The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), one of the world's largest pro-abortion and population control entities, relies greatly on the use - or rather - misuse of language to promote its programs. By reviewing the aims and goals of IPPF and unmasking them, IPPF's true motives will be made clear.

IPPF claims it wants to reduce worldwide maternal mortality rates, supposedly caused by illegal abortions, in order to "protect" women's lives and health. In its Strategic Plan - Vision 2000, IPPF states its desire "to eliminate the high incidence of unsafe abortion, and increase the right of access to safe, legal abortion."1

Also, it instructs that "IPPF and its member associations are no longer to remain silent in the face of this major threat to the health and lives of millions of women."2 Despite this professed concern, IPPF endorses and recommends the training of personnel other than physicians to perform abortions.3

IPPF claims that it seeks to promote "sexual health" and has started the "Sexual Health Project".4 Hilary Hughes, IPPF advisor on this project, calls "sexual health" a "basic human right". Yet, IPPF and its affiliates throughout the world, use youth "promoters" to distribute harmful contraceptive drugs and abortifacients such as the Pill and Depo Provera, which can cause serious side effects, particularly in adolescents. 5

IPPF holds also that the right to plan a family is a basic human right.6 It claims that its main objective is to "advance the basic human right of all women, men and youth to make free and informed choices regarding their own sexual and reproductive health, and advocate for the means to exercise this right."7 The strategy put forth to accomplish the "protection" of this "right" is its introducion into the constitutions of different countries.

Yet, IPPF supports China's brutal one child policy, which includes forced abortions and sterilizations.8 Actually, IPPF was one of two organizations that decided to face a loss of U.S. funding (amounting to over 25% of total revenues in IPPF's case), rather than stop supporting the Chinese program. In all, "IPPF gives financial support to China at the rate of nearly $1 million each year."9

JOICFP, Japan's IPPF affiliate, even praised the Chinese population control program in its magazine.10 Yet, IPPF still publicly claims that "no person should be subject to forced pregnancy, sterilization and abortion."11

"Alternative" lifestyles

IPPF also promotes homosexuality, along with other sexual deviations.. In one document, IPPF advised that the "the first aspect which must be considered is that educators, parents and teachers should have a healthy mentality with respect to homosexuality."12

Some of IPPF's affiliates call themselves "Pro Familia" (Pro-Family), yet in its manual for sex educators "La Enseñanza de la Sexualidad Humana en las Escuelas" (Teaching Human Sexuality in Schools), IPPF (Western Hemisphere Region) condones homosexuality (p. 113) and suggests that "marriage should be compared to other unions . . . analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of different [types of] unions" (p. 189).

On page 197, the manual suggests that students should discuss "homosexuality, bisexuality, lesbianism...oro-genital sex . . .[and] deviations such as bestiality, sadism, masoquism, exhibitionism and voyeurism, to mention the most common ones".13

Clearly, IPPF is promoting sexual perversion in its sex education programs.

"Neutral" on abortion?

IPPF claims that its stance on abortion is "neutral".14 Yet, its officials themselves claim that abortion is an indispensable part of any population control program, as a "back-up" to failed contraception. IPPF states: "...therefore, even in countries with very high quality contraceptive services, abortion is needed as a back-up method in cases of contraceptive failure, if only to a limited extent."15

Furthermore, through the organized action of parliamentarian groups in developing countries, IPPF has formulated ways in which laws can be changed in order to make contraception and abortion accesible to all. Two of its main objectives are "to amend any law that limits the access to family-planning services to adolescents and adult women", and "to amend national laws in order to decrimilize abortion."16

IPPF underhandedly promotes abortion legalization, when it tells its affiliates to work to change the law in countries where abortion is not permitted: "[Family Planning] Associations should operate right up to the edge of what is legal and sometimes even beyond, where the law is uncertain or out of tune with public opinion. While a government gains short term respect by being respectable, a voluntary body may gain long term respect by being responsibly disreputable." (emphasis added).17

Teen pregnancy

IPPF claims that it wants to lower the rates of teen pregnancy.18 Yet, it shows adolescents (ages 10 and up) erotic films such as "The Blue Dove," "Music for Two" and "The Last Train," which incite them to want to experiment with sex. In "Music for Two", a young couple is advised that "the sexual encounter is a special form of communicating, a profound encounter where tenderness and respect permit them to understand and give themselves to the other."

In its Guide for Educators, no mention of a marriage commitment is included in the account. However, there is ample and explicit information on how the couple can use contraception and give each other pleasure.19 IPPF's sex education programs do not really promote abstinence, 20 but what is deceptively called "safe sex" or "safer sex", which is merely the use of contraceptives and abortifacients to avoid pregnancy. This is what IPPF calls being "responsible" where sex is concerned.

On the healthiest method of spacing births, Natural Family Planning, IPPF has this to say: "IPPF does not advise that periodic abstinence [Natural Family Planning] be considered as an alternative to the other, more effective methods of family planning."21 Obviously, it is not good business to promote a family planning method which doesn't yield any profit for population controllers. After all, the idea of couples genuinely controlling their own reproduction according to God's plan, would not give the population planners the control they seek.

