Pro-life activist in Africa: Western ‘benefactors’ attach population control strings to aid money for schools and infrastructure

Obianuju Ekeocha, the founder and president of Culture of Life Africa, says Western “benefactors” often require developing nations to promote contraceptives, abortion, and sterilization programs as a condition for receiving much-needed financial aid for education, clean water, and other vital infrastructure.

“What we see on the ground is Western organizations bringing in millions of dollars’ worth of contraceptives,” Ekeocha explained during an April livestream for Natural Womanhood, a non-profit dedicated to promoting women’s natural health and fertility literacy. “They are taking it to the most rural parts of Africa in some cases, and they are giving women these contraceptive drugs and devices without really informing them of the real dangers that are attached…. We are finding women who are then going ahead to have really horrible side effects.”

As an example, when Western benefactors donate money to construct a hospital in an African nation, they require that a family planning program play a major role in the operation of the hospital. In another example, when money is donated to schools or universities for textbooks or facilities, those schools are then required to implement a contraceptive program for students.

Ekeocha often addresses the subtle racism of charitable Westerners who assume that Africans are in dire need of population control by means of abortion and hormonal contraceptives, which run contrary to the pro-life values of most Africans.

These charities, she said, “are earmarking … money that will go into contraception, even when those societies and communities are saying that ‘we need more education and more water and more development in our communities,’” she explained.

The activist characterized the importation of these values into African society by way of aid money as “ideological colonization.”

Some clinics, she says, move into rural areas and administer drugs, medicine, and implant contraceptive devices only to “disappear” before women face issues with the devices, including blood clots, loss of libido, and even infertility. In one stunning example, a woman was implanted with an IUD for free, only to be told it would cost the equivalent of a week’s worth of food for her family to have it removed after she experienced serious side effects.

“We’re finding real, difficult things happening as a direct result of Western-provided contraceptive drugs and devices,” Ekeocha stated, who noted that young girls are targeted as well, with contraceptives given without their parents’ knowledge or consent.

This ultimately boils down to the values driving these harmful means of distributing aid and family planning services. Africans simply don’t view reproduction as something that needs to be prevented in the same way that modern progressives who promote global population control do. As Ekeocha explained,

“The way a lot of these African customs and cultures and traditions regard marriage is such that they feel marriage is sacred…. T]here’s such a high purpose and regard that is attached to human sexuality. And in the same way, they then respect motherhood, because obviously, a baby that is born is expected and loved and cherished and seen as a sign of hope. So there is this real joy that exists in community for the birth of children.”

In other words, despite the likelihood that their birth increases the likelihood or level of poverty, children are still viewed as a blessing in many African cultures.

“That means that this society and this community is going to go on,” Ekeocha explained, adding that “these things are really woven into many of the African cultures.”

It is difficult to separate today’s “reproductive health,” “family planning,” and “population control” movements from the philosophy of progressive 20th century eugenics proponents like Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger or British birth control champion Marie Stopes, who were open and adamant about society’s responsibility to discourage the reproduction of “undesirables,” including minorities, the disabled, and the poor.

These women, of course, were also racists and only in today’s hyper-woke culture are their names finally being dropped from the facilities founded to carry on their agenda.

Unfortunately, it is only the names that are being dropped — the agenda to prevent women of color from having too many babies is still in full swing a century later, whether the means is an abortion clinic in New York City or exchanging financial aid for abortions and contraceptives in rural African villages.

And while it is carried out in the name of women’s rights, this push goes against the values and culture of many African women, who as we know from Ekeocha, don’t even want to have access to abortion or contraceptives.

It is quite disturbing that organizations are running blackmail schemes that offer to invest in community-empowering resources like education and clean water with the caveat that developing nations also promote measures to reduce their own populations by means of abortion and dangerous contraceptives. It is all the more disturbing that this is happening when it’s clear that most African women don’t even want these programs to begin with — so much so that these caveats are being put in place to try to extort them into changing their minds.

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