Still Running Off at the Keyboard

The ninth reason to stand against the URI is that the movement, and its prominent allies, stand for population control, legal abortion, and artificial contraception--with a focus on the Third World.

Bishop Swing has expressed the movement's dominant beliefs.

During Swing's global pilgrimage in 1996, he cited Pakistan as an example of overpopulation. He said "Now the world is drowning in people. You can see it plainly. Pakistan is only the size of Texas, and yet it is the 8th most populated country in the world...All through the middle of the earth, we are drowning in people. (p. 218)

URI supporter Barbara Marx Hubbard wrote, "The vast effort of humanity to 'be fruitful and multiply' would have to be curtailed in our generation. One more doubling of the world population will destroy our life support system. Our Mother will not support us if we continue to grow in numbers!" Her spirit guide said, "The population overgrowth on Earth must cease."

URI supporter Robert Muller, a former Assistant Secretary-General of the UN, has given a UN imprimatur to efforts to reduce human population, and credits UN activities for preventing the birth of 2.2 billion people. (p. 219)

Muller has urged the "white western world" to take up the cause of population control for racial reasons: "Business is not interested in population control: they are interested in growing numbers of consumers and new markets. But the white western world should be acutely interested, for within a few decades their children and children's children will be minimal in the world, close to disappearance." Muller predicts this response to the problem: "The time might come when laws will be adopted in some poor countries that no couple should have more than two children while in the western countries allowances will be given for more children. (p. 220)

Jan Fransen, a demographer and former staff member for the UN Population Fund...said that the real concern should be the number of "people which the earth can hold in a sustainable way;" he believed the earth's carrying capacity is 700 million to 1 billion people. He added that "the focus on human rights disturbs him because it draws attention away from this more pressing matter of the carrying capacity of the earth." (p. 220-221)

In its support for population control, the URI has elite company--including Bill Gates, the Packard Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, Warren Buffett, the MacArthur Foundation, George Soros' Open Society Institute, and Ted Turner. (p. 221)

In THE SECRET DOCTRINE, [published in 1888] Blavatsky urged that an astrologically based form of natural family planning be taught to "the armies of the ragged and the poor:" "If instead of being taught in Sunday Schools useless lessons from the Bible, the armies of the ragged and the poor were taught Astrology--so far, at any rate, as the occult properties of the Moon and its hidden influences on generation are concerned, then there would be little need to fear increase of the population nor resort to the questionable literature of the Malthusians for its arrest." (At the time, world population was about 1.6 billion people, roughly one-quarter of the current human population.) In the 20th Century, many others would follow the trail that Blavatsky blazed, and would concern themselves with limiting reproduction among the poor. (p. 252)

In the 1940s--when world population was less than half what it is today--Alice Bailey said, "certain physical restrictions should be imposed, because it is now evident that beyond a certain point the planet cannot support humanity." Bailey's proposed solutions were far-reaching: eugenics, and the reshaping of human sexuality so that people--like animals and plants--only mate and reproduce for a part of each year: "The emphasis in the future will shift from the urge to produce large families to that of producing quality and intelligence in the offspring. This will include that science of which eugenics is the distorted and exoteric indication." "The real change in human consciousness which is needed will appear only as the race itself is brought under a rhythmic law--under which, for instance, the animal lives function, or the seasonal law under which forms in the vegetable kingdom operate--thus transferring the whole concept on to a higher turn of the evolutionary spiral." (p. 263-264)