"Emergency contraception"

Of course, IPPF backs "emergency contraception", such as the insertion of a copper-releasing IUD within five days of "unexpected" and/or "unprotected" sexual intercourse,22 or the use of oral contraceptive pills for treating "unprotected" intercourse within the previous 72 hours, administered 12 hours apart. 23

According to IPPF officials, these methods do not really constitute abortion. They know full well that these drugs and devices act to prevent implantation of a fertilized ovum, but they hold that a woman is not technically "pregnant" until implantation. Subsequently, they claim such methods are permissible even in countries where abortion is illegal.24

IPPF officials obviously rely heavily upon the use of euphemisms, such as when their literature discusses "menstrual regulation," which is nothing more than abortion in the first stages of pregnancy. They deny that "menstrual regulation" is an abortion, supposedly because "pregnancy cannot be reliably diagnosed" at those stages.25 These early abortions also escape notice because in countries in Latin America where abortion is illegal, "prosecution for abortion requires proof that a pregnancy was terminated,"26 and "menstrual regulation" procedures are performed so early in a pregnancy that the resulting "evidence" is destroyed or disposed of quickly.

IPPF should be unmasked at the highest levels of government, where its affiliates are at work, in nearly every country in the world. Real reform won't happen unless pro-lifers everywhere get involved in exposing its nefarious agenda.

Endnotes

1. Strategic Plan - Vision 2000, IPPF, Objective 3, 1995; IPPF/WHR Forum, July 1990.

2. Ibid.

3. "Train Providers of Abortion Care," Planned Parenthood Challenges (1993/1): 46. See also IPPF Medical Bulletin, Vol. 26, No. 1, Feb. 1992, p. 1.

4. "More Than Just a Health Issue", Health Action, (Sept.-Nov. 1994) p. 2.

5. Comprender a los Adolescentes, ("Understanding Adolescents") IPPF, London (1994): pp. 26-27.

6. Human Right to Family Planning, IPPF, London (1984).

7. Strategic Plan - Vision 2000, IPPF, Objective 1, 1995; IPPF/WHR Forum, July 1990.

8. "China is the most extraordinary success. Irrespective of media speculation about that program, on the whole this is carried out in a very responsible way." (Family Planning World, Vol. 2, No. 2, March/April 1992).

9. Robert Whelan, Choices in Childbearing (London: Committee on Population and the Economy, 1992) p. 35.

10. "Involving Women at All Levels", JOICFP News (September 1995) p. 2.

11. "IPPF Strengthens Stand on Reproductive Rights and Unsafe Abortion", IPPF, taken from the Charter on Sexual and Reproductive Rights (November 29, 1995).

12. Human Sexuality and Personal Relations ("Sexualidad Humana y Relaciones Personales"), (New York: IPPF, 1983) p. 260.

13. A. Lewis, S. Rogoonanan, R. Saint-Victor, La Enseñanza de la Sexualidad Humana en las Escuelas: Un Manual Para el Educador" ("Teaching Human Sexuality in Schools: A Teacher's Manual"), IPPF (WHR), New York, 1985.

14. "Encounter: Dr. Fred Sai, International Planned Parenthood Federation." Sunday Inquirer Magazine, November 26, 1995, pp3-5, as cited in The International Planned Parenthood Federation's Promotion of Abortion in the Developiing World, A Report by the Population Research Institute, April 18, 1996, p. 5.

15. Global incidence of abortion", Planned Parenthood Challenges (1993/1): p. 28-29.

16. Dr. Maria Cristina Calderón, "The Fight for Women's Lives: Parliamentarians Join Forces Against Maternal Morality," Inter-American Parliamentary Group on Population and Development (Aug./Sept., 1993) p. 3-4.

17. Malcolm Potts, M.D., former director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). "Population Growth and Abortion," in Gerald I. Zatuchni, John J. Sciarra, and J. Joseph Speidel (eds.) Pregnamcy Termination: Procedures, Safety and New Developments (New York: Harper & Row, 1979) p. 424.

18. Jacqueline Kasun, The War Against Population, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988):pp. 99-100, 166-117.

19. "Musica para dos" ("Music for Two") used by MEXAM (Planned Parenthood of Mexico), Guide for Educators, Mexican Foundation for Family Planning, Juarez 208, Tlalpan, 14000, Mexico, D.F., Mexico.

20. Alan Guttmacher Institute, 11 Million Teenagers: What Can Be Done about the Epidemic of Adolescent Pregnancies in the United States (New York: Planned Parenthood Federation of America, 1976); Teenage Pregnancy: The Problem That Hasn't Gone Away (New York: The Alan Guttmacher Institute, 1981); see Hearings of the United States Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, March 31, 1981, testimony of Susan Roylance, James H. Ford, and Jacqueline Kasun; as cited in Kasun, p. 100.

21. Ronald L. Kleinman, ed., Abstinencia Periódica ("Periodic Abstinence"), (London: IPPF, 1983) p. 60.

22. IPPF Medical Buletin, IPPF (December 1995) p. 2.

23. "New Interest in Emergency Contraception," Women's Health Journal, Latin American and Caribbean Women's Health Network (July-December 1995) p. 34.

24. Malcolm Potts, Peter Diggory and John Pell, Abortion. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970) p. 230-232, as cited in The International Planned Parenthood Federation's Promotion of Abortion in the Developing World, A Report by the Population Research Institute, April 18, 1996, p. 7.

25. Ronald L. Kleinman, ed. Regulación Menstrual ("Menstrual Regulation"), (London: IPPF, 1976) p. 8.