(LifeSiteNews) — Can words simply mean whatever the group in power declares them to mean? This certainly seems to be the case with the Population Council of the 1960s whose meetings spawned the goals of redefining basic biological principles and scientific lexicon. The meetings, sponsored by John D. Rockefeller III, the Population Council, and Planned Parenthood, were the 1st and 2nd International Conferences on Intra-Uterine Contraception held in New York City in 1962 and 1964. John D. Rockefeller’s opening remarks for the 1964 meeting could not have made his intentions clearer, with the “hope that this conference marks the beginning of a new era, in which for the first time in history we may see the practical chance of controlling population in ways that remove it as a major obstacle to the achievement of health, education, and prosperity…”
The foundations of the Population Council were established in the 1950s. John Rockefeller III was extremely concerned for what he viewed as the one of the greatest threats to humanity, and convened experts on how to reduce the world’s population. A major focus was to study and circumvent negative religious, cultural, and political perceptions of population control, and thus was born the Population Council. Eugenic ingredients were baked into the Population Council from the beginning, and Frederick Osborn, the first president of the Council, had been a founding member of the American Eugenics Society in 1926. John D. Rockefeller III had himself served on the board of the Bureau of Social Hygiene, an organization created by his father and which helped fund the birth control clinics of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.
The mindset of eugenics often fit well with that of population control, but religion and politics stood in the way. President Dwight Eisenhower condemned government involvement in such endeavors as “not a proper political or governmental activity.” The “open-mindedness” of the 60s, however, swept away many such barriers, and a few short years later, President Lyndon Johnson cleared the way for government funding of such endeavors, stating that “five dollars invested in population control is worth a hundred dollars invested in economic growth.” The government was now involved in managing populations. Not coincidentally, the very same year of Johnson’s statement, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) changed the definition of the “conception” of new human life to make contraception more palatable.
But the Catholic Church still stood in the way. Protestant Christians had already ceded to the contraceptive mentality at the 1930 Lambeth Conference. Rockefeller wanted the Catholics, and to that end he sponsored a series of population symposia at Notre Dame University in the 60s for Catholic leaders to meet with Planned Parenthood and the Population Council. Notre Dame would receive the funding from the Population Council, with the prerequisite being that the only Catholics invited were those willing to consider a change in the Church’s position on contraception. The Population Council stipulated “only the liberal minded Catholics” and those Catholics “who represent the position nearest our own” be involved. Expressly omitted would be “representative Catholics.” Furthermore, the Population Council would determine which books were to be read and discussed. (In some sense, one sees an eerie resemblance to the recent “Synod on Synodality” in which pre-selected, non-representative speakers and materials were permitted the lions-share voice.) Notre Dame acquiesced, but this can hardly be seen as consistent with Notre Dame’s self-proclaimed “true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of any kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.”
The American Catholic leaders were in a quandary at this time because of the bishops’ disagreement on contraception and the uncertainty of Pope Paul VI’s final decision on birth control, which was not finalized until Humanae Vitae in 1968. Furthermore, Catholic hospitals and charities depended on federal funds. Rockefeller seized the moment and made Notre Dame’s president, Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, a member of the board of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1961 until 1982. Hesburgh was even the Foundation’s Chairman from 1977-1982.
Notre Dame made further funding requests to the Ford Foundation, which also had interest in the population control movement. Proposed funding for these additional meetings had “the objective…to prepare a final statement and distribute it widely” to “echo far beyond the confines of the United States.” These somewhat bombastic promises by Notre Dame led to the meetings being funded, and the resulting statements from the Notre Dame meetings denounced in ever stronger terms the Church’s stance against contraception.
On the “Catholic problem”, Rockefeller knew the importance of coopting liberal Church leaders who needed funding. But he also knew the importance of whether or not “contraceptives” were perceived as causing abortions from a scientific standpoint. Changing definitions would be necessary.
In the 60s Americans feared nuclear Armageddon with Russia. But for Rockefeller, nuclear war was no longer the greatest threat to mankind’s survival. In opening remarks at the 1964 Population Control Council meeting, Rockefeller said, “I believe that the problem of unchecked population growth is as urgently important as any facing mankind today. Until recently, I believed an even graver problem was the control of nuclear weapons. However, there is a justifiable hope that the use of these weapons can be prevented; but there is no hope that we can escape a tremendous growth in world population.” In our modern times, do we still think that the threat of nuclear war can be so easily dismissed?
The Population Council thus altered the trajectory of public opinion as to the greatest threat to humanity. Redefining societal attitudes and priorities could be an achievable goal of a major population control meeting. But could such a meeting actually lead to redefining basic biology and embryology? That is an altogether entirely different undertaking.
One would not expect semantic gymnastics to be appropriated to something as simplistically obvious yet profoundly basic as “conception.” Ask anyone on the street the definition of conception and the overwhelming response will be that conception is synonymous with fertilization, the moment when the sperm penetrates the ovum, when a new biologic entity with 46 chromosomes and its own sex comes into existence. All embryology, genetics, and basic biology textbooks certainly affirm this overtly obvious reality that is so apparent to the lay person. The “conception” of something is the “beginning” of something – or someone.
