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PRI Weekly Briefing
June 30, 2006
Vol. 8, No. 25

The Gates-Buffett Marriage, Designed Not to Bear Fruit
By Joseph A. D'Agostino

Two fanatically anti-people billionaires--the two richest men in the world--have announced that they will combine their enormous fortunes into one charitable foundation. Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway plans to give securities currently valued at about $37 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has already had its coffers swollen to $29 billion by Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The poor Ford Foundation, once the world's largest, has only $11 billion. Gates has even let slip that the motivation behind reproductive health programs is actually population control, as PRI has argued for years (see below). Both men are dedicated to population control in the Third World, and now they have created an unfathomably large organization that will join the United Nations, the U.S. government, the European Union, and many private organizations in continuing the disastrous effort to reduce the Earth's population.

An exagerration? Hardly. As readers of this column know very well, population control has been a huge success in almost every corner of the world. Birthrates have dropped dramatically in the past few decades and continue downward. Not only developed countries, but now many Third World countries have birthrates below replacement level. In a few years, most Third World nations will have socially suicidal birthrates, not having enough children to maintain their populations in the long term. Even Latin America, once the region of large Catholic families, has a birthrate of only 2.4 today, down from 4.5 just 30 years ago. Mexico's is already below replacement, which is generally reckoned at about 2.1 children per woman in her lifetime. Most Third World nations now face rapid population aging over the next few decades and a dearth of young people to work and pay taxes, just as First World nations do--but without First World nations' wealth or social security systems. Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region of the world that still has consistenly high birthrates, and it needs them to replace populations decimated by wars, famines, and epidemics such as AIDS.

So why are the world's elites still so bent on population control? Why aren't they trying to prevent continued falling birthrates and massive population aging instead? This is, I think, a spiritual question.

In any case, the Associated Press and some other media picked up on the dismay of pro-life organizations when Buffett announced his gift. AP quoted PRI and some other pro-life groups which, instead of hailing this tremendous foundation gift, had to criticize it. Both Buffett and the Gates Foundation have a long history of subsidizing abortion and population control. Claiming the money is for services other than abortion, the Gates Foundation gives millions to Planned Parenthood. But I called this position dishonest, because giving money to one wing of an organization frees up funds to be used for other activities--in this case, for abortions.

Someone who read my comments e-mailed me the following: "I was disgusted and sickened by your comments regarding the Gates Foundation. Your comment that the foundation's position 'is simply dishonest' shows your ignorance," he wrote. "This foundation is one of the best organizations at helping people, yet you attack them. This blatant attack is just yet another example of the extremism inherent in the anti-abortion movement. Your group does nothing but attempt to take choices away from women. Who made you (and POP) the decision-makers? I am well-educated and completely able to make my own decisions without your input. Instead of focusing on making the world change to your personal view, why not look inward and stop the hate you have for others."

First of all, let me acknowledge that the Gates Foundation does much good work. It funds research into disease eradication and many legitimate Third World health programs. In addition, it funds educational alternatives to our utterly catastrophic public school system, even venturing into school choice programs. But when a foundation also subsidizes the killing of unborn children and the ongoing destruction of Third World societies, it is not extremism to condemn it, even if such activities account for a relatively small part of the foundation's funding.

How small? It's difficult to say, since so much money spent on reproductive health and HIV prevention (condoms) has the effect of reducing population. But certainly, there is plenty of evidence of the anti-people inclinations of Gates and Buffett. And it's especially shameful that Gates uses the profits from his near-monopoly on business operating systems to fund abortion. Large numbers of pro-life people are forced to buy his products. Why can't Gates restrict himself to funding charitable activities that everyone can agree on?

