Father Wilson Miscamble published an excellent article in First Things Wednesday in which he made clear the stakes of the University of Notre Dame’s decision to appoint a woman named Susan Ostermann as head of the university’s Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies.
Ostermann is a pro-abortion activist of the most radical variety. Her rather colorful arguments in favor of killing preborn children include that pregnancy and childbirth amount to sexual abuse. Yes, really. And, no, Ostermann is not talking about cases in which a child is conceived in rape. She simply means it’s sexual abuse for a woman to be pregnant with a baby she does not want.
“Forced pregnancy and childbirth is sexual abuse. Both require the sexual reproductive capacity of human bodies,” Ostermann wrote in a piece for Salon. “Being forced to provide that capacity, and to endure the physical intrusion and penetration of the body that both pregnancy and childbirth require, is nothing less than sexual abuse.”
Of course, that makes absolutely zero sense and functions only to distort what sexual abuse actually constitutes. But it is far from the only time Ostermann has willfully warped reality to comply with her own deranged morality.
In a twist of words that Father Miscamble deemed “Orwellian,” Ostermann claimed that access to abortion is “[c]onsistent with integral human development.”
“Abortion access is freedom-enhancing, in the truest sense of the word,” Ostermann wrote for Salon. “Consistent with integral human development that emphasizes social justice and human dignity, abortion access respects the inherent dignity of women, their freedom to make choices and to evaluate medical and other risks associated with pregnancy and childbirth.”
As Father Miscamble noted, Ostermann’s argument here attempts to “co-opt Catholic social teaching.” Few things could be more pernicious than utilizing the framework of Catholic thought to argue that young children ought to be summarily murdered. Yet Ostermann has now been elevated to lead an institute at a Catholic university that claims to serve as a moral voice for justice in the world.
What are university leaders expecting? That Ostermann will use her perch as administrative head to openly advocate the mass killing of innocent children under the guise of Catholic language? Or that she will suddenly shut up? Father Miscamble writes that the argument being made in defense of Ostermann’s appointment is that she will be able to separate her “personal” views in support of killing unborn children from her leadership of the Liu Institute.
Of course, if a professor regularly argued in national publications, say, that Tutsis should be rounded up and shot, or that Armenians should be forced on death marches, no Catholic university would be happy to raise that person to a position of leadership under the justification that such advocacy was just a “personal” perspective separable from institutional leadership. Only when it comes to children in the womb is this basic moral logic suspended. This is of course rooted in the University of Notre Dame’s failure to fully recognize the humanity of unborn children and the absolute evil inherent in killing them or upholding laws that support their murder.
The Catholic Church’s magisterial teaching does not flinch from upholding that abortion is murdering a baby. In Pope Leo XIV’s Jan. 9 address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See, he made this clear again, saying, “The primary objective must remain the protection of every unborn child and the effective and concrete support of every woman so that she is able to welcome life.”
Father Miscamble brings our attention to a particularly insidious line item on Susan Ostermann’s résumé: her role as a “consultant” for the Population Council, an organization that played a major role in advancing the neo-Malthusian view that government intervention is necessary to prevent catastrophic population growth, a perspective that led to the massive human rights abuses and large-scale forced abortions that resulted from China’s one-child policy. This is especially important given that Ostermann’s involvement in such an organization will compromise her role leading an institute focused on the study of Asia.
I looked into the Population Council, and it’s not just that the organization advanced the arguments leveraged by the Chinese Communist Party to carry out its regime of forced abortions, sterilizations, and child kidnapping. No, the Population Council in fact publicly collaborated with China’s State Family Planning Commission, the government agency charged with enforcing the one-child policy. The Population Council is also documented to have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to China for its population control measures in the 1980s.
This is of course something that the Population Council now wants to memory-hole, now that the human rights violations of China’s evil one-child policy are widely known. But the evidence is still present.
In a 2015 dissertation by a woman named Diana Szatkowski, who had a “consultancy” with the Population Council, Szatkowski wrote that the Population Council was involved in “providing technical assistance to the State Family Planning Commission.” Szatkowski described working with a man employed by the Population Council, Baochang Gu, who had previously been the deputy director for the research arm of the Chinese State Family Planning Commission. She described how her work for the Population Council involved meeting people “at all levels of [China’s] population program,” including the minister-in-charge of the State Family Planning Commission, Zhang Weiqing, otherwise known as the man engineering this whole evil project.
Further, a 1999 report on an international symposium on China’s population control measures documents the damning remarks of the vice president of the Population Council’s international programs division, George Brown, to an audience that included Chinese officials orchestrating the one-child policy. (The conference itself was sponsored by China’s State Family Planning Commission.) According to the report, Brown used his speech to draw attention to the Population Council’s “early work in support of China’s family planning program, such as support for biomedical research, contraceptive development and introduction,” as well as the Population Council’s continuing work in “helping to develop evaluation systems (including new indicators of program performance) and improve information exchange.” The report goes on to say, “The Population Council looks forward to continuing its collaboration with the SFPC.”
Additionally, a report from the Center for International Research at the U.S. Bureau of the Census documented how the Population Council and other organizations “contributed money to China for population and family planning.” The Census Bureau calculated that the Population Council gave China over $1 million for this purpose between 1985 and 1989.
The Population Council is now careful to say that its efforts to increase the worldwide use of contraceptives ensure that such uptake is “voluntary.” It has also focused even more on abortion. In 2000, it secured FDA approval for mifepristone, the abortion drug. It also celebrates people such as Rebecca Gomperts, an abortion activist who is seeking to enable every woman to be able to easily murder her unborn baby from the comfort of her own home.
Susan Ostermann’s public collaboration with an organization complicit in the grave human rights abuses involved in the enforcement of China’s one-child policy ought to disqualify her from leading a Catholic university’s study of Asia. As China’s stunning population decline becomes a more critical factor in the region, the fact that Ostermann is discredited from speaking to this issue and its authoritarian roots will be increasingly problematic.
Making everything worse is that Ostermann doesn’t see just how discredited she is on this issue. In her Salon piece in which she likened pregnancy to sexual abuse, Ostermann wrote, “In no other circumstance can the state legally force a human being to endure sexual abuse — the violation of their sexual autonomy and bodily integrity.” If she wants to talk about state violations of sexual autonomy and bodily integrity, we can easily turn to China’s forced abortions, forced sterilizations, insertion of IUDs without consent, and kidnappings of children born “illegally.”
Of course, Ostermann’s advocacy for the killing of unborn children should be the death knell for her promotion. But if the university doesn’t care that she spends plenty of hours advocating for killing of unborn children, her involvement in the Population Council should be sufficient reason for not employing her at all.
Father Miscamble said it best. “If this sad appointment is allowed to stand, the hollowness of the claim that Catholic character informs all Notre Dame’s endeavors will be painfully exposed.”
