President Obama is not the only one with a Pinnochio problem these days. Melinda Gates (shown), the wife of billionaire Bill Gates and co-chair (along with her husband) of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is under fire again for funding pro-abortion activities, after making emphatic statements that the Gates Foundations does not and would not support abortion.
President Obama promised: “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.” It was a promise he repeated dozens of times — before his ObamaCare program started causing millions of Americans to have their healthcare plans taken away.
Melinda Gates told Newsweek: “From the very beginning, we said that as a foundation we will not support abortion, because we don’t believe in funding it.”
But pro-life organizations are pointing to the recent Gates-funded international population control conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as the latest example of the Gateses’ promotion of abortion. In a November 15 posting on C-FAM.org, Dr. Rebecca Oas and Wendy Wright reported on the November 11-15 conference in Ethiopia:
When world leaders pledged over $2.6 billion to Melinda Gates’ global family planning campaign, she assured them, “This is not about abortion.” The wife of billionaire Bill Gates branded her campaign “No Controversy.”
Yet this week the Gates Foundation is hosting an international conference in Ethiopia on the campaign and a significant number of workshops focus on abortion. An estimated 3,000 people are expected to attend the meeting designed to build on last year’s London Summit where governments, corporations and wealthy foundations pledged political and financial commitments to increase family planning in developing countries. Melinda Gates is scheduled to speak.
“Some people think when we talk about contraception, that it’s code for abortion, which it’s not,” Melinda Gates said in April 2012 when she launched the campaign. “We’re not talking about abortion.”
But the initiatives that Bill and Melinda Gates fund do more than just “talk about” abortion. As we reported here on October 24 (“Gates Foundation Pushing Dangerous Contraceptives on Black Populations”), leaders of Black organizations and human rights groups are calling the Gates Foundation out for foisting the dangerous drug Depo Provera, an abortifacient, on women in Africa and developing countries. Concerning the latest event in Addis Ababa, Oas and Wright report:
On the agenda for the family planning conference in Ethiopia are sessions titled “Efforts to Implement Policies that Expand Access to Safe Abortion,” “Access to Safe Abortions,” “Abortion and Quality of Care,” and “Abortion: Before and After.” These feature representatives of the world’s top abortion providers — Ipas, Planned Parenthood, and Marie Stopes — as well as other pro-abortion groups.
Abortion is also the topic of two of the five poster exhibits and several “topical roundtables,” including an Ipas-chaired discussion promoting the World Health Organization’s problematic guidelines on how to do abortions.
Ipas is not as infamous as Planned Parenthood (PP), but it is militantly pro-abortion, as a quick perusal of the Ipas website easily confirms. In its report on Ethiopia’s “progress,” Ipas claims that “two notable trends in this country — increases in women’s access to medical abortion and to post-abortion contraception services — serve as examples of the progress that is possible when comprehensive abortion care is integrated into government family planning programs.”
Ipas boasts that through its collaborative work with the Ethiopian Ministry of Health “more than 400 public and private health facilities across four regions of the country and in the capital city Addis Ababa, women’s access to comprehensive abortion care and integrated contraceptive services is expanding.”
Ipas, together with Planned Parenthood, UNFPA, and the other population-control advocates, are carrying out a global campaign to repeal all national and local laws that restrict abortion.
According to C-FAM’s Oas and Wright:
A key aim of the [Ethiopia] conference is keeping pressure on national governments. Gates’ campaign partners, such as Planned Parenthood and Population Action International (PAI), have promised to increase their advocacy to keep money flowing from donor and recipient countries. A “lot of our work in sub-Saharan Africa is really around holding those country governments to account” for their pledges, said PAI’s president.
Bill and Melinda Gates & Friends: Serial Offenders
It’s not like the Ethiopian conference is the first time the Gateses have supported programs larded with blatant, militant abortion advocates and providers. In June, Nadja Wolfe, writing for the Charlotte Lozier Institute, reported on the Gateses’ sponsorship of the United Nations’ Women Deliver conference in May in Malaysia. In addition to prominent participation by Ipas, PP, and UNFPA, speakers included infamous abortionist Dr. Leroy Carhart and notorious Princeton ethicist Peter Singer. Nadja Wolfe notes:
Dr. Carhart has been in the news in the past year for the death of a patient attributed to complications following the abortion and for a video in which he describes a late-term unborn child as “meat in a crock pot.” One of the most prominent late-term abortion providers in the U.S., he has sued against legal restrictions on abortion. In many countries and some U.S. states the late-term service he is known for is illegal. If “safe and legal” abortion is the goal, Carhart is a poor representative of it.
Peter Singer has also been no stranger to controversy for many years. While pioneering expansive notions of animal rights, Singer has also championed population control, abortion and even infanticide. His appointment at Princeton was met with protests by advocates for the disabled objecting to the hiring of someone to teach ethics who suggested that those with disabilities have less of a right to life than those without them. At Women Deliver 2013, Singer suggested contraception will not solve the overpopulation problem he sees, given that women can still choose to have more children than he considers ecologically responsible. “I hope we don’t get to a point where we do have to override” a woman’s freedom to have as many children as she likes, he stated, but he clearly considered it an option. At least one other speaker at the Gates event mentioned forcible population control.
“[Melinda] Gates was not merely a guest at the conference; the foundation she leads sponsors it and has a visible presence,” noted Wolfe.
Like Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Jerry Brown, Andrew Cuomo, and the late Ted Kennedy, Melinda Gates claims to be a Roman Catholic and to be personally opposed to abortion. But claims that her foundation does not support abortion are about as honest and credible as President Obama’s promise that “you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period.”
Photo of Melinda Gates: AP Images
Related articles:
Gates Foundation Pushing Dangerous Contraceptives on Black Populations
Global ObamaCare & the “Good Club” Billionaires
Global ObamaCare and World Population Control
Obama Behavior Team to “Nudge” U.S. Toward Government Goals
“Inhuman”: Abortionist Leroy Carhart — Yet Another Gosnell Exposed
Abortionist’s House of Horrors: Gosnell’s Unindicted Media Accomplices
Gosnell House of Horrors: Just One of Many Abortion Slaughterhouses
Another House of Horrors: Gosnell’s Abortion Counterpart in Texas
