solution to these difficulties is acceptable which does violence to man's essential
dignity....The only possible solution ... is one which envisages the social and economic
progress both of individuals and of the whole of human society...."
This was a direct challenge to the cultural paradigm transformation which Bush and other
exponents of the oligarchical world outlook were promoting. Not for the first time nor for
the last time, Bush issued a direct attack on the Holy See. Just days after Humanae Vitae
was issued, Bush declared: "I have decided to give my vigorous support for population
control in both the United States and the world." He also lashed out at the Pope. "For
those of us who who feel so strongly on this issue, the recent enyclical was most
discouraging."
During his four years in Congress, Bush not only introduced key pieces of legislation to
enforce population control both at home and abroad. He also continuously introduced
into the congressional debate reams of propaganda about the threat of population growth
and the inferiority of blacks, and he set up a special Republican task force which
functioned as a forum for the most rabid Malthusian ideologues.
"Bush was really out front on the population issue," a population- control activist recently
said of this period of 1967-71. "He was saying things that even we were reluctant to talk
about publicly."
Bush's open public advocacy of government measures tending towards zero population
growth was a radical departure from the policies built into the federal bureaucracy up
until that time. The climate of opinion just a few years earlier, in December 1959, is
illustrated by the comments of President Eisenhower, who had said, "birth control is not
our business. I cannot imagine anything more emphatically a subject that is not a proper
political or governmental activity ... or responsibility."
As a congressman, Bush played an absolutely pivotal role in this shift. Shortly after
arriving in Washington, he teamed up with fellow Republican Herman Schneebeli to
offer a series of amendments to the Social Security Act to place priority emphasis on
what was euphemistically called "family planning services." The avowed goal was to
reduce the number of children born to women on welfare.
Bush's and Schneebeli's amendments reflected the Malthusian- genocidalist views of Dr.
Alan Guttmacher, then president of Planned Parenthood, and a protege of its founder,
Margaret Sanger. In the years before the grisly outcome of the Nazi cult of race science
and eugenics had inhibited public calls for defense of the "gene pool," Sanger had
demanded the weeding out of the "unfit" and the "inferior races," and had campaigned
vigorously for sterilization, infanticide and abortion, in the name of "race betterment."
Although Planned Parenthood was forced during the fascist era and immediately
thereafter to tone down Sanger's racist rhetoric from "race betterment" to "family
planning" for the benefit of the poor and blacks, the organization's basic goal of curbing