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The Trump administration said Monday it was ending funding to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), long a target of conservatives over concerns that its work in China abets the communist authorities’ controversial population limitation programs. The administration’s first confirmed cut to a U.N. agency will cost the UNFPA $32.5 million. Its budget proposal for fiscal year 2018 calls for unspecified reductions to contributions to the U.N. budget, and further “seeks to reduce or end direct funding for international organizations whose missions do not substantially advance U.S. foreign policy interests, are duplicative, or are not well-managed.” The move comes as...

March 2, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) -- Population controllers told the Vatican at a conference this week that the Catholic teaching of “responsible parenthood” in determining family size has “result[ed] in collective failure” in reducing the world’s population. They suggested that the only way to stop the exhaustion of “humanity’s natural capital” is by imposing a system of “taxes and regulations” that would help modify “social norms of behaviour.” This week’s Vatican symposium on Biological Extinction, sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences was a closed-door event. Speaking at the event were two controversial figures,...

VATICAN CITY, January 12, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — The Vatican has invited the undisputed father of the modern, pro-abortion population control movement to present a paper at an upcoming Vatican-run conference. Dr. Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb is scheduled to speak in Vatican City during the February 27-March 1 conference that will discuss “how to save the natural world.” The Stanford biologist champions sex-selective abortion as well as mass forced sterilization as legitimate methods to curb population growth. In his 1968 book, Ehrlich went so far as to defend forced abortion, writing: “Indeed, it has been concluded that...

As temperatures plummet overnight to near or below freezing, Bay Area residents will be barred from using their fireplaces on Monday. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District issued a Winter Spare the Air Alert on Sunday, making it illegal for residents to use fireplaces, wood stoves or other wood-burning equipment. During other seasons, Spare the Air Alerts encourage Bay Area commuters to avoid driving due to stagnant air that may become unhealthy due to exhaust and other pollution. But the winter alerts focus on eliminating wood smoke, and even come with a possible penalty to those who flout the...

Dr Travis Rieder, a moral philosophy professor and bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University, claims reducing the number of babies born each year could save the world. . . “If you're Catholic, and you're really going to stare climate change in the face, refuse contraception, and continue to have sex anyway, there's the foreseeable outcome that you will have more children than average. “Well, then you really better be doing your darnedest in all sorts of other ways. When you make that choice, there's a cost. You have to pay for it in some way.”

Apple is a great American success story and we can say of the late Steve Jobs: You did build that. But there’s a problem with Apple in China. The Beijing government’s forced abortion policy is worming its way into the factories of Apple, Inc. Twenty-four of these factories, it is reported, have helped the Communist government’s brutal efforts to prevent so-called unauthorized births to Chinese mothers. Exiled human rights champion Chen Guangcheng is reporting on the collaboration of Apple in compulsory pregnancy testing of Apple’s Chinese employees. Chen told Bloomberg news agency that Apple should refuse to comply with such...

Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, who was allowed to travel to the U.S. after escaping from house arrest, said Monday that New York University is forcing him and his family to leave at the end of this month because of pressure from the Chinese government. The university denied Chen’s allegations. Chen said in a statement that China’s Communist Party had been applying “great, unrelenting pressure” on NYU to ask him to leave, though he did not provide details or evidence to back his claim. Chen said Beijing’s authoritarian government has more influence on the American academic community than is perceived. “The...

The State Department painted it as an elegant way out of a ballooning crisis involving Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng — but by day’s end, it looked like a disgraceful performance by US diplomats. Initial reports had Chen so pleased by the deal that he told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “I want to kiss you.” The agreement Clinton negotiated with Beijing yesterday supposedly allowed Cheng to stay in China and get medical attention, with the authorities guaranteeing his future safety. But things started unraveling just hours after the compromise was inked. First, while State claims Chen never wanted to leave...

Climate-change activists are mobilizing to cut the birthrate, arguing that richer nations should discourage people having children in order to protect them from the ravages of global warming and reduce emissions. Travis Rieder, assistant director of the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University, told NPR that bringing down global fertility by half a child per woman “could be the thing that saves us.” “Here’s a provocative thought: Maybe we should protect our kids by not having them,” said Mr. Rieder, who has one child. He proposed procreation disincentives such as government tax breaks for poor people and tax...

February 2, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – The forces of death and misery of the pro-abortion industry are at it again, and they are doing their best to use a troubling item in the news to scare and intimidate strongly pro-woman and pro-child Latin American countries into loosening restrictions on abortion. The Zika virus scare is the tool du jour. In an interview on NPR’s “All Things Considered” published on January 30, 2016, reporter Lourdes Garcia-Navarro interviewed staff of a fertility clinic and abortion activists who decried the slowing down of in vitro fertilizations as women were afraid to become pregnant lest...

