FREDERICKSBURG, VA – “Last year International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) dispensed 103.4 million condoms to starving people. The problem is, you can’t eat condoms,” said Brittany Shankle, a senior at the University of Mary Washington who is coordinating the event. “Students at Mary Washington University are taking part in a demonstration called Food Not Condoms which insists that the selfish policies of sending condoms to places where people are starving to death must come to an end.”
Today, Tuesday, April 17, students will share in a free meal composed of rice, beans and tortillas – the staple diet for most of the world. According to the fliers distributed at the event, “On the American market this meal would cost only 25 cents. With the average cost of a condom at 50 cents, IPPF could feed 206.8 million starving people in a year instead of distributing 103.4 million condoms.”
“
The name of the event says it all,” said Shankle, “We want to raise awareness of the fact that people in Africa, Honduras, and other parts of the world are starving while organizations and governments are shipping millions of dollars worth of condoms every year instead of food or aid. Food Not Condoms is their wakeup call.”
Shankle wants her fellow students to realize that the policies of the American government, the UN, and private organizations such as IPPF of sending condoms to starving people are not only ineffective, but selfish too. “By claiming overpopulation as the problem, these organizations are telling African and South American people that if they didn’t exist, starvation wouldn’t be a problem,” said Shankle. “In essence, these policies are prejudiced against minorities and impoverished people.”
The Food Not Condoms event is aimed at highlighting social injustices, and, Shankle hopes, enlightening people to the true root problem of world hunger: selfishness.
“
Starvation and disease will persist as long as we continue to apply a ‘band-aid’ of contraception to this gaping wound,” said Shankle. “Our community needs to understand that contraception is not the cure.”
Food Not Condoms is sponsored by the college group Project Plus, an organization dedicated to revealing the truth about contraception to their college peers. Project Plus can be reached at their website, www.theprojectplus.com, or via email at projectplusinfo@gmail.com.
6 comments
Interesting and different.
Thanks.
What a good idea! Addressing the needs of the population instead of the reality of population.
I like the line about not being able to eat condoms.
No doubt some smarty will come up with edible condoms to address this solution, however.
The message to poor people is that they are poor because they are obviously breeding too much. Poverty is punishment for childbearing in the eyes of the Planned Parenthood types. They won’t help anyone who would just feed the food to their ravenous little brats. So they say, here’s a condom, and our address just in case it breaks.
My boyfriend prepared his 15-year-old son yesterday for a geography exam. It was really amazing how biased the teaching material (here in Austria, Europe) was concerning the “reduction of the birth rate” in Third World countries. The message of the texts given to the kids was basically that having fewer children (either through abortion or contraception or both) was the aim the population of all these countries should be striving for. It constantly associated social progress with fewer children. It was really disgusting.
My boyfriend, good Catholic as he is, pointed all this out to his son of course and heavily criticized the ideological bias… Hopefully, the kid will pick up at least some of good Catholic teaching! 🙂
yes, according to Planned Parenthood, the answer to all the hungry people is less people not less hunger
I don’t see the issue here. If there are less people, there will be less hunger. And you can have less people much cheaper than you can feed everyone you do have.
Why is this a problem?