The United States National Security Council is the highest decision-making body regarding foreign policy in the United States. On December 10, 1974, it completed a top-secret document entitled National Security Study Memorandum or NSSM-200, also called The Kissinger Report, since Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State at the time it was written.
Henry Kissinger
The subject of NSSM-200 is “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” This document, published shortly after the first major international population conference in Bucharest, was the result of collaboration among the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Departments of State, Defense and Agriculture.
NSSM-200 was made public when it was declassified and was transferred to the U.S. National Archives in 1990.
Although the United States government has issued hundreds of policy papers dealing with various aspects of American national security since 1974, NSSM-200 continues to be the foundational document on U.S. government population control. It therefore continues to represent official United States policy on government population control and, in fact, is still posted on the USAID website [1].
NSSM-200 is critically important to pro-life workers all over the world, because it completely exposes the unsavory and unethical motivations and methods of the population control movement. We can use this valuable document to lay bare the strategies used by unscrupulous governments and “aid” agencies that are used to bend developing nations to their wills. Their rote denials will be useless in the face of this evidence.
The Purpose of The Kissinger Report (NSSM-200)
The primary purpose of U.S. government population control efforts is to maintain access to the mineral resources of less-developed countries, or LDCs.
The Kissinger Report states:
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 order to protect U.S. commercial interests, NSSM-200 [2] cited a number of factors that could interrupt the smooth flow of materials from LDCs to the United States, including a large population of anti-imperialist youth whose numbers must be limited by population control. The document identified 13 nations by name that would be the primary targets of U.S. government population control efforts.
Under the heading “Concentration on key countries” we find:
Assistance for population moderation should give primary emphasis to the largest and fastest growing developing countries where there is special U.S. political and strategic interest. Those countries are: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia and Columbia [sic].… At the same time, the U.S. will look to the multilateral agencies, especially the U.N. Fund for Population Activities which already has projects in over 80 countries to increase population assistance on a broader basis with increased U.S. contributions. This is desirable in terms of U.S. interests and necessary in political terms in the United Nations. [emphasis added]
Countries targeted by NSSM-200
According to the report, elements of the implementation of government population control programs could include the legalization of abortion, financial incentives for countries to increase their abortion, sterilization and contraception-use rates, indoctrination of children, and mandatory population control and coercion of other forms, such as withholding disaster and food aid unless an LDC implements population control programs.
This particular form of coercion is evident in this story of Peruvian women who did not wish to be sterilized [3]. The workers visited one woman “day and night, day and night” to wear her down to agree to sterilization. Some food programs leveraged their power, demanding that women be sterilized or stop receiving food. Women weren’t told about Natural Family Planning. And many weren’t informed about the dangers of sterilization. Some women were even sterilized without knowledge or consent.
The population control cartel uses force and coercion in developing countries to push abortion, sterilization and birth control, as well as other evils such as homosexuality and transgenderism.
Gynecologist holding an IUD
There are dozens of examples of this kind of blatant injustice, including the following:
- When Nigeria refused to legalize contraception and homosexuality, the United States withdrew financial and military aid that would allow it to combat the Islamic terror group Boko Harem, which has murdered and kidnapped tens of thousands of people in that nation.1
- When Ecuador declined to legalize abortion, the United Nations refused to provide any aid for it to battle COVID-19, condemning many Ecuadorians to death.2
- When Kenyan pro-lifers collected irrefutable evidence that Marie Stopes International (MSI), one of the largest abortionists in the world, were committing illegal and dangerous abortions on a vast scale, MSI demanded that they be either muzzled or jailed.3
- The United Nations Population Fund halted food and other aid to millions of starving Yemenis because the nation refused to legalize abortion.4
- When Zambia refused to legalize sodomy, the United States withdrew much-needed foreign aid to help alleviate the 11% national HIV infection rate and to care for 250,000 AIDS orphas.5
- The Joint United Nations Program on AIDS [UNAIDS] threatened to withdraw all of its aid from the Caribbean island of St. Lucia unless it approved language supporting abortion and homosexuality in a political declaration on HIV/AIDS.6
The powerful population control cartel does not engage in charity at all – instead, it freely employs thuggery and bullying to enforce its will.
NSSM-200 also specifically declared that the United States must cover up its population control activities and avoid charges of imperialism by inducing the United Nations and various non-governmental organizations – specifically the Pathfinder Fund, the International Planned Parenthood Foundation (IPPF) and the Population Council – to do its dirty work.