We will avoid editorializing on whether the Church has "never been against birth control" as this type of statement is simply a symptom of the horrific state of modern religious formation. Prelates and priests preach incorrect ideas, sadly, on a daily basis. They are not infallible -- even on issues of faith and morals. The primary issue is, once again, that Pope Francis led the way to this thinking, both in the insensitive and simple-minded way he lambasted large Catholic families (see here) and in his fixation on climate change (see here). Cue Peter Cardinal Turkson, President of the Pontifical...

NEW YORK CITY, November 18, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – In response to a lower than projected Family Planning 2020 (FP2020) report, Bill Gates is spending more money on abortifacient birth control in third-world countries. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has announced additional donations over three years totaling $120 million more for their pet project, a global initiative to combat childbirth among the poorest of the world. FP 2020 had a goal of getting contraceptives to 120 million more women and girls by its namesake year. A status report showed only an additional 25 million, far short of the trajectory needed...

BOSTON, November 5, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – China has officially gone from a forced abortion and sterilization one child policy to a forced abortion and sterilization two child policy. While most of the free world think this is an improvement, one Boston Globe columnist is lamenting the change and says no one should have the right to give birth to more than one child. "Having more than one child is just something that none of us – Chinese or American – has a moral right to do," Sarah Conly, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bowdoin College, wrote in a column. "We don't...

Arena Profile: Peter Goldmark Peter Goldmark currently directs the Climate and Air program for Environmental Defense Fund. Prior to joining Environmental Defense, he was Chairman and CEO of the International Herald Tribune. Peter has had exceptional careers in both the public and private sectors. His public service was highlighted by his tenure as Budget Director for the State of New York during the 1970s city- and state-wide fiscal crisis where he was an architect of its rescue; and as Executive Director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey through to 1983. He served as president of the...

October 1, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) -- Arriving in the Philippines last January, Pope Francis warned his millions of listeners to resist “ideological colonization.” This destructive assault on families, the Pope continued, included efforts to “redefine the very institution of marriage, by relativism, by the culture of the ephemeral, by a lack of openness to life.” Africans, above all, know what he is talking about. After all, their continent has been the playground of Western imperialists for the past two centuries. Their bodies were enslaved, and their countries were colonized. Now the target is their very minds. The assembled African bishops—all 40 or so...

One of America’s leading scientists has dismissed as “raving nonsense” the pope’s call for action on climate change – so long as the leader of the world’s 1 billion Catholics rejects the need for population control. In a commentary in the journal Nature Climate Change, Paul Ehrlich, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, argues that Pope Francis is simply wrong in trying to fight climate change without also addressing the additional strain on global resources from population rise. “That’s raving nonsense,” Ehrlich told the Guardian. “He is right on some things but he is just...

ED. NOTE: As this article is posted, Pope Francis begins his visit to the United States. In his encyclical released in June of this year, the pope singled out air conditioning as being a "harmful habit" that is a symbol of rampant capitalism that is blind to the plight of the poor and disadvantaged. These comments by Matt Michel, CEO of Service Roundtable, serve as a timely response. ————— Since becoming pontiff, Pope Francis has repeatedly made the news for his criticism and condemnation of capitalism and free markets. Worse, in his encyclical, he singled out air conditioning as particularly...

(Breakpoint) - In a 1971 appearance on the Dick Cavett Show, John Lennon and wife Yoko Ono gave their take on the big scare of the day: overpopulation.“I don't really believe it,” Lennon said in his Beatle-esque Liverpool accent. “I think whatever happens will balance itself out...It's alright for us all living to say, 'Well, there's enough of us [people] so we won't have any more...I don't believe in that.”It was a counter-cultural statement—even for the voice of the counterculture. Back then, all of the experts were warning that our planet couldn't take much more. And no one sounded that alarm...

n a sweeping, sometimes apocalyptic encyclical, Pope Francis on Thursday blasted the Obama administration and other world governments for not doing nearly enough to confront climate change, and said mankind is squandering the planet given to it by God and must abandon fossil fuels as soon as possible. “The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth,” the pontiff said in his 184-page climate-change encyclical, a long-awaited document released publicly Thursday by the Vatican.”These situations have caused sister earth, along with all the abandoned of our world, to cry out, pleading that...

June 16, 2015 (ThePublicDiscourse) -- In a recent mini-documentary, the New York Times investigates the unrealized horrors of population explosion, especially those predicted by Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 book, The Population Bomb. Despite the failure of his forecast, Ehrlich remains undaunted. “The end is still nigh,” he says according to the Times, and population control ought to be implemented, “preferably through voluntary methods.” But, Ehrlich continues, allowing women to choose to have as many children as they desire is like allowing everyone to “throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.”In our view, Ehrlich fundamentally misunderstands the value of...