janw@inmet.UUCP (09/18/86)
From "Helping Hand Won't Solve Africa's Problems" by Nick Eber- stadt, in WSJ, Sep 17, 1986, p.30. : Many poor Africans seem to fear that family-planning programs will be used to enforce involuntary sterility upon them. Last March, the Washington Post recounted a story of a primary school in rural Kenya from which hundreds of children ran screaming, some scrambling through windows, upon the approach of an unfamiliar car: it was thought to contain population workers who would inject them with nonreversible contraceptives. The previous year starving Kenyans in drought-afflicted areas were reported to have refused relief shipments of U.S. corn, on the rumor that the corn had been laced with sterilants. Kenya, of course, is a country in which civil liberties are rela- tively well secured and government policies relatively en- lightened. It is precisely for these reasons that such stories of deep-seated distrust and fear are noteworthy. In other words, these scenes are probably worse in other places, but we are unlikely to hear about them. [orb@whuts.UUCP ] /* ---------- "Re: Population control" ---------- */ >But to imply that caring people throughout the world who are do- >ing what they can, including population control, to stop the >senseless deaths of 30 children a minute from starvation simply >view humans as "tools" is an absolute outrage. These "caring" people may seem to themselves as noble as Dr. Schweitzer; but the "cared for" apparently see them as the equivalents of Dr. Mengele... Jan Wasilewsky