The Life and Death of NSSM 200: How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U. S. Population Policy [Paperback]

Stephen D. Mumford (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Center for Research on Population; Revised edition (October 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 093730705X
• ISBN-13: 978-0937307052
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,848,740 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Intense, Well-Structured, Mind-Glazing, Valuable, January 25, 2004

By 

Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

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This review is from: The Life and Death of NSSM 200 : How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U.S. Population Policy (Paperback)

Although I have had this book in my possession for months, it kept slipping to the bottom of the pile because it is an excruciatingly detailed look at one very specific policy area--that of population. I was mistaken in thinking that the book was so detailed as to be boring or difficult to grasp.

On the contrary, the author has done a superb job, in partnership with the publisher, in presenting a great deal of important information in a readable font size and form.

For me, the book is important in two ways. First, it tells me there is a person out there who really understands all this stuff in detail, and can help me rethink our national policy when the time comes that we have a sane White House willing to be serious about this vital long-term matter.

Second, it lists up front the various areas that impact on population policy (drawing on the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future) and is worth the price of the book for this superb list (each with a paragraph about the sub-policy area): Population Education; Sex Education; Child Care; Children Born Out of Wedlock; Adoption; Equal Rights for Women; Contraception and the Law; Contraception and Minors; Voluntary Sterilization; Abortion; Methods of Fertility Control; Fertility-Related Health Services; Personnel Training and Delivery of Services; Family Planning Services; Services for Teenagers; Population Stabilization; Illegal Aliens; Immigration; National Distribution and Migration Policies; Guiding Urban Expansion; Racial Minorities and the Poor; Depressed Rural Areas; Institutional Responses; Population Statistics and Research; Vital Statistical Data; Enumeration of Special Groups; International Migration; Current Population Survey; Statistical Reporting of Family Planning Services; National Survey of Family Growth; Distribution of Government Data; Mid-Decade Census; Statistical Use of Administrative Records; Intercensal Population Estimates; Social and Behavioral Research; Research Program in Population Distribution; Federal Government Population Research; Support for Professional Training; Organizational Changes; Office of Population Affairs in the Department of Health, National Institute of Population Sciences; Department of Community Development; Office of Population Growth and Distribution; Council of Social Advisors; Joint Committee on Population; State Population Agencies and Commissions; Private Efforts and Population Policy.

The author makes a very strong case for how, as his subtitle suggests, US population policy has been doomed by a lack of political will and the inappropriate influence of the Catholic Church and Mexico, in addition to strong private sector interests seeking low-wage workers while avoiding any associated social costs that are put on to the taxpayer.

I consider this book a primary reference that will be needed soon as America becomes more thoughtful and participatory democracy is restored. Population policy is fundamental. Missing from the official documents are serious discussions about citizenship, civics, ethics, morality, the restoration of the one-income two-parent family as the foundation for a strong nation, and the role that taxation policy can play in strengthening families while holding employers accountable for not making illegal immigration sustainable by hiring undocumented aliens.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Overlay of Frustration, Anger, and Tears, October 31, 2005

By 

Paul G. Shelton (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Life and Death of NSSM 200 : How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U.S. Population Policy (Paperback)

Stephen Mumford deserves credit not only for his detailed and revealing research about the power and anti-democratic designs of the Vatican, but for his otherworldly ability to compile evidence of such malice without succumbing to abject hopelessness or a searing anger. That such evil can be done by the efforts of dogma driven, self-righteous, ideologues is both depressing and frightening. Mumford brings together a compelling collection of evidence that will dispell your naivete forever regarding the anti-democratic and anti-American motives of the Vatican as it has sought to destroy all initiatives for family planning, contraception, and abortion in America and around the world. We are being lead to a fearful choice between quiet capitulation to a de facto Catholic theocracy or all-out ideological war. Read this book, please, and be prepared for the future.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vital Book Tells Of Catholic Plan Against Women Hatched 35 Years Ago, March 14, 2010

By 

Donald A. Collins "Free Lance Writer" (Washington, DC, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Life and Death of NSSM 200: How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U. S. Population Policy (Paperback)

The Life and Death of NSSM 200: How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U.S. Population Policy:

To a standing ovation during his January 27th State of the Union Address, President Obama said, "Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests - including foreign corporations - to spend without limit in our elections. I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people..."

The general reaction to that position has been agreement. Obama was responding to the Citizens United decision by the U.S. Supreme Court [...]

The Court's decision by the 5 conservative Catholic judges is frighteningly familiar to a predication I remembered from a powerful book called "The Life and Death of NSSM 200: How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U.S. Population Policy", published in 1996 by Dr. Stephen D. Mumford. Dr. Mumford, who holds a Dr.P.H. degree from the University of Texas, has spent his 30 plus year career forwarding important work in the field of reproductive health.

Just as the now well publicized scandals involving Catholic priests took many years to be fully told (although recent disclosures about the facts in Germany suggest more news is coming) this carefully researched investigative report book received virtually no notice at the time of its publication.

Now it certainly should be reprinted and brought forward again, as its message is pertinent and far more frightening now then when the initial activities of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops first instigated and initiated their high powered machine in 1975. This machine's influence as you can read in this book on US policy has been devastating.

Control of the Supreme Court was one of the cited goals of the Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities (IV. Judicial Activity, point #1; [...] created by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that Mumford predicted would result in United States lawmaking being heavily influenced by a foreign entity.

Because of his extensive research on this powerful Pastoral Plan, I contacted Dr. Mumford about his assessment of Citizens United. He responded, "I believe that the bishops Pastoral Plan is the most important political development of the last half of the 20th Century," and suggested that I cite material from his book [...]

