The Dark History of Population Control

[Jan Klimkowski]

The human consequences of the popluation control agenda, quotes from a "clinical trial" of a new long-acting contraceptive on poor women in Bangladesh:

INTERVIEWER: If they ask you to take Norplant again, will you?

WOMAN: That thing! Even if 14 generations of my ancestors asked me, I shall refuse.

INTERVIEWER [SUBTITLED]: How many times did you go to the clinic and ask them to take it out?

WOMAN: In 6 months about 12 times. Yes, about 12 times. I went to the clinic and pleaded 'I'm having so many problems. I'm confined to bed most of the time. Please remove it.' My health broke down completely. I was reduced to skin and bone I had milk and eggs when I could, but that did me no good.

WOMAN [SUBTITLED]: I felt so bad, my body felt so weak, even my husband told me it was all very inconvenient.

INTERVIEWER: How is your relationship with your husband?

WOMAN: What else could it be? He says he'll get another wife tomorrow. I told the doctors, 'Please take it out, I'm having so many problems.'

INTERVIEWER: How many times did you ask to get it removed?

WOMAN: Oh, about 15 times. One day I was so desperate. I gave up hope. I felt like throwing myself under the wheels of a car.

FARIDA AKHTER: One woman when she begged to remove it, they said 'I'm dying, please help me get it out'. They said 'OK, when you die you inform us, we'll get it out of your dead body', so this is the way they were treated. In a slum area people are living in a very small, like 5ft by 7ft where at least five family members are living and these woman are working outside. The most important resource they have is their own healthy condition.

NARRATOR: In Bangladesh if a woman can't work, often her family can't eat.

NASREEN HUQ: I think the Norplant trials were bad science, really shoddy science, because they were not recording the side-effects. They were scolding women when they wanted to report side-effects, they were scolding women if they came in at a time when they were not scheduled to come in for a follow-up check. Their request for removal were disregarded, were not even recorded during the trial. So how can they tell us that it was an acceptable method for women and that this has been scientifically tested out, you know? When continuation rates reflect caution, reflect refusal to remove, reflect disregard of women's concerns, reflect disregard for women's health, how can they even accept that this has been the work of scientists?

FARIDA AKHTER: If you look at the trial, it looks like as if this woman are no better than a guinea pig and a guinea pig perhaps is more expensive in the West, that's why our woman are cheaper here, so they're easily available, they can be easily controlled and their bodies can be easily tested.

NASREEN HUQ: When you conduct a trial in this sort of setting, you are simply taking advantage of them being poor. You've access, cheap access, to subjects, and you can write it up as a successful trial. You're not in any way advancing science, you're taking advantage of a situation in which women are poor and they don't want to have more children, and by providing this method, or conducting this trial, you are not in any way letting them out of their desperate situation. I mean, I have been trained in science and I'm sorry, this is not science.

NARRATOR: The trials were developed with funds from the US Agency for International Development.

The fanatics and true believers in population control via chemical sterilization without hospital treatment:

STEPHEN MUMFORD: It's a very simple procedure, takes only a few minutes. It can be done in very primitive settings by people who do not necessarily have a lot of clinical skills. Quinacrine is clearly the cheapest method available in the world and in fact the second cheapest method would probably be more than 100 times as expensive as the Quinacrine method. For $10,000's worth of Quinacrine pellets, 70,000 women can be sterilised.

INTERVIEWER: Is that a lot of women?

STEPHEN MUMFORD: That's a lot of women, and a lot of grateful women.

An ethical scientist provides a counter view:

PROF. SHREE MULAY: This method of producing scar tissue is extremely barbaric. to try to damage the tissue so that you produce inflammation and block the tubes that way I think is extremely crude. It is imprecise for sure because one does not know where exactly that is going to take place and it causes a tremendous amount of pain because of the inflammation. There has been a long history of chemical sterilisation research and this history is really an ugly one and it's quite a shocking one because all kinds of agents have been used - sulphuric acid, formaldehyde - all of these agents which actually burn the tissue and cause production of scar tissue. Chemical sterilisation was first tried out by the Nazis in their very first experiments in the death camps. That it has been picked up in the 60s, 70s and the 80s and been promoted as rescue for the women of the Third World I think is quite extraordinary.

And here's the money:

NARRATOR: So who is funding the research?

BETSY HARTMANN: A student of mine was examining who was funding the anti-immigration movement in the United States and searching through the tax records of various foundations, when she chanced upon the tax records of the Leland Fikes Foundation and found to her amazement that that Foundation was not only funding the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which is very anti-immigrant, but Mumford's work on Quinacrine. It's very scary that you have a private foundation funding both an anti-immigration group and a form of unethical contraception. I think there's a racial fear involved in this politics.

STEPHEN MUMFORD: My God this is they call this an anti-immigrant organisation. I think that the Federation of American Immigration Reform is a highly patriotic institution, that is correct. I mean very few Americans agree that we should have open borders and FAIR's position is that we should not have open borders and that has been the focus of their efforts since they were created. I'm very happy to identify with the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

ELTON KESSEL: You know, if you open the borders of the United States, the United States will become a developing country.

STEPHEN MUMFORD: That's correct. Most Americans do not want to live in these conditions, including myself.

NARRATOR: They've had sympathisers for their philosophy in high places.

STEPHEN MUMFORD: I've just completed a book and George Bush was just leaving the directorship of the CIA at that time. George Bush read the synopsis again, which said over-population is a graver threat to US security than the nuclear threat. George Bush says I agree with everything you're saying here in this synopsis and I can assure you that the people at the CIA agree with you too, so at that point I knew that at the highest levels of our government this issue was being discussed.

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