Revoke NSSM-200 and Apologize for Evil Done 

Last week, I wrote about the admirable work that President Trump’s administration is doing to promote the pro-life cause. The sheer amount of pro-life activity undertaken by the Trump administration in the first weeks via executive orders and administrative directives has been truly remarkable. It is extremely encouraging to see this administration push back against the anti-life mentality (such as ideologies that disrespect human dignity) and reverse several domestic and international pro-abortion and anti-family policies that dominated the Biden administration. 

As one serving a global pro-life apostolate, I was especially happy to see President Trump’s executive order reinstating the Mexico City Policy that prohibits the use of taxpayer dollars to fund organizations that promote or perform abortions overseas, offer abortion counseling, or advocate for abortion. It cut, for example, all funding to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) that supports coercive abortion and forced sterilization. The policy is also applicable to what remains of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), to the State Department, and to all departments and agencies.  

The president’s order revokes the previous administration’s memorandum that authorized taxpayer funding to abortion providers, including Planned Parenthood and Marie Stopes International. The reinstated policy has expanded influence, encompassing the vast majority of U.S. bilateral global health assistance, as expressed in the charge given to the Secretary of State: 

[to] take all necessary actions, to the extent permitted by law, to ensure that U.S. taxpayer dollars do not fund organizations or programs that support or participate in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization. 

On the same day, President Trump issued a second executive order reinstating his previous administration’s directives regarding the Hyde Amendment, ensuring its rule is embedded into federal policy and programs. The Biden administration circumvented the Hyde Amendment (one can go so far as to say the Biden administration ignored the law), which is a U.S. policy that prohibits the use of taxpayer dollars to fund abortion. Biden’s two executive orders, which referred to abortion as healthcare, attempted to embed federal funding of abortion within government programs, making it easier for women to access surgical abortion as well as the abortion pill.  

President Trump’s orders rectified these issues and reestablished the United States’ commitment to protecting life and families on the domestic and international stage. This is a step towards restoring our role as leaders on the issue of promoting and defending human dignity. Of course, there is much more to be done in this regard, but Trump’s executive orders are implementing pro-life policies and directives that have and will have tremendous impact.  

The U.S. wields enormous global influence, and it is fitting that it should use that power to offer ethical means of health care to women and protect the rights of preborn children, the most innocent and defenseless, from the abortion industry. Ensuring that taxpayer dollars do not promote or pay for abortions saves lives. Americans should not be forced to fund the abortion industry or be compelled by government to export and promote it abroad.  

For the U.S. to adopt a foreign policy that is explicitly committed to proactively fighting the murder of innocent preborn children and promoting a holistic and truly pro-life approach to women’s health marks a radical shift. Indeed, far too many people remain ignorant of the fact that a great deal of U.S. foreign policy is poisoned by a commitment to export coercive population control, built upon contraception and legal abortion, to “protect” U.S. interests. 

It’s all spelled out quite explicitly in The Kissinger Report adopted by the Nixon administration’s National Security Council in 1974. This nefarious top-secret document, also known as National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM-200), was classified until the late 80s. It has the subject heading “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” The document was the result of collaboration between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Departments of State, Defense, and Agriculture. 

This document has never been rescinded. Quite the contrary: it’s quite clear that its principles have seeped deeply into U.S. foreign policy, as well as Western-led “philanthropy” in general. The time is far past due for the U.S. government to formally disavow this evil document, with its barely concealed racist view and embrace of a condescending and destructive ideological colonialism.

NSSM-200 and Population Hysteria

NSSM-200 was written and adopted at a time when overpopulation hysteria was at its peak. Paul Ehrlich had published The Population Bomb in 1968, predicting widespread famines and starvation in the coming decades if population was not radically curtailed. The apocalyptic opening line of Ehrlich’s book, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” has gone down in infamy as one of the most wrong-headed predictions in history. So have many of Ehrlich’s other predictions.  

Ehrlich believed the planet could no longer support the human population. As a result, he forecast that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s, including 65 million Americans. He even went so far as to predict that India was essentially doomed and that “England will not exist in the year 2000.” In response, Ehrlich recommended the U.S. government establish the Federal Department of Population and Environment (DPE), which would have the legal power to dictate how many children couples could welcome.  

