Two of the world’s leading pro-abortion advocates were invited by the Vatican to address a workshop on the environment on April 28, 2015.
Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary General, and Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute, were invited to speak at the Vatican workshop Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity. The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Development held by the Pontifical Academy for Sciences (PAS), Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and Religions for Peace on April 28th 2015 in anticipation of the new papal encyclical on the environment.
Ban Ki-Moon has on many occasions promoted the so-called “right” to abortion worldwide. He also issued a controversial new report this year on sexual violence in conflict zones, which was critical of the lack of “safe abortion” in many conflict situations.
Dr Jeffrey Sachs, on the other hand, is a well-known international proponent of population control and abortion. He is one of the architects of the millennium development goals and a member of the Executive Board of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. The Network has proposed draft Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which contain provisions that are radically antagonistic to the right to life from conception to natural death, to the rights and dignity of the family and to the rights of parents as the primary educators of their children.
He made a plea for legalizing abortion as a an cost-effective way to eliminate “unwanted children” when contraception fails in his 2008 book “Commonwealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet.” He describes abortion as a “lower-risk and lower-cost option” than bringing a new human life to the world.
He also glowingly writes that the “legalization of abortion reduces a country’s total fertility rate significantly, by as much as half a child on average”, and criticizes Ronald Regan and George H.W. Bush for denying groups that provide and promote abortion any U.S. funding through the Mexico City Policy.
He is the heir-apparent of the discredited population alarmists of the twentieth century who warned against the “population bomb” and developed the concept of the Earth’s limited “caring capacity.” According to Sachs “high fertility rates are deleterious to economic development.”
He frequently speaks of humanity transgressing “planetary boundaries” and the threat of an overly-crowded planet. He has been a leader in developing and promoting the theory of the “demographic dividend,” which says countries must invest in family planning and reduce fertility before they can experience development. The theory has been criticized for failing to result in any dividends in entire regions, where fertility rates have dropped precipitously in the past two decades, and underemphasizing the corresponding risks of rapidly aging populations.
This isn’t the first time that Jeffrey Sachs was honored at the Vatican. He delivered a keynote lecture at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 2013. Sachs’ link to the Vatican appears to be Monsignor Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, who hosted the Vatican Conference in end April together with Sachs’ Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Sánchez Sorondo sits on the group’s Leadership Council.
Catholic intellectuals and pro-life media criticized how the two most powerful proponents of abortion and population control were given a platform at the Vatican.