Dr. Alan Guttmacher, one of the most knowledgeable and active population suppression experts of all time, described this strategy:
My own feeling is that we’ve got to pull out all the stops and involve the United Nations…. If you’re going to curb population, it’s extremely important not to have it done by the “damned Yankee,” but by the UN. Because the thing is, then it’s not considered genocide. If the United States goes to the black man or the yellow man and says “slow down your reproductive rate,” we’re immediately suspected of having ulterior motives to keep the white man dominant in the world. If you can send in a colorful UN force, you’ve got much better leverage.7
Massive Human Rights Violations
NSSM-200 has directly and inevitably encouraged atrocities on an enormous scale in dozens of the world’s nations. Just four of countless examples are shown below.
China
For many years, the United States government funded the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). In April 2017, the Trump Administration finally took the step of ending UNFPA funding [4].
Why?
One of the main targets of UNFPA money is the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The State Department grounded the change of policy in the fact that the agency “supports, or participates in the management of, a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization” in China.
While the UNFPA denies it, according to its own documents the UNFPA has donated more than $100 million to China’s population control program [5], financed a $12 million computer complex specifically to monitor the population program, provided the technical expertise and personnel that trained thousands of Chinese population control officials, and presented China with a United Nations award for the “most outstanding population control program.”
Those unfamiliar with the countless abuses perpetrated under this program might consider reading material from 2015-present at the links for the U.S. Congressional Hearing on China [6] and Population Research Institute [7] (PRI) for evidence. As the PRI article states, “More children were aborted under the one-child policy than the entire population of the United States.”
Peru
During the years 1995 to 1997, over a quarter of a million Peruvian women were sterilized [8] as part of a program to fulfill then-president Alberto Fujimori’s family planning goals. Although this campaign was called the “Voluntary Surgical Contraception Campaign,” many of these procedures were obviously coerced. In fact, women whose underweight children were on government food programs were threatened with the withholding of this food if they refused to be sterilized. Others were kidnapped from their families and forcibly sterilized.
Uganda
Uganda became the first African country to roll back its adult HIV infection rate, from 21% in 1991 to about 6% in 2004, a 70% decrease. The nation accomplished this amazing feat by changing the behavior of the people [9] and shifting the focus away from condoms.
Second from right is HLI Anglophone Regional Director, Emil Hagamu, with Ugandan delegates at the recent Africa Family Life Federation Conference in Mauritius
The population control groups were upset that Uganda’s successful program emphasized virtuous behavior. They did not want this success to interfere with their inflexible template, so they aggressively undermined President Yoweri Museveni’s program. Timothy Wirth, President of the United Nation Foundation, called this highly effective program “gross negligence toward humanity.” The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Population Services International, CARE International, and others began pushing condoms as hard as they could in Uganda. Rates of HIV infection rose to over 7% in 2013. Edward Greene, former senior research scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health, ascribes this increase to riskier behavior [10] and less fear of HIV as a death sentence.
Recently, Ugandan adult HIV infection rates have declined to 5.4% [11]. Nevertheless, Uganda’s initial success in the ’90s proves that abstinence works. The attempt to undermine Uganda’s proven HIV prevention program is perhaps the most egregious example of population control ideology trumping science.
India
In 2014, there was renewed international attention on India’s continuing forced sterilization program after dozens of women were killed [12] and many more harmed due to the assembly line procedures being done in grotesquely unsanitary conditions [13]. As gynecologist Josas Koninoor remarked:
95% of our clients belong to the very poor class. They are responsible for giving birth four or five times. Since they cannot remember to take birth control pills every day, long-acting contraceptives are much better for them…. In order to have a good thing there is always a price to pay. If two or three women die — what’s the problem? The population will be reduced.”8
HLI marriage enrichment program in India
Female sterilization is still India’s primary method of “contraception.” According to The New York Times, as of 2016, four million tubal ligations are still done annually. This program continues to be financed by the US and other western governments and foundations [14]. Currently, there are no plans to stop sterilizations, but the Indian government is introducing free injectable contraceptives [15], which will also have major negative health impacts on women.
Outline of the Population Control Strategy in NSSM-200
NSSM-200 explicitly lays out the detailed strategy by which the United States government aggressively promotes population control in developing nations in order to regulate (or have better access to) the natural resources of these countries.
The following outline shows the elements of this plan, with actual supporting quotes from NSSM-200 [1]:
1. The United States needs widespread access to the mineral resources of less-developed nations (quote shown above).
2. The smooth flow of resources to the United States could be jeopardized by lesser-developed country government action, labor conflicts, sabotage, or civil disturbances, which are much more likely if population pressure is a factor: “These types of frustrations are much less likely under conditions of slow or zero population growth.”
3. Young people are much more likely to challenge imperialism and the world’s power structures, so their numbers should be kept down as much as possible: “These young people can more readily be persuaded to attack the legal institutions of the government or real property of the ‘establishment,’ ‘imperialists,’ multinational corporations, or other–often foreign–influences blamed for their troubles.”
