why is an English village's birthrate outstripping China's?

I envy Chris Havergal of the Cambridge News, who had to think up a headline for his story about the village of Cambourne having a higher birthrate than India, and came up with Welcome to Prambourne!

According to the Cambourne Website, the three settlements that compose Cambourne started to be built on East Anglia farmyard in 1998, and is expected to have an eventual population "somewhere in the region of 8-10,000". In the twelve months up to April 2009, Havergal reports, in Cambourne there was a birthrate of 24.1 per 1,000 population, compared to 21.67 for India. Also mentioned were Indonesia (18.84), Brazil (18.43), China (14) and the US (13.82). The birthrate for England and Wales was 12.8 per thousand, and that of Cambridgeshire 11.9 per thousand.

The statistics were prepared by Cambridgeshire County Council Research Group, and it was great to read an article quoting a whole lot of positive comments about a rising birthrate, with John Vickery, clerk of Cambourne Parish Council, offering the explanation that "it must be something in the water".


There has been a small but steadily growing tide of positivity about childbirth in recent years, so much so that even the left-wing New Statesman has tried to inform us How to Make Babies, while author and journalist Sir Max Hastings advises "a Tory government must offer parents better tax breaks, to encourage us to have more children of our own". France aggressively pushes tax and other breaks for working women who decide to have children, but a spokesman for the Paris office of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development - which supports the Millenium Goal advocating "reproductive rights" [including abortion] for all - states that "The way you encourage women to have more children is to help them work more". The Labour Life Group disagreed in a 2008 press release and proposed a position I would hesitate to embrace by stating that "Improved opportunities for women in paid employment and equal access to better paid careers has been a factor reducing the birth rate".

One can imagine reasons why a small Cambridgeshire village is outstripping the birthrates of five of the world's most populous countries:

In China, the one-parent policy has been in place since 1979, with the full knowledge and cooperation of the International Planned Parenthood Foundation, despite its denials. In its forst year, Stephen Mosher brought back this report, referred to in Matthew Connelly's Fatal Misconception - the struggle to control world population (to which I owe much of what follows):

Eighteen women who were at least five months pregnant, "red-eyed from lack of sleep and crying", were told they would have to undergo abortions, in two cases by Caeserian section. Through such means, China registered 7.9 million abortions, 13.5 million IUD insertions, and almost 7 million sterilizations in 1979...

Reimert Ravenholt, while head of USAID, was credited with reducing the world's birthrate from 4.9 to 2.9 children per woman (although birthrates do fall endogenously as societies slowly become more affluent); he commented that introducing a family planning project at "sub-village level" in Indonesia was "awesome - perhaps the most socially directed [aimed at the poorest] family planning outside of red China".

Ravenholt fanned the flames of population control in India, and when things got too hot for him wrote to the Washington Post in January 1976 stating his opposition to the programme of compulsory male sterilisation that was compounding the Emergency. The mindset of (mostly male) population controllers was revealed when he stated his preference for the substitution of sterilisation of women, which would involve going through the abdominal wall in often less than salubrious settings where not all involved were fully trained. Sex-selective abortion when a baby is identified as being female through the use of ultrasound (which is banned in the country for this purpose) is warping the country's demographics, as it is in China - when Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans was confronted about unregulated export of the machines to the latter country in 1990 fuelling abortion, he replied that the same could be said of unregulated export of coathangers.

Through the offices of Margaret Sanger, eugenics - population control - got a firm foothold in the United States. While she criss-crossed India handing out contraceptive foam to villagers, she never thought anything about sinister stories of side-effects until the same foam, distributed by Lydia DeVilbiss, caused adverse effects when tested upon dogs. This shows the attitude of population controllers to people who aren't white (and able-bodied) which continues in the organisation Sanger founded - the IPPF - targeting poor black areas with abortion clinics to the extent that the Revd Arnold M Culbreath, who oversees the Life Issues Institute's program Protecting Black Life, has stated that "every month in the U.S., approximately 35,000 black babies die by abortion".

Brazil was also an early victim of the eugenics/population control movement: in the First Pan-American Conference on Eugenics and Homiculture at Havana in 1927, Brazilian eugenicists "considered ways to 'whiten' their populations as a way to improve them" (as well as Chinese, Japanese and Mexican delegates). As perhaps a sign of things to come for us all, Philip Longman, author of The Empty Cradle: how falling birthrates threaten world prosperity mentioned the use of certain images of womanhood in Brazilian soap-operas as a means of bringing down birth-rates.

