Now THIS is a novel idea. Melinda Gates has revealed in an exclusive interview with Newsweek that
she has decided to make family planning her signature issue … “My goal is to get this back on the global agenda,” she says.
I didn’t realize that it had gone off the “agenda.” In fact, the Gates Foundation and the UN Population Fund have been pouring billions into contraception for decades. And women around the world get to pump liquid contraceptives into their veins because of it. (The preferred method in poorer nations is Depo Provera. Never mind the health consequences and the fact that we would not offer such forms of population control en mass to wealthy women in the developed world.)
Oh, and all of this comes from her “Catholic Faith.”
Perhaps more importantly, there’s her Catholic faith, which has always informed her work…. she went through a lot of soul-searching before she was ready to champion the issue publicly. “I had to wrestle with which pieces of religion do I use and believe in my life, what would I counsel my daughters to do,” she says. Defying church teachings was difficult, she adds, but also came to seem morally necessary.
I suppose being a ‘cafeteria Catholic’ must be hard.
I find this whole issue incredibly sad and misguided. Instead of teaching women how to respect their natural fertility cycles (something that Mother Teresa did in the streets of Calcutta with remarkable success), or even focusing on providing these women with hospitals where they can receive pre- and post-natal care, she is towing the old population control line.
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The whole attitude “Poor people need to stop having babies” just disgusts me.
Forgive me for being cynical, but I wonder if the women they are treating are really given the information they need to make an informed choice. There are plenty of anecdotal stories saying that wemen are being coerced.
Apparently women in India are the latest casualties of forced sterilization.
http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/u.s.-u.k.-foreign-aid-tied-to-indias-forced-sterilization-campaign
Melinda Gates, the Gates Foundation and UNFPA promote Cycle Beads, a form of natural family planning, among the range of family planning methods they advocate.
But NFP is not for everyone, and so other methods, including hormonal methods (which contrary to popular belief work *prior* to fertilization) need to be available to women and men who need and want them.
And when will more prolifers learn to distinguish between advocacy for *voluntary* family planning rights and coercive population control, such as that inflicted by the Chinese government?! These two things are different as day and night.
While the latter is reprehensible, the former is necessary to alleviating the root causes of abortion, and saves lives in so many other ways as well.