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In 1959, the Population Council and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America held their meeting “Mechanisms Concerned with Conception” at West Point, New York. The proceedings were published in 1963. Concerns were expressed at the meeting by Dr. Brent Boving over the definition of “conception.” In his chapter “Implantation Mechanisms,” the concluding paragraph (p. 386) suggested that the term “conception” should be associated with implantation rather than fertilization, using a “prudent habit of speech.” This would avoid the perception that preventing implantation was the destruction of an already-established pregnancy. Dr. Boving stated:
If, then, implantation, like life, is a continuity of mechanisms, how shall we say when it begins or when it is that a woman becomes pregnant? Scientifically, of course, we might consider it a poor question, but returning to the world of common parlance we realize that it is a question so old that we have become accustomed to what may be a poor answer – ‘the moment of conception’ … ‘conception’ is a word much older than our knowledge of fertilization and really denotes the broader idea of ‘becoming pregnant.’ …Whether eventual control of implantation may be reserved the social advantage of being considered to prevent conception rather than to destroy an established pregnancy could depend on something so simple as a prudent habit of speech.
But those who proposed the redefinition of conception in 1959 surely knew of Watson and Cricks’s 1953 publication of the structure of DNA and its importance in human life. And surely they knew of the 1955 discovery of the full 46 chromosome genetic complement of the eukaryotic human cell. And they surely knew that the newly formed zygote with a new complement of 46 chromosomes and a gender was a new human being.
Against all scientific evidence, the seeds had been sown to change embryologic definitions. The purpose was to obviate the moral dilemma that contraceptives, including the IUD (intrauterine device), might function as abortifacients to terminate an already established pregnancy. The seeds were planted to change reality itself to suit an ideologic purpose, in this case to regulate populations.
In the 1964 Population Council Symposium, Dr. Samuel Wishik said that whether birth control is accepted or rejected by society depends on whether it causes early abortion. Wishik stated, “…if it is considered that the intrauterine device is an abortifacient, this obviously would have a bearing on national acceptance or rejection of the method. I think, therefore, that careful attention should be given to the definition of terms.”
Dr. Christopher Tietze, at the same 1964 conference, suggested from a public relations standpoint, “not to disturb those people for whom this is a question of major importance” and “[If a] medical consensus develops and is maintained that pregnancy, and therefore life, begins at implantation, eventually our brethren from other faculties will listen.” Who would these “brethren from other faculties” be? Theologians, legislators, and policy makers would seem to be high on the list.
And indeed, on cue from the 1964 meeting, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) changed their definition of conception from fertilization to implantation the very next year.
Also leading the discussions at the same 1964 Conference was Dr Howard Taylor, president of ACOG and president of the American Association of Planned Parenthood Physicians for several years. He startlingly commented, “It has been suggested that we ought to set our definition that pregnancies start at implantation…we are talking about a theological definition, not a biological definition…”
The 1969 book Second Genesis. The Coming Control of Life (A Rosenfeld, ed) states that chemical contraceptives do not necessarily “prevent the sperm from…fertilizing the ovum – the classic definition of conception – they are not strictly contraceptives.” Since these contraceptives act “after conception, some hold that such practice constitutes abortion. A way around this impasse has been suggested…Equate conception with the time of implantation rather than the time of fertilization…”
The definition of conception from fertilization to implantation was implemented to soothe uneasy moral consciences that would take issue with an intrauterine device (IUD) or other “contraceptives” destroying a developing human embryo before implantation. As the erroneous ACOG logic goes, if the embryo has not implanted, then conception has not really occurred, pregnancy has not started, and a new human person does not exist.
Of course, the problem with such a change in the definition of “conception” is that it defies scientific reality, and all human embryologists universally affirm that the most important moment in the growth and development of a human being is when 23 chromosomes of the mother join 23 chromosomes of the father to form a unique, new, biologic entity, with a gender, that had previously simply not existed. This new being, the zygote, has all the necessary genetic information to thrive, needing only nutrition and a warm place to grow. As succinctly stated in KL Moore’s textbook The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, “A zygote is the beginning of a new human being.” Implantation of the early embryo 7-10 days after fertilization is not the embryologic beginning of a new human being.
Unfortunately, as influenced by the Population Council meetings, the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology in 1965 changed the definition of conception (and the start of pregnancy) to implantation rather than fertilization. The sloppy, grotesque redefinition of scientific terms remains anathema to the authentic, legitimate science of embryology.
The impact of ACOG’s redefinition of conception has widespread consequences, not limited to classifying many abortifacients, including the IUD, as “contraceptives.” The embryologic and genetic mischaracterization also extends to the ethics of human embryonic stem cell research, human therapeutic cloning, and the hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos of in-vitro fertilization. In none of these has “implantation” occurred, and thus the erroneous concept that “conception,” or the beginning of new human life, has not occurred.
It is important to dispel any notion that the Population Council’s primary intention was focused on the rights or autonomy of women. There was, rather, a brazen lack of concern for women’s health. Commentary at the 1962 Population Council Meeting on the IUD betray attitudes toward individual female patients as being “expendable” in the final goal of controlling populations. Said Dr. J Robert Willson:
The traditional medical training is toward a single individual…We are less concerned, by training and tradition, about groups of people, and about the welfare of the world in general. This is something that certainly has to be considered in any discussion of world-wide population control.