All the more reason, then, to congratulate the good people of Cambourne on their good news. Amid whispers that the Optimum Population Trust are embarking on a letter-writing campaign, I wish the villagers a happy time with their families.

hiroshima: a thousand suns

If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One and I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds

Today, the world is marking the anniversary of the Atom-Bomb's being dropped on Hiroshima, in the second man-made nuclear explosion in history on August 6, 1945. The first one was on the Trinity Site near Alamogordo, New Mexico, where the sheer destructiveness of the thing caused Robert Oppenheimer to quote the variation on a verse from the Bhagavad-Gita at the top of the page.

How did it all start? On December 6, 1941, US President Franklin D Roosevelt sent a "triple priority" telegram to Emperor Hirihito of Japan, delivered by ambassador Joseph C Grew, in which Roosevelt reminded the god-king of the mutual benefits of the hundred-year friendship that had existed between the two countries, and asked him to reassure the American people that war was not inevitable by withdrawing his forces from Indo-China (south-east Asia). On the next day, of course, Japanese forces bombed the US fleet in the Hawaiian port of Pearl Harbor, which marked the start of America's formal entry into World War II without, as Grew writes in his 1944 memoirs, Ten Years in Japan, "the usual preliminary declaration of hostilities". In a CBS radio address delivered on August 30, 1942, Grew referred to the "Spartan" qualities that the Japanese Army had "nourished and encouraged" in its warriors, opposed to their perception of "the white man's flabbiness".

By the time the bomb was dropped, American forces were involved in a grim island-by-island struggle. The Telegraph's Kate Day states that 70,000 Japanese are reckoned to have died on that fateful day when the Enola Gay flew over Hiroshima, and another 70,000 died within 5 years. Compare this with 110,000 Japanese killed in the battle for the island of Okinawa alone.

I'm not trying to make out the dropping of Little Boy to have been a philanthropic act - the Second World War was what it said on the tin, and, of course, when the Japanese powers-that-be realised that the attrition was not going to stop after the Nagasaki bombing, many American lives were saved. (And not only American: Professor Calculus once told me that when he heard the news about Hiroshima his reaction was "thank God" - his brother was fighting in Burma).

When Max Planck founded quantum physics with the publication of his paper on black-body radiation in 1901, the die was cast: as soon as 1905, Einstein had published his Special Theory of Relativity, containing the equation that would power atomic research: E=mc².

Like Einstein, many of the foremost mathematicians and theoretical physicists lived in Europe and were Jewish. After the rise of Hitler, many would flee to America, thus making the A-bomb project possible. In his 1999 biography of the mathematician Paul Erdős, The Man who Loved Only Numbers, biographer Paul Hoffmann describes Erdős' surprise in finding, at a meeting of mathematicians in Los Alamos, that everybody in the room was not only European but, like him, Hungarian.

A Thousand Suns by Alex Scarrow is an account of a German-built A-bomb that is made possible because a captured Jewish scientist, working under threat of his family being executed, finds the hole in Werner Heisenberg's theory that will allow a bomb to be built with pounds of uranium instead of tons of the stuff. (Heisenberg was interrogated at Farm Hall in the Cambridgeshire village of Godmanchester.) We read the crises of conscience of the scientist, who places a note inside the bomb's arming compartment telling of his fears that an atomic explosion might start a chain reaction that would destroy the world - something that worried Oppenheimer; the leader of the crew that will fly a captured B-17 Flying Fortress, modified to carry more fuel, to New York; and, towards the book's gripping dénouement, the crew-member who goes to arm the bomb and finds the note. Along the way we visit President Harry S Truman's war-room and the chaos of Hitler's crumbling bunker.

Threaded through, we read the story of a photographer and his minder who, diving off the New York State shore, find the wreck of the craft, and trigger a chain of events which will lead a CIA operative, who has spent his life guarding the hidden history of America's short-lived surrender to Germany, to a decision which will, in the light of his own troubled conscience, either redeem him or damn him.

