Vatican rebuts UN birth control claim

By Simon Caldwell
THE VATICAN has denied claims that its opposition to birth control programmes has started to buckle.
Spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls refuted suggestions made last week by Dr Nafis Sadik, head of the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, that the Church had stopped insisting on "natural" fertility regulation and was beginning to accept that people had a "right" to artificial contraception, sterilisation and abortion.
Dr Sadik said such methods were now routinely used in traditionally Catholic countries — "and the Church had let it go".
She said: "The international community accepts family planning, contraception, sexual health and reproductive right as part of the international agenda and part of the basic human rights of women."
But Mr Navarro-Valls said: "The Holy See's satisfaction over the consensus achieved in international documents that affect the regulation of fertility must not be interpreted as a change in its well-known position regarding the family planning services that do not respect the
nor1f.i.V liberty, lberty, human dignity or the rights of those affected."
He also reiterated the Church's view of legal abortion (including abortifacient pills) as "a crime", and defended the right of conscientious objection on the part of health workers.
Dr Sadik's speech came with the release of the UNFPA's Annual Report on the World's Population, which, echoing discredited Malthusian theories, claims that the current one billion child-bearing adolescents could present a danger to the planet's resources.
Austin Ruse, president of the New York-based Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, said: "As a reaction to their fear that this adolescent cohort will reproduce itself, the UNFPA and its allies in the developed countries have attempted to promote the broadest possible notions of reproductive health for young people.
"At the same time, they attempted to eliminate all aspects of parental control."
Mr Ruse also criticised Dr Sadik for openly praising China's population control programmes, which include the forcible sterilisation, abortion and fitting of intra-uterine devices of Chinese women, as well as other draconian measures against couples who have more than one child.
Steven Mosher, president of the United States-based Population Research Institute, also hit out at the UN report, attacking it as "statistically misleading and designed to generate fear of an overpopulation crisis that simply does not exist".
He said the UN had simply glossed over the problem of countries falling below replacement fertility levels and which, because they are unable to reproduce themselves, have rapidly begun to age.
The UN's own statisticians believe more than 87 of the world's countries are experiencing the phenomenon, with Italy having among the lowest replacement levels in the world.