Posted on 07/20/2002 1:27:51 PM PDT by Askel5
Report and Recommendations of the Republican Task Force on Earth Resources and Population. House Republican Research Committee
House Republican Research Committee
Robert Taft, Jr., Ohio, Chairman
July 8, 1970 Congressional Record, pp. 23188 and contining.
(Current excerpts taken from Section II on Population)
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It is almost self-evident that the greater the human population, the greater the demands for natural resources and the greater the danger to ecological balance. The paramount questions deals with an optimum human population.
How many is too many people in relation to available resources?
No one seems to honestly know but many believe that our current environmental problems indicate that the optimum level has been surpassed.
A fair analysis would seem to be that our population and consumption rates have grown more rapidly than our ability to develop and supply the resources being consumed while protecting our environment. […]
Many of our nation's social problems can be attributed to population density and the congestion of our urban areas.
Projections of the Urban Land Institute place 60% of our population in the year 2000 in just four huge megalopolis areas— (1) from Boston to Washingon, D.C., another from Utica, New York, to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a third from San Francisco to the Mexican border, and the fourth from Jacksonville to Miami, across to Tampa and St. Petersburg. Most of the remaining 40% of the population is expected to live in urban areas as well. Metropolitan areas of over 150,000 grew faster than the national average of 9.8%.
This trend toward density creates immense stress on the public services necessary to accommodate the population. Police, fire, sanitation, transportation—all of these and many others, including education, health and housing, have been unable to keep pace with the demands created by this congestion.
Sociologists believe that this density of population has been a prime cause for increased automobile traffic deaths, drug addiction, broken marriage, alcoholism, crime, homosexuality, suicides, venereal disease and heart attacks as a result of the social stresses that man encounters in his struggle to exist in such a congested environment.
In both his Population Message of July, 1968 and his State of the Union message of January, 1970, President Nixon stressed the need for America to begin developing a national growth policy.
In his State of the Union address, the President said:
The role of family planning services as part of an overall medical health care system was covered in the Task Force report on Federal Family Planning Programs—Domestic and International which was released on December 22, 1969. In that report, we stressed that an estimated 5.3 million American women do not have access to information or techniques available to the rest of society about how to limit their fertility.
It was further noted that this inaccessibility of knowledge undermines the morals of our society and was not in keeping with the basic principles of a democratic system.
Family planning is more than simply birth control.
It includes many aspect of maternal and child healthcare which must be made available to all our citizens. Birth control must be kept within the total context of Family Planning and should be considered always as an available option for any individual.
The belief that Family Planning constitutes population control must be rejected. Over 97% of American married couples utilize maternal and child healthcare services and an estimated 90% [2] practice birth control in some form and still the United States experience a population growth of 1%, a doubling every 70 years.
Family Planning constitutes the knowledge base for regulating births and reducing infant mortality. Population control is to limit birth, not to regulate births. It is necessary to understand the difference.
The practice of birth control is an accepted norm for American married couples. There is, however, concern among many demographers over the widespread desire on the part of Americans to produce three and four children in the belief that such family sizes constitute the practice of birth control. Without failsafe contraceptive devices, available to both men and women, that are medically safe and easily administered, it is not realistic to believe that an honest, free choice decision is available to those who prefer to limit their families to two children.
Population control is not a function for federal, state or local governments. However, Family Planning services, within the context of maternal and child healthcare services, must be made more accessible to the poor in providing these services as a proper function of all governments at a sensible level of costs.
As part of Family Planning Services, birth control information as well as devices and techniques to regulate fertility should be available to all those who want them and cannot afford them through private sources. The major problem in providing these specific birth control services has been the availability of trained personnel. Medical doctors and nurses are hard-pressed for services in more specialized areas of medicine. Also, providing family services to the poor has not been considered an appealing avocation of the medical profession.
Ideally, our entire healthcare system should be overhauled to create less reliance on specialized medicine and overburdened hospitals and more dependence on para-medical professionals in providing healthcare services and more reliance on providing proper nutrition for all Americans.
