If it looks, walks, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. This simple logic applies to eugenics and an official US government agency inside the Health and Human Services Department known as the Office of Population Affairs (OPA).
The controversial bureau is finally being gutted by the Trump White House after four years of ramped-up politicization by the Biden administration. But the big question is not why it’s going away, but how a relic of the ugliest side of the Zero Population Growth hysteria of the 1960s and ’70s managed to survive so long.
According to *The Daily Caller*, “The Office of Population Affairs (OPA) saw roughly 30 employees issued reduction-in-force notices October 10, effectively sidelining most of the agency’s staff.”
### A Federal Cash Conduit for Planned Parenthood
Since its creation under the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970, the agency has served as a federal taxpayer cash conduit for Planned Parenthood. Although funding for abortion is expressly forbidden, Title X grants for birth control programs supported by the agency have funneled money to Planned Parenthood for decades.
The pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute reported in May that, “From 2019-2024, Planned Parenthood was awarded around $66 million of direct funding through Title X.”
Planned Parenthood clinics were routinely awarded lavish grants under OPA’s “Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program” (TPP). For example, a listing on the OPA website shows Planned Parenthood of South Florida and the Treasure Coast receiving $983,000 in annual funding under the TPP program.
### Anti-Parent, Pro-Woke, and an Ugly History
Title X became a battleground for parental rights during the Biden administration when Texas sought to require parents be informed when birth control was handed out to teens. This is now the law in the Lone Star State, much to the chagrin of Title X advocates.
“In a family planning setting, it is critical that adolescents have access to high-quality, confidential care from a provider who supports and respects their values,” Clare Coleman, president and CEO of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, said in 2022 during one courtroom clash. “Title X-funded providers are considered highly trusted sources of health care information for their patients, and not being able to access confidential care will block a critical pathway to essential health services for young people.”
Under Biden, OPA also pushed woke policy under the guise of “health equity.” A 2024 OPA guideline revision paper “includes newer approaches to care by adopting a health equity lens and recognizing the impact of structural and interpersonal racism, classism, ableism, and bias based on sexual orientation and/or gender identity on health and [sexual and reproductive health] care,” the publication states.
But there’s nothing novel about the core mission of the Office of Population Affairs. As its name very much suggests, OPA was founded at a time when harsh and often coercive measures of population control were soaring in popularity within the US health and political establishment.
A surprisingly honest *New York Times* feature article in 2022 on coercive birth control measures of the 1970s explained OPA’s beginnings:
> “After Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, his Republican administration set out to dismantle Great Society programs, while also increasing funding for family-planning services in an effort to target the so-called population bomb,” the article states.
> “This term, popularized by Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich – and the title of his 1968 best-selling book – referred to an exaggerated population explosion that he incorrectly predicted would lead to global famine in the 1970s and 1980s. Nixon championed the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970, also known as the Birth Curb Bill, a $382 million federal program to control population growth, which had ballooned into a national obsession.”
Future Republican President George H.W. Bush was a key congressional co-sponsor of the bill that created OPA. To this day, OPA lists “sterilization” among its core functions.
> “OPA advises the Secretary and the Assistant Secretary for Health on a wide range of reproductive and adolescent health topics, including teen pregnancy prevention, family planning, and sterilization, as well as other population issues,” the “About” section of OPA’s portal at HHS states.
Such sterilization promotion is said to have led to barbarous actions 50 years ago against the very people today’s woke OPA personnel claim to champion in the name of “health equity.”
In a 2019 University of Rochester article on a book authored by assistant professor of history Brianna Theobald, it was reported:
> “In the 1970s, doctors in the United States sterilized an estimated 25 to 42 percent of Native American women of childbearing age, some as young as 15. The Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970 subsidized sterilizations for Medicaid and Indian Health Service patients. Many Native people received their healthcare through the IHS. We know that after its passage, sterilization rates on many reservations increased,” Theobald elaborated.
> “On the Navajo Reservation, for example, they doubled between 1972 and 1978. That doesn’t mean that all these procedures were performed coercively… but we do know that the subsidization of the procedure as well as the increased legitimacy of sterilization as a form of birth control at the time facilitated coercive use of the technology.”
### Phony Population Bomb Blows Up in Americans’ Laps
Senator Joseph Tydings (D-MD) was another co-sponsor of the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970 alongside George Bush. He could not have been more blunt about his intentions:
> “Either we must act now to develop rational, voluntary policies and programs to stabilize US population size or face the possibility of a drastic deterioration in the quality of national life and the collapse of many of our cherished institutions under the sheer weight of human numbers,” Tydings proclaimed in 1971.
Fast forward to today: America is in the throes of a demographic crisis due to a catastrophically low birth rate, and massive unchecked immigration is regularly cited as a “solution” to the problem.
“ The fertility rate in the US dropped to an all-time low in 2024 with fewer than 1.6 children being born per woman, federal data released [July 24] show,” CBS News reported this summer.
> “The US was once among only a few developed countries with a rate that ensured each generation had enough children to replace itself – about 2.1 kids per woman. But it has been sliding in America for close to two decades as more women are waiting longer to have children or never taking that step at all.”
The words “trust the science” have been used by ivory-towered elitists as a weapon to bludgeon the American people and harm their future for far longer than a recent health pandemic you might recall.
https://www.libertynation.com/trump-demolishes-hhs-relic-of-1970s-zero-population-growth-craze/