There are many well-drawn characters in the book, which is named after Oppenheimer's comment. But there's no doubt in my mind that the hero of the piece is the Medusa, the fictional B-17 bomber that, ironically, was the name of one of the ships which survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Scarrow has obviously done his research. At one point he has a navigator take a reading on a sextant, whose use in WWII bombers is not widely known, which makes me wonder if one of his resources was Colin Heaton's authoritative history of the night war over Europe, Night Fighters.

So how have we fared since 6 August, 1945? Well, after Nagasaki no nuclear device has been set off in anger, a situation which is increasingly likely to change as more and more unstable countries seek the bomb, and nuclear powers China and India increasingly look to Africa for Lebensraum.

In other areas, we're not doing too well: one example of this is published in John Smeaton's blog for today, quoting the Reverend Arnold M Culbreath's statistic that "every month in the U.S., approximately 35,000 black babies die by abortion" - a 6 August 1945 every two months, showing that predominantly white population controllers are something more sinister than flabby. And in Japan, when abortion became legal in 1949 there were 246,000: the fateful day over three times over - things are so bad that older women are buying "healing dolls" to replace children who weren't born.

Mori Masaki's anime film Barefoot Gen, based on Keiji Nakazawa's manga series of the same name, depicts the horror of Hiroshima as seen through the eyes of an innocent victim, a child. Spare a thought for the innocent victims of other, undepicted, catastrophes.

Saint Valentine's night

I don't always have the sunniest disposition, but excelled myself this morning, not having slept well for several nights. I growled through a shift at XV, the draughty old fen's charity shop, then went home for some kip. Awaking a bit more refreshed, I was still a bit unsure about going to a Valentine's night dinner at a place in another old fen I'd never been to before.

When she'd dressed up, Maxima looked amazing, and indeed looks better on a daily basis than I think of giving her credit for. An older friend of ours had laid down the law to me that I was NOT to have her cycling through the country in her good frock, so some friends called to pick us up.

Our destination was a barn that's functional around harvest time, but for the rest of the year it has flooring put down and gets hired out for weddings, dances and general events. It was high-roofed, with an intricate array of beams supporting the roofing, and tables waited on by a mixture of professional staff and local clergy.

I'm told that Cambridge and its environs has the highest concentration of choirs per square mile in the world. I don't know if that's true, but the local old fens have their fair share of singers. A group of four of them sang Grace in Latin before we started eating. I calmed down - food tends to do this for me. The dinner was exquisite beyond my descriptive skills. But the night was composed of far more than food: candles burnt on every table, with a little wooden heart, painted red, for everybody and a rose for every woman. I initially had a headache looking at Maxima through a candle-flame, but once some of the wax had melted I realised she looked amazing by candle-light, her eyes glittering like Loch Lomond under the full moon.

There was a "silent auction" whereby guests could submit bids for a list of promises, from an hour's conversation with a French-tutor to the whole works for a dinner-party for eight. In many of the old the fens, poverty and riches live cheek-by-jowl, as they have done for centuries, and even now ideologues of a certain political hue haven't managed to set the relatively poor and the relatively rich at each others' throats - but that's for another time.

I believe there were some pretty good bids made, by people who make a reasonable living out of doing jobs that need to be done, and doing them well. And amidst the bolting of stable doors almost a decade too late because of the actions of a few madmen, some are upping sticks and heading for foreign climes where they aren't treated as pariahs, and all the best to them. Settings like tonight's are where payouts and bonuses are recycled quietly - the auction, and indeed the whole night, was set up by Rector Pellegrina to help build a primary school in the diocese of Vellore in India, which is the twin diocese to that of Ely.

Our singers treated us to madrigals from different ages, starting from Hélas Madame by Henry VIII; I hope they were singing it because of the serial widower's facility with a bon mot, and not through any insights he might have had into keeping a partner. They took us, in several sessions alternated with a local girl playing music from Bach to the Bee-Gees on the piano, through Victorian times to the roaring twenties, then left us with what they (rightly, in my opinion) described as the best love-song ever: Robert Burns' My Love is like a Red Red Rose. I can't find it in madrigal form, but here's Scots songstress Eddie Reader singing it:



I am never in any doubt about how good Maxima looks in my eyes, but it was good to see her light up when other people told her she was looking lovely. Note to self: tell her how good she looks more often.

epithets and officers

There's been a big debate in Great Britain right now about a three-year-old video made by Prince Harry (the Queen's younger grandson) in which he refers to a colleague from Pakistan, Ahmed Raza Khan, as "our little Paki friend".

