Troll, you said, "kat, just what right does our, or any other, government have to go into another country-often unasked-to give out birth control and/or abortion information? In the places that we have meddled before such as the Sahel (Southern Sahara) our efforts have resulted in over-population and the subsequent desertification of the area. We need to study what the possible results of any kind of social or medical intervention will be BEFORE we sent aid of any kind."

Are you saying that teaching birth control resulted in over population and desertification in the Sahel? If, so, please give references.

Also, what do you think of Doctors Without Borders? Should they be stopped from practising their humanitarian efforts because of the possible results of their social/medical intervention? I suppose we wouldn't want to provide any kind of vaccines to developing countries, either, right?

Have you read about the women in Afghanistan? Is it more correct to sit by and do nothing to help them when every girl born there is destined to either be left for dead at birth, kept in her house for life with no education, vocation, etc. until she is given to a man as a wife/slave and suffers from whatever abuses he chooses to inflict, often resulting in her murder?

Or how about the famous super model who was sexually mutilated as a young girl in Africa; who walked alone, barefoot, for hundreds of miles in the desert to escape her culture where girls are castrated as young as 5 & 6, with rusty tin can lids, then sewn up until they are wed, and subsequently after each birth in order to be "pleasingly tight" for the husband's sexual appetite?

Are you saying it is not okay to provide these women and hopefully their male counterparts with family planning methods?

Did we study the possible results before we intervened in Kuwait for OIL? Is a condom such a threat to an emerging society? No one forces these programs on anyone. They are made available. I do not know of any instance when our government has gone into a country and mandated birth control education. And, that IS what it is, education. How anyone would want to deny that to anyone asking is beyond me.

kat