The Pastoral Plan was formulated in 1975 to create a public advocacy political machine to reverse Roe v. Wade. It is a superbly detailed blueprint of the bishops' strategy for infiltrating and manipulating the American democratic process at the national, state and local levels.

The Plan's strategy is elucidated by a February 21, 1993 quote from Stephen Settle, veteran contributor, the National Catholic Register, "...LAW can override consensus and reshape it...history isn't made by majorities, but by minorities with the stamina and smarts to persevere against the establishment while co-opting its institutions."

In Mumford's view, the Pastoral Plan's first co-opting of an American institution was the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. This election was different from previous ones because of targeted corporate giving, directed by implication ("Mobilization of Leadership at National Level", [...] by the bishops in the Pastoral Plan, regardless of existing laws prohibiting such activity.


The 1980 election cost $127.3 million. Trade and corporate political action committees (PACs) spent $61.6 million. New Right PACs raised only one-third that amount, a combined $19 million. Conservative challengers were given disproportionately far more by corporate and right-wing sources. In her book, The Right to Lifers: Who They Are, How They Operate, How They Get Their Money, Connie Paige states, "The most perplexing aspect of [the 1980 election] was the change in nature of corporate giving -- the phenomenon that threw the Democratic candidates off balance even more than did the astonishingly large amounts.


"Never before had oil companies, savings and loan associations, defense contractors, the real-estate and insurance industries, builders, truckers, auto manufacturers and dealers, and the utility, chemical and dairy industries directed their resources in such vast quantities toward so many political unknowns of the same ideological stripe." These `political unknowns' were people who had passed the Bishops' anti-abortion litmus test for public office.


The Pastoral Plan has been called by Timothy Byrnes the most "focused and aggressive political leadership" ever exerted by the American Catholic hierarchy.

In 1973, when the Supreme court decided Roe v. Wade, James McHugh was a monsignor and the staff director of the National Catholic Family Life Bureau who later became a bishop. In a March 4, 1987 interview by Byrnes, Bishop McHugh observed that "within twenty-four hours" of the court's action, the bishops knew they would need to mount a political campaign in favor of a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion. "Indeed," Byrnes observed, "by November 1973 the bishops had explicitly declared that they wished `to make it clear beyond a doubt to our fellow citizens that we consider the passage of a pro life constitutional amendment a priority of the highest order.'"


The Pastoral Plan states: "It is absolutely necessary to encourage the development in each congressional district of an identifiable, tightly knit and well organized pro life unit. This unit can be described as a public interest group or a citizen's lobby."


One of the early great successes of the Pastoral Plan was the passage of the Hyde Amendment in 1976. This amendment, offered by Congressman and Catholic activist Henry Hyde of Illinois, restricted the use of Medicaid money for abortion, limiting access to abortion for poor women. Planned Parenthood asked Federal Judge John F. Dooling of the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York, to determine whether the law was constitutional.

Dooling, a practicing Catholic, took thirteen months to hear the evidence, which ultimately amounted to dozens of witnesses and thousands of pages of testimony. This included a careful examination of the Bishops' Pastoral Plan.

On February 4, 1980, E. Willis, writing for The Village Voice, summarized the outcome: "[In] Judge John F. Dooling's 328-page decision [on January 15, 1980], striking down the Hyde Amendment...he demonstrates that the purpose of the Hyde Amendment was never to save the taxpayers' money, keep the government neutral on a delicate moral issue, or distinguish between `necessary' and so-called `convenience' abortions.

"`The amendment,' says Dooling bluntly, `was a ploy by anti-abortion congressmen frustrated in their attempt to pass a Constitutional amendment that would override the Supreme Court's 1973 pro-abortion decision; its purpose was quite simply to circumvent the Court's ruling and prevent as many abortions as possible.' He confirms that right-to-life's main source of energy, organization, and direction has been the Catholic Church, and describes in detail how the movement uses one-issue voting to put pressure on legislators, candidates, and the party organizations that nominate them."

"...The Hyde Amendment, he concludes, is religiously motivated legislation that imposes a particular theological viewpoint, violating dissenters' First Amendment rights."

Dooling documented in his decision that the Hyde Amendment became U.S. law only because of the considerable success enjoyed by the bishops in the implementation of their Pastoral Plan.

The Bishops have periodically updated the verbiage of the Plan. The current version can be found on their website [...].

A November 10, 2009 Huffington Post column headline read, "Do Catholic Bishops Run the United States Government?" [...].

This article appeared just days after the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (UCCB) stunningly intervened in the development of the new Affordable Health Care Act to successfully demand that government-support for abortion services be eliminated from the House bill.

The column also ends with a question, "Why are the Bishops running the country?" Whether one concurs with the extent of power the Bishops wield, it is clear that their Pastoral Plan has had remarkable success in influencing important political and social decisions since its enactment.

Prior to the Super Bowl which was to be played on Sunday, February 7, 2010, I received an email from NARAL-Pro Choice America, which complained that Focus on the Family, a group whose pro life policies are much akin to those expressed in the Catholic Bishops's Pastoral Plan, would be running an anti abortion commercial during the Super Bowl. The spot, which was run, cost $2.5 million which indicates the kind of money focused on taking away women's right to choose.

How this Plan has permeated the hierarchy is well illustrated by my Catholic friend who was deeply involved in the Proposition 187 campaign in California. You recall 187 sought to better enforce our immigration laws, especially as they relate to illegal migrants. My friend was at her church when a priest there blasted supporters of 187, calling them xenophobic, etc. He said so during the mass.

My friend became angry and stood up and told him that she was an immigrant who used to prepare immigration applications. She asked to be given a chance to present an opposing viewpoint! The priest said he did not have the time for such a presentation.

After the mass was over, his... Read more ›