Things are getting out of hand. For example, one agitated caller to today's Jeremy Vine Show, who said he was a Pakistani living in the UK, said that the term "Paki" was charged with much more negative emotion than the term "Brit" or "Yank".

That's where the fellow lost my sympathy. I suspect he's never been in a quondam Glasgow to watch columns of IRA supporters marching down the street shouting "Brits out!" and, British citizens (mostly) themselves, baying for the blood of "Brits" in the Army stationed in Northern Ireland. As for the term "Yank", if he addressed this to somebody from the Southern States of the US - as I once did out of ignorance many years ago - he might not get the response he expected.

When "Paki" and other terms based on unalterable characteristics are used aggressively as insults or abuse, there's no excuse. But having watched the News of the World video embedded in the Telegraph report linked to in the first paragraph, the term doesn't come across as insulting or abusive. Certainly the reaction in this country to a friendly gibe made in an Army environment doesn't bear any resemblance to the "British tolerance" which Gordon Brown assured the Indian people of when he visited to the sound of riots over the prolonged racist treatment of Shilpa Shetty in Celebrity Big Brother; and I certainly don't recall any Pakistani voice raised in protest when Greg Dyke, former Director General of the BBC, called the corporation "hideously white". I wouldn't be surprised if much of the present furore is coming from Brits who are as hideous and as white as the IRA supporters.

The then-cadet, who received the élite award of the Sword of Honour from the Queen at his passing-out parade and is now a Captain in the Pakistani army, has not made any complaint in the three years since the home-video was made. But his father, also an officer in the Pakistani army, has complained bitterly.

I rather think the father is more culturally Pakistani than the son, in the sense of being closer to the concept of Pakistan as an ethnocentric theocracy. One of Pakistan's founding fathers was Mawlana Abul A'la Mawdudi (1903-1979), who stated that Islam is

a revolutionary concept and ideology which seeks to change and revolutionise the world social order and reshape it according to its own concept and ideals.

I quote the above because of another story involving somebody born in Pakistan that broke on Sunday - and in my home town - showing that people from that country can definitely be genuine victims of discrimination. Reverend Mahboob Masih of Awaz FM, which serves the Asian communities of Glasgow, was debating the views of Zakir Naik, who states that Jesus is not the only person who is the "way, the truth and the life".

This may be a fair comment for a Muslim to make in the context of Islam, but Naik, who has been criticized by Muslims in his native India for issuing fatwas (sharia rulings) with no authority to do so, demands that Christians recognise Mohammed with the equal reverence that they afford to Jesus. Rev'd Masih defended Christianity, and found himself sacked by Awaz FM, which claims in its mission statement to be "the voice of Glasgow’s ethnic communities and their respective faiths" (my italics). The Telegraph's Andrew Alderson reports that the minister has "reluctantly" apologised in order to calm things down, but has refused the station's demands that he apologise in person at the city's Central Mosque, on the reasonable grounds of fears for his safety.

I don't think those fears are overstated. The Pakistani caller to Jeremy Vine's show attempted to show how downtrodden Muslims were in Britain by stating that it was unacceptable to insult Georgina Bailley, but not to insult a Pakistani. I think he said more than he realised - namely, that in Islam, women are viewed as being worth something less than men. Case in point: today's Telegraph reports the murder of one of Pakistan's famous dancing girls called Shabana by the Taliban because the terrorist organisation considered her dance too erotic. Given that Georgina Baillie is a burlesque dancer, I hope the remark wasn't meant to be as sinister as it sounded.

I hope also that Prince Harry gets what he deserves - a bollocking directed at stopping him from putting daft remarks on tape, especially when that tape might fall into the hands of papers owned by the anti-monarchist Rupert Murdoch.

You can take that as the authentic ethnic view of an honest Jock. (I changed a washer today...does that make me Jock the Plumber?)



