propose that we totally revamp our foreign aid program to give primary emphasis to population
control," he stated in the summer of 1968, aforeign aid by concentrating on building hugedding: "In my opinion, we have made a mistake in our steel mills and concrete plants in underdeveloped
nations...."
One of Bush's more important initiatives on the domestic side was his sponsorhip of the Family
Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970, braMaryland. Signed into law by President Nixon on December 24, 1970, tinchild of Sen. Joseph Tydings ofhe Tydings-Bush bill
drastically increased the federal financial commitment to population control, authorizing an initial
$382 million for family planning sevices, population research, population education and
information through 1973. Much of this money was funnelled through private institutions,
particularly local clinics run by Busmandated the notorious Title X, which explicitly provided "family planning assistance" to the poor.h's beloved Planned Parenthood. The Tydings-Bush measure (^)
Bush and his zero-growth cohorts talked constantly about the importance of disseminating birth
control to the poor. They claimed that there were over 5 million poor women who wanted to limit
their families, but could not afford to do so.
On October 23, 1969, Bush praised the Office of Economic Opportunity for carrying out some of
the "most successful" family planning projects, and said he was "pleased" that the Nixon
administration "is giving them additional financial muscle by increasing their funds 50 percent--
from $15 million to $22 million."
This increased effort he attributed to the Nixon administration's "goal to reach in the next five years
the 5 million women in need of these services"--all of them poor, many of them from racial or
ethnic minorities. He added: "One needs only to look quickly at the report prepared by the Planned
Parenthood-World Population Research Department to see how ineffective federal, state, and local
governments have been in providing such necessary services. There is certainly nothing new aboutthe fact that unwanted pregnancies of our poor and near-poor women keep the incidence of infant
mortality and mental retardation in America at one of the highest levels of all the developed
countries."
The rates of infant mortality and mental retardation Bush was so concerned about, could have beensignificantly reduced, had the government provided sufficient financing to pre-natal care, nutrition, (^)
and other factors contributing to the health of infants and children. On the same day he signed the
Tydings-Bush bill, Nixon vetoed--with Bush's support- -legislation that would have set up a three-
year, $225 million program to train family doctors.
Bush seemed to be convinced that mental retardation, in particular, was a matter of heredity. The
eugenicists of the 1920's had spun their pseudoscientific theories around "hereditary feeble-
mindedness," and claimed that the "Kallikaks and the Jukes" by reproducing successive "feeble-
minded" generations had cost New York state tens of millions of dollars over decades. But what
about learning disorders like dyslexia, which has been known to afflict oligarchical familes Bushwould consider wealthy, well-bred, and able? Nelson Rockefeller, Bush's friend Nick Brady, and (^)
Bush's own son Neal have suffered from dyslexia, a reading disorder. But these oligarchs are not
likely to fall victim to the involuntary sterilization as "mental defectives" which they wish to inflict
on those they term the lower orders.
In introducing the House version of the Tydings bill on behalf of himself and Bush, Rep. James
Scheuer (D-N.Y.) ranted that whle middle-class women "have been limiting the number of
offspring for years ... women of low-income families" did not. "If poverty and family size are so
closely related we ask, `Why don't poor women stop having babies?'" The Bush-Tydings bill took a
giant step toward forcing them to do so.