2Bcontrol%26rnk%3D5%26cz%3D8b133770774e79df%26src%3DDH_ASK_SRCH%26u%3D∾=7&adcat=hlth&pt=Birth+Control+Quotes-+contraception&dm=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pop.org%2Fstudents%2Fbcrcont.html&io=15&qid=5ADBFC567C1F0D4BAE0D4CF9B96ACB7E&back=&ask=What+are+the+problems+of+international+aid+for+birth+control

When Maria Aguirrez woke up on the morning of June 5, 1977, she was, at first, too drenched with sweat to feel the blood. They had warned her at the clinic that there might be some bleeding, but this was more than a period. Her skirt, the worn sheet, the mat, were soaked through – more than after her oldest daughter’s birth, when the midwife had, at one point, simply prayed. Dimly, Maria must have realized that the baby was already awake and fussing. He was still fussing an hour later when Maria’s sister, summoned by the older children, came running in. Maria was no longer sweating.
The death of Maria Aguirrez (not her real name) does not even figure as a statistic in our story. It was recorded as the result of a fever. That the fever and the bleeding were the result of an intrauterine device (IUD) known to be unsafe was not recorded. Nor would the information have made any difference to the government and corporate officials behind the distribution of the device; they were already well aware of the history of medical problems associated with it.
The U.S. government and U.S. drug companies maintain a systematic and intentional double standard for the sale of contraceptives. Unsafe IUDs, dangerous high-estrogen birth control pills and, most recently, Depo-Provera – an injectable contraceptive not approved for American use – are bought up wholesale by the U.S. government for mass consumption in the Third World. This is the story of how and where and why these contraceptive dumps take place, of the corporations that profit from them and of the government official, Dr. R.T. Ravenholt, who headed the Office of Population of the U.S. Agency for International Development and engineered the dumps.
The contraceptive double standard surfaced as a public issue only in the summer of 1978, when a congressional committee held hearings on the Depo-Provera problem: Should the U.S. government subsidize the export to Third World nations of a contraceptive drug that had been ruled unsafe for American women? Pharmaceutical company spokespeople, officials of the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) and representatives of private population control agencies stood up one after another to advance the “humanitarian” defense of the double standard. Because the risks of dying in childbirth are so much greater in the Third World than in the United States, they asserted the use of almost any contraceptive is justified. Scientists from selected Third World governments, many of them U.S.-sponsored dictatorships like Chile and Thailand, seconded the argument, adding that their “national sovereignty” would be violated if they were denied access to the contraceptive of their choice. Consumer representatives countered that there is no excuse for sending our least safe contraceptive abroad and questioned the accountability of the “sovereign” governments, which, it is now known, have received millions of dollars in bribes from U.S. drug companies like Upjohn Co. (maker of Depo-Provera) and G. D. Searle Co. (a manufacturer of birth control pills).
At the bottom the contraceptive issue is no different than the case of Tris-treated pajamas, carcinogenic pesticides or lethal antibiotics: products that had been found unsafe for domestic use are still being sold overseas. There is, however, a crucial difference in the case of contraceptives: dumping them is not only a common business practice; it is part of U.S. foreign policy.

Source: http://www.motherjones.com/mother_jones/N79/ehrenreich.html

Something which just occured to me Fisternis, evidence of the dominance of American culture.

What language are you typing in?

When was America anywhere close to speaking German?