The Jeremy Vine show referred to in the second paragraph can be accessed until Sunday 18 January 2009 - click here

bullies breaking society's bonds - so bin the box

I noticed in today's Cambridge News that today marks the beginning of Anti-bullying week in an article that focussed on a local school for severely bullied britain named after Albert Lamorisse's short anti-bullying film from 1956 Le ballon rosse; you can see the reason for the name on Youtube:




Staff at the Red Balloon Learner Centre in Cambridge have found some children so badly bullied that they haven't been to school for a year, and whose subsequent feelings of complete unworthiness are firmly entrenched.

Even so, I was astounded to read an article by Robert Winnett, Deputy Political Editor of the Telegraph, stating that in 98.5% of cases, children suspended from school for bullying are returned to the same class to prey on their victims again. In many localities schools are forced to pay for private tuition for excluded pupils, therefore if cash is strapped, as it usually is, exclusions will be forced to a bare minimum. Only 80 children were excluded from state schools specifically for bullying last year, out of 2000 who were excluded for violence - from a total of over 62,000 who committed acts of violence, more than 8,000 of these being towards teachers.

The trouble, it seems to me, is that all over the West stormtroopers of the liberal-socialist axis have walked a covert revolution into swathes of our educational, scientific, entertainment, administrative and governmental institutions since the 1970's, and the vanguard are now where they had intended to end up - occupying key positions where they can harm (sorry, "deconstruct") society with their sociopathic convictions, in many cases ignoring good counsel from people they employ. So although it's very laudable aiming anti-bullying week at children, it should be noted that it is from the adult-led structures of liberal oppression that bullying trickles down to children, who become what they behold.

A manifestation of this is the view that people who bully others are themselves "victims" who are in need of nothing stronger than "therapy" which presupposes that treating them like besandalled liberals will turn them into the same, all warm and fuzzy with no rough edges. The leads to, at one end of the spectrum, a primary school in Cambridgeshire with a garden that lets children calm down with a bit of work out in the open, instead of having to stay in the classroom, that will produce results they can see and hold and eat. The trouble is, it's only available to children who exhibit challenging behaviour...see the flaw?

At the other end of the spectrum, we have a process that identified a woman living in an alternative family arrangement, therefore Haringey Social Services managers closed their ears to the concerns of workers on the ground about her son; you can follow the case of Baby P in the news. This illustrates starkly the chaos wrought when social services managers assume that members of certain groups are not only impeccable but untouchable, in the teeth of dire warnings from people on the ground. Another example is last year's independent inquiry into the managerial and supervisory setups at Wakefield Council following a couple having been arrested for abusing four children they had fostered between 2003-2005. The problem? Because Ian Wathey and Craig Faunch were gay, social workers found their careers threatened if they should voice concerns that they might be abusers to their managers. (I must say that in the many years I've met social workers through my work, I haven't met a PC crusader in a long time - they infest the upper echelons now.)

We are increasingly becoming nations of unhappy people, and I'm not surprised by a University of Maryland report stating that unhappy people watch more TV than happier ones, who tend to read, socialise and even vote more often.

Bullying is big business on TV. Last year, Channel Four's Celebrity Big Brother let Jade Goody's racist bullying of Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty carry on because it attracted viewers; but the ratings war yeilded a Pyrrhic victory as riots in India coincided with Gordon Brown's visit there, Carphone Warehouse dropped out as sponsors and 50,000 complaints were received. But, nevertheless, bullying is big business, so Channel 4 let it happen all over again with Big Brother 9.

Alternatively, during the campaigning for this year's US elections, shortly after John McCain picked Sarah Palin as running mate, Democrats soon discovered their reactionary sides when they criticised her, basically, for being a mother in a public place. Things got very nasty when it was alleged that her newborn daughter was in reality her own daughter's child; to (then) Senator Obama's credit (something I'm not that used to saying) he reacted swiftly to insist that family members were off-limits. It would send a stronger message about the President-Elect's sense of fair play if he were to announce an inquiry about who targeted two minors, one a newborn baby with special needs - and upon whose orders.

