The commission's principal conclusion was that "there are no substantial benefits to be gained fromcontinued population growth," Chairman Rockefeller explained to the Senate Appropriations
Committee. The commission made a host of recommendations to curb both population expansion
and economic growth. These included: liberalizing laws restricting abortion and sterilization;
having the government fund abortions; and providing birth control to teenagers. The commission
had a profound iplunge into outright genocide. Commission Executive director Charles Westoff wrote in 1975 tmpact on American attitudes toward the population issue, and helped accelerate thehat
the group "represented an important effort by an advanced country to develop a national population
policy--the basic thrust of which was to slow growth in order to maximize the "quality of life." The
collapse of the traditional family-centered form of society during the 1970's and 1990's was but one
consequence of such recommendations. It also is widely acknowledged that the commission Bushfought so long and so hard to create broke down the last barriers to legalized abortion on demand. (^)
Indeed, just one year after the commission's final report was issued, the Supreme Court delivered
the Roe v. Wade decision which did just that.
Aware that many blacks and other minorities had noticed that the population control movement wasa genocide program aimed at reducing their numbers, the commission went out of its way to cover
its real intent by stipulating that all races should cut back on their birth rates. But the racist animus
of their conclusions could not be hidden. Commssion Executive Director Westoff, who owed his
job and his funding to Bush gave a hint of this in a book he had written in 1966, before joining the
commission staff, which was entitled From Now to Zero, and in which he bemoaned the fact thatthe black fertility rate was so much higher than the white.
The population control or zero population growth movement which grew rapidly in the late 1960s
thanks to free media exposure and foundation grants for a stream of pseudoscientific propaganda
about the alleged "populprewar protofascist eugenics movement, which had been forced to go into temporary eclipse whenation bomb" and the "limits to growth," was a continuation of the old (^)
the world recoiled in horror at the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the name of eugenics. By the
mid-1960s, the same old crackpot eugenicists had resurrected themselves as the population- control
and environmentalist movement. Planned Parenthood was a perfet example of the
transmogrification. Now, instead of demanding the sterilization of the inferior races, the newlypackaged eugenicists talked about the population bomb, and giving the poor "equal access" to birth (^)
contol, and "freedom of choice." But nothing had substantively changed--including the use of
coercion. While Bush and other advocates of government "family planning" programs insisted these
were stricly voluntary, the reality was far different. By the mid-1970s, the number of involuntary
sterilizations carried out by prograproportions. Within the black and minority communities, where most of the sterilizations werems which Bush helped bring into being, had reached huge (^)
being done, protests arose which culminated in federal litigation as a suit was brought.
In his 1974 ruling on this suit, Federal District Judge Gerhard Gesell found that, "Over the last few
years, an estimated 100,000 tfederally funded programs. Although Congreo 150,000 low-income persons have been sterilized annually underss has been insistent that all family planning progra (^) ms
function on a purely voluntary basis," Judge Gesell wrote, "there is uncontroverted evidence ... that
an indefinite number of poor people have been improperly coerced into accepting a sterilization
operation under the threat that various federally supported welfare benefits would be withdrawn
unless they submitted to irreversible sterilization." Gesell concluded from the evidence that the"dividing line between family planning and eugenics is murky."
As we have seen, George Bush inherited his obsession with population control and racial "down
breeding" from his father, Prescott, who staunchly supported Planned Parenthood dating back at
least to the 1940s. In fact, Prescott's affiliation with Margaret Sanger's organization cost him the