CAIRO - REPACKAGING POPULATION-CONTROL

Aid agencies, charities, and other nongovernmental organizations once denounced population control programs as racist interference in the th ird world. Yet, at the United Nations Conference on Population and Dev elopment in Cairo last September, these same organizations endorsed ve ry similar ideas. The U.N. can now claim that even its fiercest critic s not only have muted their criticism of population control programs b ut now positively endorse them. Over the last 30 years, population con trol has been consciously repackaged by the U.S. establishment. The im age of population control has changed from being overtly anti-third wo rld to being about giving the people of the third world-especially wom en-basic rights in family planning. Wrapped up in the language of wome n's empowerment and environmentalism, the establishment's old argument s about there being too many nonwhite babies in the world, have, unfor tunately, won the day.