By Deborah Gyapong
Canadian Catholic News
OTTAWA
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Cardinal Peter Turkson, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, speaks at a news conference Sept. 29 at St. Paul University in Ottawa. He said the Gospel and justice and peace are inseparable. Deborah Gyapong / CCN.
Programs pushing contraception and abortion on the developing world under the guise of women’s health care and “reproductive rights” may have an underlying racist agenda, Cardinal Peter Turkson said in a Sept. 28 interview.
“The program being pushed does not reflect the true situation of women in the Third World,” the president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace said. “It derives from a certain thinking that you deal with poverty by eliminating the poor.”
Canadian Catholic News
OTTAWA
Cardinal Peter Turkson, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, speaks at a news conference Sept. 29 at St. Paul University in Ottawa. He said the Gospel and justice and peace are inseparable. Deborah Gyapong / CCN.Programs pushing contraception and abortion on the developing world under the guise of women’s health care and “reproductive rights” may have an underlying racist agenda, Cardinal Peter Turkson said in a Sept. 28 interview.
“The program being pushed does not reflect the true situation of women in the Third World,” the president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace said. “It derives from a certain thinking that you deal with poverty by eliminating the poor.”
Some think poverty has to do with demographics, that because populations are so high they cannot feed themselves so stopping population growth is the key to ending poverty, Cardinal Turkson said. “I can think of nothing more fallacious than that.”
“Since when did abortion become a health issue?” he asked, though he noted some argue that without proper access women will “seek it through the back door.”
If people are serious about women’s health care there are many more things needed than abortion and contraception, he said. “Why not ask the Africans what they need? Why not ask the Asians what they need for women’s health?” he said.
“It’s not for people sitting here [in the West] to decide the issues for people in developing world are abortion and contraception,” he said. “These are not health issues.”
The cardinal said he has met people from various ministries in Europe who “think this is the thing to do.”
“There will be a racist agenda behind all of this,” he said, noting the population control efforts are focused on Africa and Asia.
He used his own life growing up in Ghana as an example of why population control is not the answer to reducing poverty. Neither his father nor mother ever went to school. His father worked as a carpenter; his mother traded vegetables in the market. “You can think of the income of such a family and yet they took care of ten of us,” he said.
All his siblings completed secondary school; one brother got into the technology field and works in Toronto; another worked for the United Nations in Denmark.
“What it requires is good will on the part of the parents and sacrifice,” he said. “It doesn’t require sterilization or abortion."
He noted some children of poor families “invariably grow up to pull others out of poverty.”
Cardinal Turkson stressed the Church’s social doctrine cannot be separated from concern for unborn life and warned against Catholic development agencies getting involved in the push for abortion or contraception through the guise of improving women’s lives in the development world.
When it comes to Catholic groups working under the Caritas Internationalis federation, “we cannot have a group that is church based which is at variance with church teaching,” he said.
“We have to move from this schizoid experience of believing one thing and doing another,” he said. “Our faith should inspire what we do.”
People donate to Caritas groups because they see images of famished people or children who need an education, he said. If for any reason agencies collect money that goes to another purpose or ends up some other place that violates the principle of following the giver’s intention, he said.
Cardinal Turkson stressed the inseparability of spreading the Gospel from justice and peace, as well as the inseparability of respect for unborn life from the Church’s social doctrine.
