The politics of abortion

If current trends continue, the population of Africa will reach 4.4 billion by 2100. If current trends continue, this will be equivalent to 39% of the world’s population. Much of this growth will come from the phenomenal fertility of women in Sub-Saharan Africa. In consequence, if this population boom is well managed and leveraged, Africa will be the world’s largest market and will probably dominate the global economy. Let that sink in.

Said another way, Africa will move from being a landmass filled with backward natives that had no borders barely a hundred years ago, once subjugated by apparently superior northern peoples, to being an economic powerhouse dwarfing its former bosses due to little more than a generous population dividend. There are many other ways in which this can be stated, but any of them is likely to fill with a terrible fear any eugenicist. Which is what most Western governments have become.

Filled with leftist liberals, driven by little more than a desire to run the morals of their countries aground, these governments have presided over plummeting population growth rates in their countries through an aggressive promotion of moral license, contraceptives and abortion that began with the Sexual Revolution of the 1960/70s. For context, in the USA, 58 million abortions have been performed over the past 44 years. If these unfortunate foetuses had been carried to term and all been assigned a country, they would constitute the world’s 24th largest country by population.

The result is that, across much of the West, populations are now shrinking, there are more old people whose care increasingly taxes ever-thinner public coffers (and so they are increasingly dispensed with through euthanasia) and there is little hope of a revival of growth rates any time soon. Their populations are sustained by immigration.

Therefore, for most of these governments, the possibility that Africa’s population and economy is on a path to dominion is an ever pressing summons to do something. But since there is no hope of their countries’ populations reviving and outpacing Africa, the only choice is to bridle the continent’s population. Now is the time to tame the animal before it goes wild and marauding, and ultimately dismantles the old order which had the West at the top of the food chain.

Development assistance for Africa has increasingly meant population control assistance. While this intention is veiled, thin is veil that conceals it. The excuse commonly given is that if Africa’s population continues growing at the current pace, it will jeopardise “efforts to eliminate poverty, curb global warming and manage international migration.” Never mind that Africa’s poverty is gradually decreasing, the continent contributes the least per capita to global warming and is the origin of a lower share of international migration than entire countries in Asia and the Middle East.

The push for contraceptives and abortion in Africa is financed largely with Western taxpayer money, and promoted with a largely Western mind-set. There is little regard for those timeless African values of community, generosity and love for life. It is as though a growing panic has so stricken Western governments that even the rules of courtesy have been thrown overboard. The Culture of Death has been packaged as progress and freedom and is being aggressively sold in Africa as an indispensable counterpart to development.

Countless African intellectuals and leaders have been drafted into this effort, through a healthy mixture of coercion, indoctrination and financial benefits, and now find themselves the unwitting promoters of the decimation of the very people they seek to lead. Western NGOs, beneficiaries of generous allocations from their governments back home, are accorded wide-ranging licence to provide their macabre services, many times in blatant contravention of the laws (left in place to accord with the common sense of African people) of the countries in which they operate. I recently highlighted the case of Marie Stopes International, which is obsessed with performing abortions, and uses the pretext of providing family planning services as a front for this in countries where abortion is illegal.

This is certainly a broad sketch, and assumes that the reader can provide for himself/herself examples from daily experience to illustrate the statements. An article with all that information in it would be unnecessarily long and achieve too little to justify itself. But this is a succinct summary of the politics behind abortion. In one sentence, Western governments have run their countries aground by destroying morals, encouraging unbridled licence, and being hostile to human life in so far as it is human life and so, to secure their future, need to do the same to Africa. It’s more geopolitical than simply political.

That said, a major roadblock has recently been thrown in the path of the march of destroyers. Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, riding on an agenda partly composed of a desire to scale back the gains made by the liberal agenda in this regard. In his first week in office, he reinstated the so called “Mexico City Policy” which bans American funding for organisations which promote abortion in any form outside the country. His government has also committed to defunding Planned Parenthood, which provides the largest number of abortions in the US. He also has the opportunity to reshape the Supreme Court’s opinion on the matter far into the future. Say what you may of the man, but this is one thing which, in my opinion, he is doing right. That aside, this shouldn’t be taken as a wholesale endorsement of his policies and endorsements.

But this is just a small change, significant more for its symbolism than real effect. The armada of pro-abortion advocates includes many other Western governments, like Canada, the UK, the Netherlands and Norway, etc. and philanthropists beyond naming. Arrayed like a flock of crows about a dying wildebeest on the African Savannah, the financial muscle they wield is considerable and will take significant shifts to scale back. The battle for future African lives is far from won.

In the next article, I will outline possible solutions to the loss of health and life at backstreet abortion clinics in Kenya, which inspired this series.

To read the first article in the series, click here.

Feature image: Source unknown.

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