The climate-change industry owes far more to bullying than it ever did to science. In his book The Deniers, Lawrence Solomon tells the story of Roger Revelle, who in the 1960's alerted a young student of his called Al Gore to his studies on climate change, but later changed his mind, writing to Senator Tim Wirth in 1988 "It is not yet obvious that this summer's hot weather and drought are the result of a global climatic change or simply an example of the uncertainty of climate variability". Gore's reaction was that Revelle (who died in 1991) had become senile. This treatment was also meted out to David Bellamy, who subscribed to the climate change theory as late as 1988, but in 2004 described it as "a load of poppycock" in the Daily Mail; Plantlife International instructed him to step down as President, The Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts refused to renew his presidency, and, echoing the Revelle case, there were "charges of mental incompetency", for example the Carbon Trust's description of "the very sad and deluded David Bellamy". Significantly, the climate change movement is using local government resources and the media - predominanty TV - to encourage children to use "pester power" on their parents to prevent "eco-crimes".

Radagast, a senior teacher in a faith school, writes in his blog Witness to Love about the effects of TV upon children:

With a media so often dedicated to profit, consumerism, celebrity and a liberal-elite agenda, it should be no surprise that many children's views are similarly shaped. Television, says William Kilpatrick author of Why Johnny Can't tell Right from Wrong, "defines what is and is not important" (264) and shapes the reality of viewers by conferring significance upon events by paying attention to them, or denying them significance by ignoring them...For many children I talk to, television programming offers 'realism' and 'entertainment' and they would be reluctant to give it up. However, the kind of 'realism' and 'entertainment' about the world on offer in many media-driven productions is not realism at all. It is a distorted picture of reality, often dominated by secular values and without any connection to the transcendent. The image of man and especially of the family that emerges in many programmes is often grossly one-sided.

In a sense, entertainment and other institutions have seen the truth in the Jesuits' maxim, "Give me the child and I'll show you the man[sic]" by turning it round for their own purposes, There are signs of hope, however - one of the most popular BBC programmes of all time (around the world) is Doctor Who, and it's spin-off for children The Sarah Jane Adventures. These science-fiction series usually take the form of morality tales, centred around the premise that acting others' good is to be desired, and wrong is objectively, well, wrong. It's ironic that they have come from the organisation which gave us the egregious Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand incident, where a 78-year-old man was bullied by the aforesaid with criminally obscene messages left on his answerphone about his granddaughter.

Ironic too that the most bullying government ever to be foisted upon Great Britain has, through its own thinktank, Foresight, rediscovered things we need to do to regain our happiness. These include activities like developing relationships with friends and families, having hobbies, and helping friends and strangers - all simple things, which many of us learnt not from thinktanks but at our mothers' knees, and which start with switching off the telly.

Fatal Misconception - The Struggle to Control World Population

Fatal Misconception - The Struggle to Control World Population
Matthew Connelly
pp520
Harvard University Press 2008

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

George Santayana

I begin with this often-misquoted phrase from George Santayana because the story of birth-control as national and transnational policy seems to be that of recurring bouts of "collective amnesia", as Connolly puts it. For example, Connelly cites a screening of the pro-life film The Great Population Hoax at IPPF headquarters which caused activists to complain about arguments using distortions of the truth; manager Julian Heddy had to admit that these were actual claims made by earlier population-control advocates.

In order to test the prevalence of population control in recent times, after the prejudices, avoidable tragedies and wilful negligence, I leafed through today's Daily Telegraph. I found a story about how Pakistan is to receive a $9 billion (£5.6 billion) loan from the IMF, but would not like a full-blown IMF program because "it would likely come with painful conditions to cut government spending that could affect programs for the poor".

Wondering what these might be, I looked through some IMF papers for other countries, and found a Senegal Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper from 2006 which contained a statement on page 38 that one of the priority objectives of this was population control.

I've already blogged about how social Darwinism evolved into eugenics. I knew that Darwin himself was horrified by the former phenomenon, but it surprised me to learn that he complained to Annie Besant during her phase as a eugenicist (before she became a mystic philosopher) that eugenics interfered with natural selection. I considered myself quite informed on these matters, but this was only one of countless revelations in Matthew Connelly's intensely-researched tome on how population control was all about controlling other folks' populations. Shortly into my first session with Fatal Misconception, I realised I was reading one of the most important books of my life.

One of the key dogmas of eugenics was maintaining the purity of one's people. When Margaret Sanger realised that those concerned about this were coalescing into a discrete movement, two of the names she thought of calling it were "neo-Malthusianism" and "race control", before she decided on "birth control". An American, her British counterpart, Marie Stopes, stated that she wanted to recruit from "healthy, well-conditioned individuals only", and that "Constructive Birth Control will fill the comfortable cradles and empty the gutters".

