ROME — Pope Francis has named liberal economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, among the world’s foremost proponents of population control and abortion, to the Pontifical Council of Social Sciences.
“The Holy Father has appointed Professor Jeffrey David Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University in New York, U.S.A., as an ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences,” the Vatican announced Monday.
In his 2008 book Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, Sachs argued for legalizing abortion as a cost-effective way to eliminate “unwanted children” when contraception fails.
Abortion, he wrote, is a “lower-risk and lower-cost option” than having unwanted children born into the world.
The “legalization of abortion reduces a country’s total fertility rate significantly, by as much as half a child on average,” he wrote approvingly, while criticizing America’s “Mexico City Policy,” which denies funding to NGOs that perform or promote abortions.
Particularly in Africa, he argued, abortion should be legalized and family planning programs made to “cater to adolescents as well as to married households.”
Jeffrey Sachs gives a discussion on climate change and surviving Trump during the Starmus Festival on June 21, 2017 in Trondheim, Norway. (Photo by Michael Campanella/Getty Images)
Sachs was the lead architect of the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals and appealed to countries to include “sexual and reproductive health” and “reproductive rights” in the scheme, after they were initially left out, which eventually led to their inclusion over and against objections from the Holy See and the United States.
Sachs wrote that the Cairo Plan of Action, which called for universal access to reproductive healthcare including abortion, was “one of the most important Millennium Promises,” noting that “population policy is integral to the overall challenge of sustainable development.”
When the Millennium Development Goals expired at the end of 2015, Sachs ushered in the Sustainable Development Goals. He is Special Advisor to the U.N. Secretary-General on the Sustainable Development Goals and previously advised both Ban Ki-moon and Kofi Annan on the MDGs.
The U.N. agenda encapsulates “17 Sustainable Development Goals and 169 targets,” some of which directly contradict the Catholic Church’s core beliefs regarding human life.
“We are committed to ensuring universal access to sexual and reproductive health-care services, including for family planning, information and education,” the agenda declares.
As Stefano Gennarini wrote in 2015, Jeffrey Sachs and Ban Ki-moon (another Vatican invitee) are “arguably the most powerful proponents of abortion and population control in the world.”
The governor of California, Jerry Brown (2ndL), Rome’s mayor Ignazio Marion (C), New York City’s mayor Bill de Blasio and professor Jeffrey Sachs (R), attend the second day of an international summit of Mayors on “Modern Slavery and Climate Change” on July 21, 2015 at the Vatican. (TIZIANA FABI/AFP via Getty Images)
For his part, Pope Francis is a vocal opponent of abortion, and recently insisted that abortion “is more than a problem, it is a murder,” adding that “whoever performs an abortion kills, any way you look at it.”
The Catholic Church considers the intentional killing of the unborn to be a very grave evil and a crime.
“Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion,” declares the Catechism of the Catholic Church. “This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable.”
“Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law,” it adds.
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