World Congress of Families Responds to the Nation's Polemic on the International Pro-Family Movement
by Staff
February 22, 2008
(christiansunite.com) -- The Nation - the oldest and largest circulation leftwing periodical in the U.S. - has just published an extraordinarily inept attack on World Congress of Families and those concerned about plummeting birthrates worldwide ("Missing: The 'Right' Babies" by Kathryn Joyce, which will appear in the March 3 issue and is currently available online at www.thenation.com).The article attempts to paint the Congress and others sounding the alarm about the coming demographic winter as concerned only with preserving the white majority of Europe and the United States.
This is ironic, in that the population-control movement (to which The Nation subscribes) was started by Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood), who saw birth control and abortion as ways to depress the non-white population (whom Sanger described as the "genetically unfit").
Joyce dismissingly refers to World Congress of Families as an "interdenominational alliance of Mormon, Catholic and evangelical 'pro-family' advocates as well as the token link between this pan- Christian front and a handful of Orthodox Jewish and Muslim representatives."
That "token link" includes Don Feder (who is Jewish and, besides serving as World Congress of Families Communications Director, was a speaker at three of four Congresses), Dr. Farooq Hassan (a barrister and visiting lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School), a number of distinguished rabbis (including Rabbi Daniel Lapin), Kay Hymowitz (a Manhattan Institute scholar who addressed the Warsaw Congress), and Madame Jehan Sadat (widow of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat) who spoke at the Geneva Congress (1999).
Allan C. Carlson, International Secretary of World Congress of Families, observed: "Speakers and delegates at our four Congresses to date have come from Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia and the Americas. They represent all of the world's races and religions. We are united not by doctrine or ancestry, but by our common concern for the fate of the natural family, the cornerstone of civilization."
World Congress of Families III was in Mexico City in 2004. A coalition of African pro-family groups has put in a bid to hold World Congress of Families V in Nigeria.
Carlson continued: "Tellingly, there isn't a single statistic in Joyce's ad hominem attack - which leaves the impression that demographic winter is a manufactured crisis, used to play on fears of the Western world to build support for the natural family."
In fact, worldwide, birthrates have declined by 50% in the last half-century. With a birthrate of 1.3 (versus 2.1 to replace current population), clearly, Europe is in serious trouble. But so are Africa, Asia and the Middle East - a phenomenon to which we regularly refer. While still at above replacement level, one of the greatest declines in fertility has been in Iran.
Carlson concluded: "The anti-family left, of which The Nation is an integral part, simply seems to be terrified of our success at building a multi-racial, multi- denominational pro-family alliance."
For more information about World Congress of Families, go to www.worldcongress.org. To schedule an interview with Allan Carlson, contact Larry Jacobs at 1-800-461-3113.
The World Congress of Families (WCF) is an international network of pro-family organizations, scholars, leaders and people of goodwill from more than 60 countries that seeks to restore the natural family as the fundamental social unit and the 'seedbed' of civil society. The WCF was founded in 1997 by Allan Carlson and is a project of The Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society in Rockford, Illinois (www.profam.org). To date, there have been four World Congresses of Families - Prague (1997), Geneva (1999), Mexico City (2004) and Warsaw, Poland (2007).
