But let's take a look at what GHWB did when in office, when he actually had the power to act on his beliefs.
During all four years of his Presidency, he tried to kill Title X, which he had worked to pass as a congressman. Why the change? Because Roe v. Wade changed it from essentially a birth control program to an abortion program. Congress would not rescind it. As a matter of fact, Congress tried to overturn the Reagan administration's "gag rule" which prohibited all clinics receiving Title X funding from giving abortion advice or counseling, even if a patient requested it. In 1991, Bush vetoed a bill that would have overturned the gag rule.
Bush vetoed the entire 1989 foreign aid bill of $14 billion because it included $15 million for the UNFPA. He also vetoed the annual foreign bill again in 1990 because of its UNFPA funding and pledged to keep U.S. funds out of the agency in the future.
The United States adopted a policy, announced at the World Conference on Population in Mexico City in 1984, that withdrew funding from International Planned Parenthood. The new policy denied U.S. population assistance to any private program in another country, or to any international program, which provided counseling, referral, or even basic information about abortion. Bush continued to enforce this “international gag rule” policy.
He hamstrung the State Department in its efforts to advance the abortion issue. The staff of the State Department’s population affairs coordinator was cut back from three to one full-time staff person in 1991, leaving it with extremely limited resources to prepare for that year’s U.N. Conference on Environment and Development.
Bush the elder is someone you have generally been quite critical of. However, there is a reason that groups like Planned Parenthood considered him an enemy.
Bush's effortless backhanded vetoes of a series of slow pitch softballs tossed on his desk by the Democratic Congress don't quite do it for me. GREAT way to make it look as though actions speak louder than words ... assuming you ignore the other evidence ... including his 11th hour Executive Order establishing a fetal tissue bank (which someone probably figured -- quite rightly -- should be left to the likes of Clinton).
If you don't understand how closely linked are the Interlock and the State where issues of propagandizing the masses and controlling their reproduction are, you should. Given that close cooperation, it wouldn't surprise me at all that -- with 7 billion incoming from the likes of Bill Gates (alone), Ted Turner, Warren Buffet, et al. -- it doesn't cost much to win some public approval points by having a President wipe out a measly million here or there in international "AID" monies.
I think Bush's ballyhooed break with Planned Parenthood is a load of crap. It's not just the fact that his opposition to abortion stands out like a sore thumb compared to his absolutely consistent support of the Earth First Culture of Death, it's that in these Records are laid the foundation for Legal Abortion as well as the crystal clear stand of the International Planned Parenthood Foundation: it's a Private Matter into which the State should not intervene.
EXACTLY the basis on which the State intervened to make that particular bit of homicide a mother-only "Constitutional Right" extrapolated from the right of privacy.
Where is his problem with that?
(Face it ... his problem stems solely from the fact abortion was too popular with exactly the wrong type of people. Regardless the rank leftist and utopian pseudo-science and illogic championed by Chairman Bush throughout these excerpts, the FACT remains that population growth is WEALTH and STRENGTH for a nation. All the talk in the world about "reducing" abortions or cringing as "abortion became the rallying cry" of Planned Parenthood rings a bit lame from one who had no problems whatsoever opening the door and ushering in abortion with Clear and Present knowledge of exactly the intent of Planned Parenthood -- at home and abroad.)
If you wish me to believe your thesis, you will have to offer me the evidence I've yet to find in three years of researching this subject.
Likewise, it would help to show me someone that your thesis does not require Bush be one of the lamest, most shortsighted, ignoramuses the world has ever seen.
I do believe him to be a Useful Idiot on many counts. I think he knew exactly what he was doing as Chairman of the "Earth First -- Let's Re-align the Death Rate" Committee. He's just not that stupid.
Besides, his family had been immersed in the Eugenics movement his entire life. Thanks to his own father's experience with busybody Catholics, he knew damn good and well what the policical stakes were Appearance-wise and exactly the arguments that had been raised -- across the board, not just abortion-related -- to the panoply of Deathist ideas he champions as Chairman.
If you like, I could gather together salient points from the research notes within "Abortion is Vital to the Solution" as well as Randy Engel's excellent research on the Mexico City and Cairo confabs. I understand perfectly how you might think he appears pro-life and I admire your defending him. It's just that he's precisely the sort I mean when I speak of a Potemkin Pro-life Movement.