The legality of abortion and of sterilization does not come under the jurisdiction of the federal government, but they are properly within the purview of state governments where medical laws are widely divergent. The most disturbing aspect of the abortion issue that was brought before the Task Force, is the disparity between the availability of professional abortion services to those women who can afford the $500-$700 to obtain a therapeutic abortion and the estimated one million illegitimate abortions performed by the unlicensed practitioners for those women who cannot afford professional service. It is apparent that many women who desire abortions take extreme measures, and subject themselves to dangerous methods in order to obtain an abortion.
It therefore seems that the main objective of abortion law revision should be to eradicate the increasing number of unlicensed and unqualified practitioners who jeopardize the health and safety of these women and to establish a system that eliminates discrimination resulting from present pricing structures.
The Task Force is committed to the development of a national population policy. We believe education, family planning services, contraceptive research and development as well as transportation, and community planning and development should be important components of such policy.
Before we can begin to remedy a problem, we must first realize that we have one.
Despite the increased interest regarding this problem, there is still a vast number of Americans who are unfamiliar with even the most essential understanding of this potentially dangerous population growth rate.
The Task Force feels that one of the most important functions of the federal government is to supply the public with the latest and most accurate data. This should be done in a non-judgmental fashion that will enable the citizens to be well-informed and to influence their own remedial action.
It is expected that the Council on Environmental Quality and the recently established President's Commission on Population Growth and the American Future will provide the public with this necessary information and ensure continuing data regarding the latest developments.
Death tolls have been reduced in every country to negligible rates from epidemics and diseases such as malaria, measles, smallpox, cholera, polio and tuberculosis; major advances have been made against heart disease and cancer, artificial organs can now prolong life.
Since we accept these intrusions into nature's control of population as morally justified, are we not unwise to consider birth control with equal moral justificiation?
If we continue to support government activities to reduce disease and improve health in order to prolong life under the auspices of what is good for society, then should we not consider birth control as a government activity for similar reasons?
In the Task Force report on "Federal Government Family Planning Program" it was recommended that Congress increase appropriations for contraceptive research in the amount of $380,000,000.00 over the next five years.
In conjunction with this research, the Task Force now feels research in the methodologies of pre-determining sex before insemination must be considered and pursued.
For birth limitation and regulation to be an honest free choice goal of Americans to undertake, pre-determination of the sex of children and failsafe contraception must be available to everyone.
The Task Force believes that much more knowledge is needed by the public in general about fertility control, contraception techniques and sex determination, as well as the social and material consequences resulting from increase population, in order that the broadest number of options are available to everyone in making personal decisions that affect the use of natural resources, family size and ultimately our environment. There must exist a greater sensitivity to these problems which cannot be provided by the federal government. The government can provide leadership and direction but should never be put into a position of having to enact controls on population as a result of public ignorance and indifference.
[2] Charles F. Westoff and Norman B. Ryder, Recent Trends and Attitudes Toward Fertility Control and in the Practice of Contraception in the U.S. University of Michigan, November, 1967, p. 10,2 Ibid |
I was totally unprepared for the "predetermination of sex" to be thrown in ever so casually in the final paragraphs of their Recommendation. I'd kept my cool throughout the transcribing of the "optimum population" bit as well as the abortion and persistent attempts to draw some distinction between Family Planning and population control but I'll admit that caught me by surprise and made me cry. I'm such a freakin' wuss about this stuff. I should know better.
Still, I wish they'd made the relationship between the State's moral control of population and the predetermination of sex more clear.
Maybe China's got a task force finding that'll spell it out for me.
Abortion and the English Language (Joe Sobran)
Language is important.
Agreed.
the Body Politic
Vol. 01, No. 06 - June 1991, Page 8
Copyright © 1991, 1998 by the Body Politic Inc.
Title X - Quotable Quotes
Read My Lips!
We need to make population and family planning household words. We need to take the sensationalism out of this topic so that it can no longer be usedby militants who have no real knowledge of the voluntary nature of the program but, rather, are using it as a political stepping stone. If family planning is anything, it is a public health matter.