The Birth Control Movement was ostensibly an internationalist movement seeking a world government in order to eliminate war. But what they were about was the future of the white race (whatever that is), and at the time eliminating the "yellow peril" (although at the International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference in New York in 1925, Indian nationalist Taraknath Das complained about the "white peril).

India was a target for Sanger and her followers from the start, and during Connelly's exposition of the whole sordid affair as a case-study I had to remind myself several times that I wasn't reading a horror story but modern history.

A measure of the morality of the Birth Control movement can be gleaned from his description of Margaret Sanger "criss-crossing" India dispensing spermicidal foam, almost totally unarmed with information as to its safety. It seems not to have bothered her that a similar foam, distributed to African Americans by "notorious racist" Lydia DeVilbiss, was causing side-effects, but finally sent her foam away for analysis upon learning that DeVilbiss' concoction had caused adverse effects when tested upon dogs.

Following the 1951 census, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru "called for free sterilisation and contraception when recommended on medical grounds, and suggested that where feasible it should be given for social and economic reasons as well". India would never be the same. (It should be noted that Hellen Keller, the deaf-blind pioneer, wrote to Sanger breathlessly congratulating her for founding the Planned Parenthood foundation in India in 1952. I find this rather strange, as Sanger referred to the blind, deaf and mute as "this dead weight of human waste" in her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization - and Marie Stopes wrote her son Harry out of her will because he married a woman - daughter of "bouncing bomb" inventor Barnes Wallis - with hereditary short-sightedness.)

The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) had maintained a presence in India for two decades before Nehru gave them the go-ahead, and responded to their mission with a Neitzschean optimism: "India is the cauldron in which mankind will be tested". Farce ensued immediately - during their 5-year study in the Punjab husbands and wives would answer intrusive questions about their sex-lives differently, and by the time their trial on birth-control ended, the birth-rate was greater than when it began. (They weren't the only ones falling over their own feet; a Swedish trial in nearby Ceylon - now Sri Lanka - couldn't prove the effectiveness of contraceptives after two years.)

The degree to which the Indian population control program contributed to the Emergency and its conclusion will, I think, be a subject for debate until Kingdom Come. But abuses in order to increase "acceptors" were a part of the program from the beginning. Intrauterine Devices (IUD's), which had been found to be a cause of heavy bleeding and ectopic pregnancy in programs in Hong Kong, Puerto Rico, Pakistan and other countries, were being used widely, and the UN promised follow-ups in India to catch complications early, despite there being one health visitor per 40,000 people in India. Men who refused sterilization were denied pay-rises and promotions, and by the late '6o's payments were being made both to be vasectomised and to recruit others.

Mass sterilisation was praised in 1960 by Time, and when the Emergency was declared in 1975 Indira Ghandi's son Sanjay commented that it was an "appropriate atmosphere" for tackling what DN Pai, director of family planning in Maharashtra, called "people pollution". What was effectively coercive for poor people became mandatory. Connelly explains:

Sterilization became a condition not just for land allotments, but for irrigation, water, electricity, ration cards, rickshaw licenses, medical care, pay raises, and promotions. Everyone, from senior government officials to train conductors to policemen, was given a sterilization quota."

One of Sanjay's circle, Ruksana Sultana, demanded that Muslims who were begging her to have the demolition of their houses stopped - the idea being that sterilization certificates be produced to get alternative accomodation - produce 300 people for sterilization in return, and had to be rescued from the resulting riot by police who eventually gained control by firing live ammunition into the crowd.

However, Gandhi had two qualities that just about all senior population controllers at the time lacked: she was a woman and a mother. She became depressed over the suffering of her people and called an election - and was robustly defeated.

Another tragedy of India is that the population control could have been different. On December 3, 1935, Margaret Sanger had an audience with Mahatma Gandhi concerning population control, and told Time, "He just didn't know much about the subject." In reality, Gandhi was a proponent of natural family planning, which he thought strengthened self-control. Connelly speculates that she didn't publicize Gandhi's views on natural family planning because "it was endorsed by a growing number of Catholics".