4. Therefore, the United States must develop a commitment to government population control among key LDC leaders, while bypassing the will of their people: “The U.S. should encourage LDC leaders to take the lead in advancing family planning and population stabilization both within multilateral organization and through bilateral contact with other LDCs.”
5. The critical elements of government population control implementation include:
- Identifying the primary targets: “Those countries are: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia and Colombia.”
- Enlisting the aid of as many multilateral population control organizations as possible in this worldwide project to deflect criticism and charges of imperialism: “The U.S. will look to the multilateral agencies, especially the U.N. Fund for Population Activities which already has projects in over 80 countries to increase population assistance on a broader basis with increased U.S. contributions.”
- Recognizing that “no country has reduced its population growth without resorting to abortion.”
- Designing programs with financial incentives for countries to increase their abortion, sterilization and contraception-use rates: “Pay women in the LDCs to have abortions as a method of family planning…. Similarly, there have been some controversial, but remarkably successful, experiments in India in which financial incentives, along with other motivational devices, were used to get large numbers of men to accept vasectomies.”
- Concentrating on “indoctrinating” [NSSM-200’s language] the children of LDCs with anti-natalist propaganda: “Without diminishing in any way the effort to reach these adults, the obvious increased focus of attention should be to change the attitudes of the next generation, those who are now in elementary school or younger.”
- Designing and instigating propaganda programs and sex-education curricula intended to convince couples to have smaller families, regardless of social or cultural considerations: “The following areas appear to contain significant promise in effecting fertility declines and are discussed in subsequent sections… concentrating on the education and indoctrination of the rising generation of children regarding the desirability of smaller family size.”
- Investigating the desirability of mandatory [NSSM-200’s language] population control programs: “The conclusion of this view is that mandatory programs may be needed and that we should be considering these possibilities now.”
- Considering using coercion in other forms, such as withholding disaster and food aid unless a targeted LDC implements population control programs: “On what basis should such food resources then be provided? Would food be considered an instrument of national power? Will we be forced to make choices as to whom we can reasonably assist, and if so, should population efforts be a criterion for such assistance?”
Throughout the implementation process, the United States must hide its tracks and disguise its population control programs as altruistic, by using the euphemisms so well-beloved by all elements of the culture of death:
There is also 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.… The U.S. can help to minimize charges of an imperialist motivation behind its support of population activities by repeatedly asserting that such support derives from a concern with:
(a) The right of the individual couple to determine freely and responsibly the number and spacing of children and to have information, education, and means to do so; and
(b) The fundamental social and economic development of poor countries in which rapid population growth is both a contributing cause and a consequence of widespread poverty.
Is Government Population Control Necessary?
There is growing awareness that the world “population explosion” is over [16] or, indeed, that it never actually materialized in the first place.
When the population scare began in the late 1960s, the world population was increasing at a rate of more than 2% per year. It is now increasing at less than 1% per year, and this rate is expected to continue to drop [17] due to continuing population control activities.
Source – Our World in Data
NSSM-200 predicted that the population of the world would stabilize at about 10 to 13 billion, with some demographers predicting that the world population would balloon to as high as 22 billion people. Now, it is estimated that by 2100, the population will level out at around 11 billion [17], although many dependable estimates put the peak population at a much lesser number.
The worldwide application of the strategies recommended in the report has resulted in regional population growth rates decelerating quickly. This is already causing severe economic and social problems in Europe, the former Soviet Union, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong. Many developing nations are now aging even more rapidly than the developed world, which foretells even more severe problems for their relatively underdeveloped economies. The developed nations had the opportunity to become rich before they became old; if a nation becomes old first, it will never become rich.
From the very beginning, the concept of a “population explosion” was an ideologically motivated false alarm. It was specifically designed to allow rich nations to pillage the resources of the poorer nations. The resulting push for population control in developing nations has borne absolutely no positive fruit in its decades of implementation. In fact, population control ideologies and programs make it even more difficult to respond to the impending disastrous worldwide “population implosion.” It is time to begin urging families to have more children [18], not fewer, if we are to avoid a worldwide demographic catastrophe.
The first step in such a massive change in policy is, of course, to change our vision and our values. To do this, we must repudiate old ways of thinking and outmoded ways of accomplishing our objectives.
NSSM-200 represents the worst aspect of the “advanced” nations meddling in the most intimate affairs of less-developed nations. It strongly reinforces the image of the “ugly American.” It advocates violating the most precious freedoms and autonomy of the individuals through coercive family planning programs.
