Starving people need real aid not population control
When the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) snaps into action, it is usually to give out do-it-yourself abortion kits and pills in situations where people haven’t basic medicines or even clean water. They did that during the Balkans war; they have backed China’s coercive one-child policy, and the efforts of Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori to pressurise Peruvian women to be sterilised.
Our Government, in the person of Minister of State Tom Kitt, has protested against the recent defunding by the Bush administration in the US of the same UNFPA. The European Union, has stepped in to pay the money the US are refusing to the UNFPA. While backing the EU on this, we ourselves have cut Third World aid.
People are starving to death in southern Africa. Couldn’t real aid in the form of food and basic medicines have been bought with that Irish money for those starving people? Aren’t we a right bunch of hypocrites? The UN has become an organisation whose right hand doesn’t pretend to know what its left hand is doing. The UN itself, in its more lucid moments, has rejected the myth of population explosion.
A recent article by Fred Pearce in the New Scientist (20 July 2002) , reports that scientists now predict that the population of the whole world by 2050 (whether developed or underdeveloped at present) will begin to implode. The consequences of such implosion must be disastrous.
Many of those politicians who promised to legislate for abortion on the lines of the X case judgement just didn’t get re-elected. The present Government has done a fudge at EU level on the issue of embryo research funding. They have now backed, along with the EU, the coercive wing of the UN population controllers.
The electorate have shown before how they can deliver a protest vote. The Government mustn’t take continued support for granted.
Séamas de Barra,
83 Beaufort Downs,
Rathfarnham Village,
Dublin 14.
