by Fritz Baumgartner, MD, LifeSite News:
Can words simply mean whatever the group in power declares them to mean? This certainly seems to be the case with the Population Council of the 1960s whose meetings spawned the goals of redefining basic biological principles and scientific lexicon. The meetings, sponsored by John D. Rockefeller III, the Population Council, and Planned Parenthood, were the 1st and 2nd International Conferences on Intra-Uterine Contraception held in New York City in 1962 and 1964. John D. Rockefeller’s opening remarks for the 1964 meeting could not have made his intentions clearer, with the “hope that this conference marks the beginning of a new era, in which for the first time in history we may see the practical chance of controlling population in ways that remove it as a major obstacle to the achievement of health, education, and prosperity…”
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The foundations of the Population Council were established in the 1950s. John Rockefeller III was extremely concerned for what he viewed as the one of the greatest threats to humanity, and convened experts on how to reduce the world’s population. A major focus was to study and circumvent negative religious, cultural, and political perceptions of population control, and thus was born the Population Council. Eugenic ingredients were baked into the Population Council from the beginning, and Frederick Osborn, the first president of the Council, had been a founding member of the American Eugenics Society in 1926. John D. Rockefeller III had himself served on the board of the Bureau of Social Hygiene, an organization created by his father and which helped fund the birth control clinics of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.
The mindset of eugenics often fit well with that of population control, but religion and politics stood in the way. President Dwight Eisenhower condemned government involvement in such endeavors as “not a proper political or governmental activity.” The “open-mindedness” of the 60s, however, swept away many such barriers, and a few short years later, President Lyndon Johnson cleared the way for government funding of such endeavors, stating that “five dollars invested in population control is worth a hundred dollars invested in economic growth.” The government was now involved in managing populations. Not coincidentally, the very same year of Johnson’s statement, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) changed the definition of the “conception” of new human life to make contraception more palatable.
But the Catholic Church still stood in the way. Protestant Christians had already ceded to the contraceptive mentality at the 1930 Lambeth Conference. Rockefeller wanted the Catholics, and to that end he sponsored a series of population symposia at Notre Dame University in the 60s for Catholic leaders to meet with Planned Parenthood and the Population Council. Notre Dame would receive the funding from the Population Council, with the prerequisite being that the only Catholics invited were those willing to consider a change in the Church’s position on contraception. The Population Council stipulated “only the liberal minded Catholics” and those Catholics “who represent the position nearest our own” be involved. Expressly omitted would be “representative Catholics.” Furthermore, the Population Council would determine which books were to be read and discussed. (In some sense, one sees an eerie resemblance to the recent “Synod on Synodality” in which pre-selected, non-representative speakers and materials were permitted the lions-share voice.) Notre Dame acquiesced, but this can hardly be seen as consistent with Notre Dame’s self-proclaimed “true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of any kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.”
The American Catholic leaders were in a quandary at this time because of the bishops’ disagreement on contraception and the uncertainty of Pope Paul VI’s final decision on birth control, which was not finalized until Humanae Vitae in 1968. Furthermore, Catholic hospitals and charities depended on federal funds. Rockefeller seized the moment and made Notre Dame’s president, Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, a member of the board of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1961 until 1982. Hesburgh was even the Foundation’s Chairman from 1977-1982.
Notre Dame made further funding requests to the Ford Foundation, which also had interest in the population control movement. Proposed funding for these additional meetings had “the objective…to prepare a final statement and distribute it widely” to “echo far beyond the confines of the United States.” These somewhat bombastic promises by Notre Dame led to the meetings being funded, and the resulting statements from the Notre Dame meetings denounced in ever stronger terms the Church’s stance against contraception.
On the “Catholic problem”, Rockefeller knew the importance of coopting liberal Church leaders who needed funding. But he also knew the importance of whether or not “contraceptives” were perceived as causing abortions from a scientific standpoint. Changing definitions would be necessary.
In the 60s Americans feared nuclear Armageddon with Russia. But for Rockefeller, nuclear war was no longer the greatest threat to mankind’s survival. In opening remarks at the 1964 Population Control Council meeting, Rockefeller said, “I believe that the problem of unchecked population growth is as urgently important as any facing mankind today. Until recently, I believed an even graver problem was the control of nuclear weapons. However, there is a justifiable hope that the use of these weapons can be prevented; but there is no hope that we can escape a tremendous growth in world population.” In our modern times, do we still think that the threat of nuclear war can be so easily dismissed?
The Population Council thus altered the trajectory of public opinion as to the greatest threat to humanity. Redefining societal attitudes and priorities could be an achievable goal of a major population control meeting. But could such a meeting actually lead to redefining basic biology and embryology? That is an altogether entirely different undertaking.