Rep. George Bush, 1969
Most important is that legislation be recognized as ... a health-care service mechanism and not a population control mechanism.
Rep. George Bush, 1970
As we amended the Social Security Act in 1967, I was impressed by the sensible approach of Alan Guttmacher, the obstetrician who served as president of Planned Parenthood. It was ridiculous, he told the committee, to blame mothers on welfare for having too many children when the clinics and hospitals they used were absolutely prohibited from saying a word about birth control. So we took the lead in Congress in providing money and urging -- in fact requiring -- that in the United States family planning services be available for every woman, not just the private patient with her own gynecologist.
George Bush (Foreword to World Population Crisis by Phyllis Piotrow), 1973
I don't get it.
Shocked, shocked, that gambling is happening at this establishment(to all lurkers rent "Casablanca" and listen for that line, and you will get the gist of Askel's disingenuousness).
Naturally, this studied silence where a person's Personal Convictions are concerned seems odd for a "democractic" society where all opinions should be heard.
A true departure from the valiant fight against the State as waged by individual Catholics for the first half of the century who were opposed to eugenics, scientific racism, the genocide that is birth control and state-enforced population control (through Clean Hands methods of education, funding, provision of implements and "data" to ease a person's Choice in the matter).
... runs a poor second to that of our "Pro-Life" establishment.
No doubt, more thread of hair wide linked conspiracy theories are in our future. That's your forte and you are practising it with relish today.
Well, that of the Democrats sure did. Many of them needed a certain regrooving from their liberal recognition of the War on Poverty as targeted genocide of the poor and attempt to maintain certain "population differentials".
Plus, the sound and fury of Democrats and their "litmus tests" worked wonders to obfuscate the FACT that abortion and population control (much less "environmentalism" at th expense of human life) are GOP policies and always have been.
I think it's important to remember always that on key issues such as this or China, for example, the message they're sending is essentially the same.
George Bush tried to establish a fetal tissue bank long before Clinton took a stab at it. It was George W. Bush who nailed open the most profitable window of Non-Personhood in his first televised address to the nation.
If you get past appearances, you'll find not a lot changes. It's merely the Fashion (as circumstances dictate) for one party or the other to assume the mantle of morality and oppose in part State-sanctioned manufacture, destruction and control of human life.
But essentially, they're one. As evidenced by their agreeing -- and setting in stone -- just this week that Personhood Begins at Birth.
Just a nugget of Republican Research and Task Force Recommendations from 1970.
If I were to theorize, I guess I'd say the Democrats steal all their best Talking Points from Republicans where population control and the Environment are concerned.
(I'm tempted to post their findings on Resources just to rub your nose in it.)
Perhaps that a Leopard doesn't change it's spots, and a Rockefeller Republican can't either?
I like things to make sense.
Now that I realize for certain that it was Republicans who handed the Dems their talking points for overpopulation, abortion, birth control and depopulation sufficient to achieve an Optimum number of people for Ecological purposes, it makes a hell of a lot more sense that we sorta "let" the Democrats win for the last 32 years on these very issues.
Save for the really tricky stuff -- like nailing open the most profitable window of Human Non-Personhood -- which we still reserve for ourselves and the Word of God where the winning over of Americans at large is concerned. The A-Team, as it were.
For, as you know, the Democrats are somewhat dimwitted sorts accustomed to perceiving the right to off their own as the ultimate in Empowerment. Very doubtful they'd have pulled off the ESCR thing.
Besides, if they'd suggested it, Republicans would have been up in arms against it.
Yep 1970, the age of Aqaurius, when LBJ liberalism was still en vogue, before the Ronald Reagan Presidency.
Yep that 1970. BTW, Margaret Sanger(the founder of Planned Parenthood), was at her penultimate in the 1920's, but that does not matter as you go about your witch hunt with the same kind of relish and ignorance of history and circumstances as the present day demo's do.
Have fun Askel as you morph into Tom Daschle for all to see on FR.
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