Two years later, in Ecoscience, Ehrlich wrote,  

It has been concluded that mandatory population control laws, even those requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under our existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently compelling to endanger the society. Many consider the situation already serious enough to justify some forms of compulsion. 

Based on Ehrlich’s dire predictions drastic measures were deemed necessary to avert catastrophe. Ehrlich recommended measures that included mandatory abortion and sterilization and the establishment of an armed international force with the power to enforce these measures.  

Other population control advocates joined in Ehrlich’s doomsday predictions. Population Council President Bernard Berelson and Alan F. Guttmacher, former Medical Director of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, are among them. In 1969, Berelson created a detailed program that included adding sterilizing agents to the water supplies of the United States, compulsory sterilization of all men with three or more children, and mandatory abortion for all illegitimate pregnancies (“Beyond Family Planning,” Studies in Family Planning, February 1969, pages 1-16). Guttmacher asserted: 

Each country will have to decide its own form of coercion and determine when and how it should be employed. At present, the means available are compulsory sterilization and compulsory abortion. Perhaps someday a way of enforcing compulsory birth control will be feasible (Medical World News, June 6, 1969). 

It should be astonishing that after being so dreadfully wrong on every one of his predictions, Ehrlich still manages to maintain a reputation as an “expert” whose prognostications are routinely sought by the media. Even as recent as 2013, Ehrlich was still pushing his anti-life agenda, stating that “nobody has the right to as many children as they want.” 

Inevitably, the push for forced population control measures found their way into official U.S. foreign policy that led to NSSM-200, which is suffused with the thinking of The Population Bomb. The new population control strategy aimed to inspire “increased motivation for smaller family size” in developing nations by any means possible, as well as reducing their population growth rates.  

NSSM-200 opens by echoing dramatic predictions about the rate of population growth, concluding, “Growing populations will have a serious impact on the need for food especially in the poorest, fastest growing LDCs. [Less Developed Countries].” It adds, “The most serious consequence for the short and middle term is the possibility of massive famines in certain parts of the world, especially the poorest regions.” 

The document is clearly far less concerned with the supposed dire effects of its policies in these so-called overpopulated countries. Instead, the authors are clearly more anxious about how the “population crisis,” and the social unrest it causes, will impact the U.S.’s access to natural resources needed to ensure its continued prosperity and security. NSSM-200 uses blunt language: 

The U.S. economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries. That fact gives the U.S. enhanced interest in the political, economic, and social stability of the supplying countries. Wherever a lessening of population pressures through reduced birth rates can increase the prospects for such stability, population policy becomes relevant to resource supplies and to the economic interests of the United States…. 

In other words, the fact that people in poor countries are welcoming more children than the U.S. government thinks wise is a threat to the U.S….and something ought to be done about it. 

Related: Kissinger Report (NSSM-200): A Population Control Agenda

NSSM-200’s Sinister Solution

The National Security Council’s proposed solution is stark in its simplicity. “[I]f future numbers are to be kept within reasonable bounds, it is urgent that measures to reduce fertility be started and made effective in the 1970’s and 1980’s,” states the document.  

The question, of course, is how to go about doing this. As far as the authors are concerned, the U.S. can and should invest enormous resources in the effort. In the first place, within U.S. foreign assistance programs, “preferential treatment” should be given “to cost-effective programs to reduce population growth; including both family planning activities and supportive activities in other sectors.” In other words, rather than providing the necessities of life to needy countries, the U.S. should focus on exporting birth control and, of course, abortion. 

When it comes to the most controversial methods to reduce population growth, including coercion and abortion, the authors resort to double-speak. But despite their efforts, it’s quite clear where they stand: if they can get away with coercion, they will, and the more abortion, the better. 