"The one issue that really grabbed me as urgent were issues related to population. reproductive health," Gates told PBS "Now" interviewer Bill Moyers, May 9, 2003 (all ellipses in original PBS transcript). "And maybe the most interesting thing I learned is this thing that's still surprising when I tell other people which is that, as you improve health in a society, population growth goes down. You know I thought it was.before I learned about it, I thought it was paradoxical. Well if you improve health, aren't you just dooming people to deal with such a lack of resources where they won't be educated or they won't have enough food? You know, sort of a Malthusian view of what would take place." So it would seem that Gates favors reproductive health programs, and maybe health programs in general, because they reduce population--exactly the argument against reproductive health programs that PRI makes (we're not against health programs in general). Gates added, "My dad was head of Planned Parenthood."

Gates has put his money where his mouth is. His foundation gave $2.25 million to Johns Hopkins to train Third World experts in population control in 1997. In 1998, his foundation--which is controlled by Gates, his wife, and his father--gave $1.7 million to a United Nations Population Fund program for controlling population growth.

Buffett has given millions to pro-abortion and population control efforts over the years, and has even funded the anti-Catholic Catholics for a Free Choice. But how much of a priority is it for him? Reported the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Nov. 13, 1997, about his wife's foundation, "One of the foundation's directors, Mr. Buffett's daughter, Susie, told The Chronicle that she did expect that population control would be the foundation's top priority. 'That's what my father has always believed was the biggest and most important issue, so that will be the focus,' she said. 'I feel as his child that it's important to carry out his wishes. It's his money.'"

In fact, the foundation, named after Buffett's late wife Susan, funded clinical trials of the RU-486 abortion pill in the 1990s. Helping to create a whole new way to kill children--that's committment.

There is no telling how much Buffett will end up giving to the Gates Foundation. He intends to give 5% a year, and his overall fortune could continue to grow year-by-year despite these gifts. It could be much more than $37 billion.

Buffett helped launch the human pesticide, RU-486. The Gates Foundation is working on its own sinister plans. On its website is an article by Gates' wife Melinda that first appeared in Newsweek, May 15, 2006. Here, not only the anti-people agenda but the feminist agenda is on display. "For many women, marriage is a risk factor for AIDS because of their husbands' dangerous behavior," she wrote. "Worldwide, 80% of women newly infected with HIV are practicing monogamy within a marriage or a long-term relationship. This shatters the myth that marriage is a natural refuge from AIDS.... Through our foundation, my husband, Bill, and I are working to develop tools that can put the power to prevent AIDS into the hands of women. Microbicides are one exciting new prevention tool in development. These are colorless, odorless gels that a woman could apply vaginally-without her partner's knowledge-to prevent sexual transmission of HIV. Microbicides may also prevent other sexually transmitted infections, such as syphilis and gonorrhea, and some act as contraceptives as well."

Notice that last clause. "Contraceptives." And, without their husbands' knowledge--driving yet another wedge between family members in a world bent on driving wedges between them. And will the women be told that the microbicide gels they receive contain contraceptives, or will they be deceived by their government-run "reproductive health" programs as women in Peru, Mexico, China, the Philippines, Africa, and countless other places have already been?

Given the odds against transmitting HIV through normal heterosexual intercourse, such microbidices will likely do little to prevent the spread of HIV, though they could assist against other diseases. Wouldn't America and Europe be suffering from a heterosexual AIDS epidemic if it were otherwise? The source of the African AIDS epidemic lies elsewhere, such as in the reuse of needles in the poorly run reproductive health clinics set up all over Africa with First World money.

Warren Buffett's biographer, Roger Lowenstein, has written that Buffett once--still does?--had "a Malthusian dread that overpopulation would aggravate problems in all other areas-such as food, housing, even human survival." Malthusian, the same attitude as Gates. The Anglican Rev. Thomas Malthus predicted in the late 18th Century that human population growth would outpace food production increases, thus leading to massive famines and death. Other, similar doomsayers have made similar predictions. Of course, it's more than 200 years later, the Earth's human population has growth enormously, and none of these predictions has ever come true. But for some reason, smart men such as Gates and Buffett continue to believe.

Joseph A. D'Agostino is Vice President for Communications at the Population Research Institute.

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The pro-life Population Research Institute is dedicated to ending human rights abuses committed in the name of "family planning," and to ending counter-productive social and economic paradigms premised on the myth of "overpopulation."