Dear Colleague,

Since the Obama Administration began in 2008, the United States has witnessed a sharp increase in left-wing domestic and international social policy and strategy. In recent years, the U.S. government, aligned with United Nations agencies, has pressured developing and conservative nations to liberalize their abortion laws and adopt pro-LGBTQ policies and programming. However, a look at the history of U.S. foreign policy reveals that its promotion of these controversial agendas is not new. Leaders of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) were outspoken advocates for abortion and implementers of population control programming until the Helms amendment in 1973, which required USAID’s progressive directors to utilize more clandestine policy channels and partnerships to enforce its leftist agenda.

This Definitions will examine the rise of USAID strategies and policies to entrench progressive sexual and social policy in international aid and bypass congressional oversight.

Sincerely,

Rebecca Oas, Ph.D.
Director of Research

With the passage of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, various U.S. development and assistance organizations from President Truman’s Marshall Plan were gathered into a single agency for foreign economic advancement: the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). In the 1970s, the agency’s priorities shifted from capital assistance programs to “Basic Human Needs,” including population planning, food and nutrition, health, education, and human resources development. In the wake of the “population bomb” alarmism, President Lyndon Johnson emphasized the immediate need for action against population growth—“next to peace, the most important task.” The first Director of the Office of Population and Development at USAID, Dr. Reimert Ravenholt, was a staunch abortion and contraception advocate. Under Ravenholt, family planning and population mitigation efforts included abortion as a primary means of achieving population targets and lowering fertility. In the spring of 1973, Ravenholt and his office finalized manual abortion devices to reach rural populations and ordered the manufacturing of ten thousand devices, with plans to call his abortion method “menstrual regulation.” These efforts were interrupted, however, by the passage of the Helms Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act by Congress in December 1973, which proscribed the use of U.S. funds for abortion overseas. A decade later, the executive order by Ronald Reagan known as the Mexico City Policy prohibited all U.S. family planning funding to organizations that promoted or provided abortions whatsoever. Since the Mexico City Policy is an executive action and not a law, its removal and reinstatement historically alternate under Democratic and Republican administrations.  Read more >>>