Day: July 21, 2017

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:

 Melinda Gates (shown), the billionaire wife of Microsoft founder Bill
 Gates, announced at the recent Global Family Planning Summit in London 
that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will funnel $375 million to
 population-control efforts over the next four years — a 60-percent 
increase above what the couple has so far given to the global abortion 
and contraception initiative, reports the U.K. women's magazine Marie Claire.

Pointing to President Trump’s move early in his administration to cut
off funding to health- and family-planning NGOs that include abortion
in their “services,” Mrs. Gates told the assembled population-control
bureaucrats that “this is a difficult political climate for family
planning. I’m deeply troubled, as I’m sure you are, by the Trump
administration’s proposed budget cuts.”
As reported by The New American,
shortly after taking office in January, President Trump signed an
executive order re-implementing President Reagan’s 1984 Mexico City
Policy that blocks U.S. taxpayer funding to groups that perform and
promote abortions overseas (the policy had been rescinded by President
Obama, and earlier by President Clinton).
Following up on that signature, on May 15 the Trump administration
announced an expansion of that $600 million funding ban to encompass all
U.S. international healthcare, which amounts to nearly $9 billion. “The
administration said that under the expanded order, called officially
the Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance plan, the same amount of
funding would still be available globally, but would only go to groups
that promise not to perform abortions as part of their ‘family planning’
strategies,” we reported.
Mrs. Gates said that her foundation’s funding will be earmarked only for contraception and sex education, but, reported LifeNews.com,
“the money also will indirectly fund abortions, too. The billionaire
family already gives money to some of the largest abortion chains in the
world, including Planned Parenthood and Marie Stopes International.”
LifeNews went on to explain that “the fungibility of money makes it
easier for pro-abortion organizations to provide abortion
internationally. In other words, every dollar the Gates Foundation gives
to Planned Parenthood for distributing birth control or building an
abortion-friendly clinic frees up a dollar in Planned Parenthood’s
budget to spend elsewhere.”
The Gates Foundation grant database reveals that, between 2009
through 2013, the foundation gave Planned Parenthood of America, the
International Planned Parenthood Federation, and Planned Parenthood of
Western Washington some $71 million. It also funded the British abortion
conglomerate Marie Stopes International to the tune of $46.1 million in
2012.
While Mrs. Gates considers herself a practicing Catholic, her
position on contraceptives and birth control put her squarely at odds
with the Church. In comments earlier this year she called contraceptives
“one of the greatest anti-poverty innovations the world has ever
known.”
Additionally, she declared that “contraceptives empower women,”
arguing that birth control increases economic productivity in developing
countries by giving women more freedom to work, and also leads to
smaller families so that parents can devote more time and resources to
the children they “choose” to bring into this world.
Mrs. Gates has offered her own life as a testament to the “freeing”
power of birth control. “It’s no accident that my three kids were born
three years apart — or that I didn’t have my first child until I’d
finished graduate school and devoted a decade to my career at
Microsoft,” she wrote earlier this year in Fortune
magazine. “My family, my career, my life as I know it are all the
direct result of contraceptives. And now, I realize how lucky that makes
me.”
In a recent BBC interview, Mrs. Gates said she felt “optimistic” that
the Catholic Church would one day change its position on contraception
for the sake of women in developing countries. “We work very extensively
with the Catholic Church and I’ve had many discussions with them
because we have a shared mission around social justice and
anti-poverty,” she said. She added, “I think what this Pope sees is that
if you’re going to lift people out of poverty, you have to do the right
thing for women.”
But John Grabowski, a professor of moral theology and ethics at
Catholic University of America, said that such a change is virtually
impossible. “The Church’s teaching on opposing contraception isn’t a
recent teaching, it’s not something made up by Pope Paul VI in 1968,” he
told the Catholic News Agency, referencing the Pope’s encyclical of nearly 50 years ago that clarified the Catholic Church’s teaching on family planning and contraception.
Noting that the Church has addressed the issue on several occasions
in recent history, Grabowski said that “this has been the teaching of
the Church from its beginning, so the Church [including Pope Francis]
can’t change constant, universal, authoritative teaching.”
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