On the one hand, the authors claim that the various agencies involved in drafting the document have “no specific recommendations to propose on abortion.” But they immediately add, there are “certain facts about abortion that need to be appreciated.” The first of these facts is that “No country has reduced its population growth without resorting to abortion.” Given that the whole document is about the imperative urgency to reduce population growth in developing nations, this statement hardly leaves any doubt about what the U.S. government would like to see in developing countries when it comes to greater access to contraception and abortion.  

NSSM-200 gives lip service to avoiding coercive measures (what the document euphemistically refers to as “leverage”), worrying that any appearance of forcing countries to reduce their birth rate could lead to local pushback. “There is,” warn the authors, “the danger that some LDC leaders will see developed country pressures for family planning as a form of economic or racial imperialism; this could well create a serious backlash.” 

LDC leaders may indeed see it that way. And it could quite rightly lead to serious backlash. 

To avoid criticism, in the very next paragraph the authors immediately propose ways that developed nations might pressure third world governments to adopt their population control measures anyway. As they write:  

There is also some established precedent for taking account of family planning performance in appraisal of assistance requirements by AID and consultative groups. Since population growth is a major determinant of increases in food demand, allocation of scarce PL 480 [Food for Peace] resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control as well as food production. In these sensitive relationships, however, it is important in style as well as substance to avoid the appearance of coercion. 

What they are trying to say is: We’ll give you food, but only if you prove that you’ve taken steps to reduce the number of people in your country who need to eat the food we’re giving you. But this isn’t really coercion, the authors seem to think, even if it might have the “appearance” of it.  

This is coercion of the most cynical sort: weaponizing developing nation’s poverty and reliance on foreign aid for the essentials of life to foist a particularly sinister ideological agenda with a hidden motive. Naturally, the provision of birth control and promotion of abortion will be couched in humanitarian concerns, as providing for the needs of the people in these countries. But in reality, the underlying motive is the United States’ concern for its own national security and access to scarce resources.

Time to Revoke NSSM-200

Unfortunately, The Kissinger Report and its mentality took deep hold in U.S. government departments and programs. Citizens in third world countries who are literally starving and thirsting often live with the paradoxical reality of having access to a superabundance of condoms and other contraceptives (as well as legal and illegal abortion), for which they did not ask, while lacking the food, water, medical care, and other necessities for which they are pleading.  

In some cases, the policies advocated in NSSM-200 have led the U.S to become complicit in horrific atrocities.  

I commend President Trump and his administration for both addressing the situation and offering policies and directives that advocate for women and the preborn. We desperately need clarity, courage, leadership, and strenuous effort to proactively promote pro-life and pro-family values both in the U.S. and in our foreign policies. After all, it is not enough merely to object to or oppose the pro-abortion agenda; we need to be working to pro-actively protect the preborn, women, and children by pursuing a positive agenda.

In Caritas in veritate, Pope Bendict XVI specifically laments the practices of demographic control, the promotion of contraception, the imposition of abortion, the practice of sterilization, and the cynical effort to “export this mentality to other States as if it were a form of cultural progress.” For the Pope and Church, this is unacceptable, for “openness to life is at the center of true development.” Without this openness, the whole society withers away. 

Pope Benedict laid out the principles that must guide authentic development efforts. “Charity in truth is…the principal force behind the true development of every person and of all humanity,” he wrote. “Only with charity, illumined by reason and by faith, is it possible to achieve goals of development endowed with human and humanizing values.”  

As I mentioned, NSSM-200 has never been abrogated or modified. It still represents the U.S. government’s formal policy on population questions. With many countries, including the U.S. facing a demographic winter, some governments are beginning to wake up to the fact that it is not overpopulation, but population implosion that poses a grave risk to national security and social stability.  

But regardless of the practical considerations, moral principles clearly show that for one country to pressure, and even demand, that another country reduce its population using immoral means is a grave injustice. It is to our eternal shame that U.S. foreign policy includes such evil principles, based upon such disrespect for the sovereignty and cultural integrity of developing nations.  

I express my gratitude to the Trump administration for beginning to change the tenor in our foreign policy and urge them to formally revoke NSSM-200, to apologize for the evil that our country perpetrated under its influence, and to foster policies and programs that respect human dignity and assist in authentic human flourishing.