'Spiritual sickness' condemned

ABORTION and the killing of our young reveal a spiritual sickness in our society, according to Professor Hugh Cambell from Cardiff, one of the Catholic speakers who took part in a conference on population last week.
The conference, entitled "People — the first concern", was organised by the Medical Education Trust at the University of Manchester on Saturday. More than 100 people heard a group of well-known speakers on subjects ranging from euthenasia to the growing scarcity of food and resources in the third world.
Fr Rene Bel, a Catholic priest and retreat master from France, and an expert on the subject, said that population control is a "tool" of the insecure rich and powerful. He said that the "false reasoning" was behind the "horrific" illegal abortion estimates which were "conjured out of French demographic statistics", and which helped the argument to legalise abortion in France.
The ineffectiveness of campaigns for contraception in high birth-rate countries led population controllers to press for widespread sterilisation and liberal abortion, first in the developed countries and then in the newly-emerging nations, Fr Bel added.
Dr Cicely Williams, an Anglican paediatrician, said that birth rates tended to fall when infant mortality drops. This happened even in Catholic Malta and in other countries decades before modern population controls were devised, she added, saying that infant mortality was more due to ignorance than poverty.
Professor Julian Simon, an economist from the University of Illinois and author of The Ultimate Resource, said that doomsday predictions of scarcity of resources could be refuted, not with complacency but in the knowledge that challenges posed can and will be solved.
As in the past, he said, future generations will apply their efforts to the tasks in hand.
Finally, Professor Roy Fox of the Department of Geriatrics in the University of Manchester, dealt with the problems of old age.
Some doctors were abandoning the long tradition of healing to pander to a state that rejected its "unproductive" members, he said, stressing that everyone should be helped to find a will to live.