Sanger was, in fact, deeply anti-Catholic, and indeed when she left the American Birth Control League "when she found she could no longer control it" she called its house journal, Birth Control Review, "no different from 'all the little Catholic papers'". Connolly continues:

Whatever their differences, Sanger insisted that all these [birth control] groups shared "one common enemy, one group of opposition objecting to everything we do or say - the Catholic Church".

This attitude still thrives: in September of this year John Smeaton highlighted tactics which were contrived to be offensive to Christians in general, but to Catholics in particular, and the British HFEA (Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority) still excludes pro-lifers, which in some circles is taken to be a synonym for Catholic. There are, however, two things to be thankful for: firstly, Roman Catholics still swell the ranks of pro-lifers, and secondly, they have been joined by people of other religions and none - there are pro-life Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Protestants, Jews, Hindus, atheists, pagans - the list goes on and on and on...

Despite the abuses of the Indian birth control campaign, in 1983 Indira Gandhi, returned to power, shared the first United Nations Population Award - with Xinzhong Qian, Soviet-trained former soldier who was one of the masterminds of the Chinese population control campaign.

Birth control being what it says on the tin, ie control, it's surprising that it wasn't embraced wholeheartedly by a Communist country before China started considering it in the late seventies.

The IPPF's program in China, states Connelly, was "no secret". Stephen Mosher, later President of the Population Research Institute, brought back reports such as that from a Guangdong village:

Eighteen women who were at least five months pregnant, "red-eyed from lack of sleep and crying", were told they would have to undergo abortions, in two cases by Caeserian section. Through such means, China registered 7.9 million abortions, 13.5 million IUD insertions, and almost 7 million sterilizations in 1979...

Yet, though the riots in India had barely died down, it was as though they had never happened - despite the repercussions of the Indian fiasco reaching not just Pakistan, but also countries as diverse as Iran, Indonesia and the Philippines and contributing to the overthrow of more than one government. Yet, says Connolly, "senior IPPF staff had their eyes wide open" regarding the China campaign, whose aims, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) were not just to reduce "overpopulation" but to "raise the quality of population from the point of view of eugenics, education and ethics". With people who could remember newsreels detailing the horrors of Belsen, Auschwitz etc at the time of their liberation still in employment, eugenics was back.

And it's back this time without necessarily being imposed from above - witness sex-selective abortions in India and China facilitated by ultrasound machines. In the light of modern preoccupations with all things genetic, Connolly refers to people "faithfully reciting a eugenic catechism without the faintest idea of where it came from or where it can lead". For example, while in Australia a child has been born after surviving an ectopic pregnancy, in Britain doctors have been given permission to screen embryos for cosmetic defects, with a view to destroying the ones that don't match expectations, the defects including squints and even hair colour.

One thing gynaecologists and obstetricians have always agreed upon is that there is no difference between a baby before birth and one after. This is why in 2006 the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists proposed infanticide for the sickest babies on the grounds, among other things, of the costs of looking after them - and Connelly notes that the population control agenda gathered steam during the financial crises of the 1930's. In the US, Senator Barack Obama is reckoned to have voted against the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, which would protect babies who have survived abortion from being murdered. (In the UK, whose population is around a fifth of that of the US, fifty babies a year are estimated to survive abortion.)

What we're looking at here is an attempt to formally renunciate the broad medical concensus that once a baby has taken its first breath it is a human being. I'm reminded of Philip K Dick's 1973 short story The Pre-Persons, in which a child can be "aborted" up to the age of 12 , and even then is only safe if he/she can prove a certain degree of mathematical ability. I wish I could say it's still in the realms of sci-fi, but earlier this year Australian doctor and bioethicist Fr Joseph Tham estimated that infanticide would be "normalised" in 50 years. An online friend has alerted me to the philosophy of Dr Peter Singer, an animal liberationist who believes that animals are people but that babies can be killed up to 28 days post-birth. (Connelly refers to a pressure group called Zero Population Growth, which in 1969 wanted to exterminate humanity but give other primates an antidote so they would survive.)

What will happen? Will the "collective amnesia" of policymakers draw us to catastrophe once more, so that in the reaction we can once more cry "Never again"?

But population planners have an enemy that they cannot forever subjugate. Connelly describes how the Emergency ended - "Something more powerful, even more implacable, had finally defeated the ideology of population control: People voting, one by one."