NSSM-200 purports to show concern for the rights or welfare of individuals and of nations, but it was conceived from the imperialistic concept that the United States has the “right” to have unfettered access to the natural resources of developing nations. The United States and the other nations of the developed world should be supporting and guiding authentic economic development that allows the people of each nation to use their resources for their own benefit. This will lead to an enhancement of human rights worldwide and healthier economies for all.
No human relationships are closer or more intimate than those found in the family. Yet, the “developed” world has spent more than 160 billion dollars just since 1990 attempting to control the number of children born to families in developing nations. This widespread imposition of abortion, sterilization and birth control is veiled under the deceptive umbrella terms “family planning services” and “reproductive health.”
All that the tens of billions of dollars of government population control expenditures have accomplished is to make hundreds of millions of large poor families into small poor families.
It is unfortunately left to our imagination to wonder what might have happened if these resources had been invested in health and education infrastructure and in research dedicated to finding peaceful strategies to transition nations from corrupt governance to truly representative and accountable courts and public service sectors.
Children are not an obstacle to development; they are the hope for the future of any society. People are not the problem – they are the solution.
People are Not the Problem: Ehrlich was Wrong
A growing population is not something to be thwarted by government programs. People are invaluable, and the war on fertility has spelled future economic and social problems [19] for the 80 nations that are now below replacement level.
Man’s life comes from God; it is his gift, his image and imprint, a sharing in his breath of life. God therefore is the sole Lord of this life: man cannot do with it as he wills.” (Evangelium Vitae [20], 1995. Emphasis added)
Perhaps the loudest pro-population control advocate in recent memory is Paul Ehrlich. In the ’60s, his book, The Population Bomb [21], sold millions of copies. This book predicted several things that ended up being grossly incorrect. Ehrlich claimed that 65 million Americans would starve to death in the ’70s, that India was doomed, and that England would cease to exist by 2000.
Obviously, he was wrong. There was no mass starvation of Americans, India is growing to be an economic competitor with Russia and China, and England thrives today.
The fear of overpopulation never came true. And it didn’t come true in the 19th century, either, which is when these fears began [19]. Indeed, as the US Conference of Catholic Bishops acknowledges, the issue is not overpopulation [19] or running out of food. The problem is getting food to those who are poor, such as families in third-world countries.
“Life is entrusted to man as a treasure which must not be squandered, as a talent which must be used well. Man must render an account of it to his Master.” (Evangelium Vitae [20], 1995. Emphasis added)
What Now?
What can be done by the layman? First, we must realize that we are in graver danger of living in a depopulated world than in an overpopulated one [3]. Next, we must vote for politicians and advocate for policies that would protect the unborn and fertility. Finally, we must entrust it all to Jesus, Mary and Joseph and pray for their intercession.
Human Life International continues to fight for the rights of women all around the world, including the right to live free from sterilization, by lobbying for pro-life and pro-woman policies.
This article was originally published in June 2021 by Dr. Brian Clowes and was most recently updated in January 2024 by Marisa Cantu.
+ Endnotes
[1] Diane Montagna. “US Won’t Help Fight Boko Haram Until Nigeria Accepts Homosexuality, Birth Control, Bishop Says.” Aleteia, February 17, 2015.
[2] Micaiah Bilger. “UN Refuses to Send Coronavirus Funds to Pro-Life Nation Unless It Legalizes Abortions.” LifeNews.com, May 18, 2020.
[3] Dorothy Cummings McLean. “Global Abortion Business Wants Kenyan Court to Ban Pro-Lifer from Mentioning Its Name.” LifeSite Daily News, March 17, 2021.
[4] Micaiah Bilger. “Feminists Block Program to Send Food to Starving People Because Abortion Isn’t Included.” LifeNews.com, July 13, 2020.
[5] Stefano Gennarini, J.D. “US Ambassador Threatens to Pull Foreign Aid Unless Zambia Embraces Sodomy.” LifeSite Daily News, December 13, 2019.
[6] Pete Baklinski. “UNAIDS Threatened to End Aid if We Fought Abortion and Gay Language in Document: Former St. Lucia Delegate.” LifeSite Daily News, May 21, 2015.
[7] William Stump. “Dr. Guttmacher — Still Optimistic about the Population Problem.” Baltimore Magazine, February 1970 [Volume 63, Number. 2], pages 25 and 50 to 53.
Dr. Alan Guttmacher speaking to a symposium at the University of California Medical Center. “Doctor Blames His Profession for Delays on Family Planning.” The New York Times, January 16, 1966.
[8] Bangladeshi gynecologist Josas Koninoor, M.D., quoted in “Norplant, The Five-Year Needle.” Issues in Reproductive Engineering, Volume 3, Number 3, pages 221 to 228.
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