Be aware of the battle being waged with International Planned Parenthood Federation

By Fr Derek Anton
Parish Priest of Chaguanas

The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) opened an office in Trinidad in July. It was reported by CCN TV6 that the IPPF says that the recent overturning of the Roe v Wade decision in the USA, which allowed women to legally access abortions, “has only fueled the Federation to fight harder for women’s rights….Now the Federation is looking to make an impact in T&T and the Caribbean” (CCN TV6 News, July 23, 2022). We need to take this seriously.

TTT (July 21, 2022) reported that the Regional Director of the IPPF said the Federation plans to launch its “new strategy focused on reproductive justice” and that “they also plan to promote the sexuality agenda and transform the gender norms”. We need to pay attention to that.

According to the report, the Vice-President of the Family Planning Association of T&T sees that the IPPF will be a powerful partner “…in the repositioning and fortifying of sexual and reproductive health and rights”.

What is this “repositioning”?

On the TV6 report, the IPPF Regional Director was asked, “When does life begin?”. To the follow-up question about whether a six-month old unborn baby foetus is “a living thing, or is it not alive?”, the Director responded that “Every cellula has life. But I am not a philosopher or” – what sounded like – “a biologist”. It seemed an attempt to evade the question.

If the Director cannot say when human life begins, then what of the talk of reproductive justice and rights? What justice, and whose rights?

Surely not the rights of the unborn child. For how can someone seek to protect the rights of anyone if they are not certain when that person’s life begins? But the IPPF is not noted for looking out for the rights of the unborn child.

We as Catholics ought to know what the Church teaches about this: that the life of every human being begins at the moment of conception (fertilisation). Science also supports this. We ought also to be aware of all that is at stake.

From the IPPF, I believe we can look out for:

• An attempt to legalise abortion;
• An attempt to legalise “same-sex” marriage; and
• An attempt to create gender confusion in T&T

If you think that this is bad enough, and it is, we can also expect attempts to introduce Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) in our schools.

IPPF is one of the purveyors of CSE, which seeks to “sexualise” our children at very tender ages using extremely explicit sexual content. (Refer also to the Archbishop’s comments in the Catholic News, p 24, August 14).

Why would anyone want to do such a thing? We can look as far back as the middle of the 19th century to Karl Marx and the advent of Communism. Noelle Mering says of Marx: “In his letters, he wrote of his understanding that as the Roman Empire was brought to its knees by sexual licentiousness, so could ruination be brought to the West through the breakdown of all sexual restraint and the abolition of the family” (Awake, Not Woke, Tan Books, © 2021 Noelle Mering, p 32).

After the First World War, German Marxists formed the Institute for Social Research (which came to be known as the ‘Frankfurt School’) to study what went wrong with Marx’s social revolution.

The Frankfurt School moved from Hitler’s Germany to the USA in the 1930s. They mixed in Freudian thought with Marxism and “preached a doctrine of sexual and cultural freedom” (p37). Wilhelm Reich, “was the most passionate about the need to unite socialism with sexual liberation” (p 39). His book The Sexual Revolution came out in 1936.

His (like another’s) aim of sexual liberation “applied also to children, whom Reich believed should be encouraged to pursue sexual exploration at an early age” (p 40) Apart from parental authority, their consciences could be corrupted.