We have to stop functioning like doctors, thinking about the one patient with pelvic inflammatory disease; or the one patient, who might develop this, that, or the other complication from an intra-uterine device; and think of the need for this in general.
…I would suspect that there might very well be a difference [increased infections caused by the IUD]…is this actually very important?…infections, for the most part, are self-limiting, nonlethal conditions…[the woman]rarely dies, and it is a sterilizing adventure anyway. So that perhaps we don’t have to be concerned about these patients at all. Suppose one does develop an in intrauterine infection and suppose she does end up with a hysterectomy and bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy. How serious is that for that particular patient and for the population of the world in general? Not very. Perhaps we have to stop thinking in terms of individual patients and change our direction a bit.
…It may well be that the incidence of infections is going to be pretty high in the patients who need the device most.
…[T]hey are occasionally going to be put in the wrong patient. Again, if we look at this from an over-all, long-range view…perhaps the individual patient is expendable in the general scheme of things, particularly if the infection she acquires is sterilizing but not lethal.
The 1962 Council approved, a member commenting, “It thrilled me to hear a clinician, like Dr. Willson, talk in terms of public health application as I, a public health person, would not have dared talk, particularly in this assembly. For any contraceptive method at all, we must think in terms of mass distribution…”
The Population Control meetings of the 60s make it perfectly clear that the primary goals were not focused on the dignity of the individual female person but had far more global aspirations. Telling, and not a little chilling, were the final comments by Dr. Alan Guttmacher at the 1964 Population Council/Planned Parenthood Conference. Guttmacher said that “… we can now talk about controlling a population.”
The globalist goals stood in stark contrast to the “expendable” dignity of women. And if the Population Council deemed it necessary to change scientific definitions of “conception” to suit their purposes, then so be it. The catastrophic acceptance of this erroneous redefinition by the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology – in defiance of all embryologic, genetic, and scientific standards – will be discussed in a future article.
Today we face an evolved form of globalist population control, decades in the making, now seemingly under the guise of radical environmentalism. Current globalism and environmental extremism are particularly funded by the ultra-rich in the tradition of Rockefeller in the 1950s and 60s. The institutions jockeying for this dystopian future include the United Nations, World Economic Forum, World Health Organization, and so many others. But it should give us pause to consider the possibility that the taint of these ideologies may have infiltrated even the institutions of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. When environmentalism is increasingly emphasized and the horrors of contraception and abortion seem deemphasized, public confusion of what the priorities are for some spheres of Catholic hierarchy is understandable. Nonetheless, the Deposit of Faith and the Perennial Teaching of the Catholic Faith, firmly rooted in scientific fact, give unfailingly sure footing on Truth and how to conduct our lives.
READ: Why are globalist elites trying to eliminate their fellow man?
REFERENCES
- Novielli C. “Exposing ACOG: how abortion and population control enthusiasts redefined the beginning of life.” Live Action, July 13, 2021
- Makdisi JMZ. “Genetically correct: the political use of reproductive terminology.” Pepperdine Law Review, 2004:32:1-37.
- Rosenfeld A. Second Genesis: The Coming Control of Life. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1969.
- Boving B.” Implantation Mechanisms,” in Mechanisms Concerned with Conception: Proceedings of a Symposium Prepared Under the Auspices of the Population Council and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1963. p.386
- The Second International Conference on Intra-uterine Contraception, New York City, Oct 2-3, 1964: Summary. Studies in Family Planning. 1965;1:12-16. Published by Population Council.
- Tietze C, Lewit S. “Intra-Uterine Contraceptive Devices: Proceedings of the Conference April 30-May 1, 1962, New York City.” International Congress Series No. 54, Exerpta Medica Foundation, 1963.
- Tietze C, Lewit S. “Intra-uterine contraception: effectiveness and acceptability.” Second International Conference on Intra-uterine Contraception, Oct 2-3, 1965; in Segal SJ, Southam AL, Shafer KD ed. Intra-Uterine Contraception, International Congress Series, No. 86. Amsterdam: Exerpta Medica, 1965.
- Jones E. Michael. “John D. Rockefeller, 3rd, Theodore M. Hesburgh, and the Contraceptive Revolution: How the Church’s Teaching Almost Got Changed.” Fidelity 1993;12:32-42.
- Jones KJ. “Money, power, and Humanae Vitae: the forgotten story.” Catholic News Agency. June 11, 2018.
- Rice CE. “Abortion, euthanasia, and the need to build a new culture of life. “Notre Dame J Law, Ethics & Public Policy. Vol 12, Article 6, Jan 1, 2012.
- Mitchell E. “Semantics matter: what does the Pill do?” Answers in Genesis July 12, 2013.
- Mitchell E. “Semantics don’t change truth: the social motivations behind new definitions.”Answers in Genesis, Nov 10, 2010
- Gold RB. “The implications of defining when a woman is pregnant.” Guttmacher Policy Review, May 9, 2005.