Melinda Gates at Stanford: "All lives have equal value"

This is paternalistic, and worse yet, it doesn't work, i.e. rich people "protecting" poor people. What indeed does work is a free market (and that includes a free jobs' market), meaning free access of all (rich and poor) to the benefits of exchanging goods and improving one's life.

What the European Union (and to a lesser extent the USA) does now when it comes to Africa is border-line criminal, what if with Europe's protectionist policies when it comes to its agriculture and its immigrant policy. Imagine if those 2 million kids that get saved by the Gates Foundation instead of being forced to remain in conflict-prone Northern Nigeria or Kenya or Uganda were given the chance to come and work , legally, in Europe. Or what if they'd really have a chance to sell their agricultural goods on the same European market without having to fight countless protectionist measures designed to protect the raising of cows in the French Alps.

(if it matters, I live on the fringes of said European Union, and in my youth I used to live with under $1USD per day for at least a couple of years)

You know what would help those kids a lot more than your medicine? Copies of all existing textbooks in an electronic format and access to all of our patents.

When the polio vaccine was created the inventor refused to get a patent for it, saying no one has the right to own it just like no one has the right to own the sun.

I just find it very hard to support the Gates foundation when I believe that it is playing by the rules to make the founders look and feel good instead of actually challenging laws and cultural assumptions, which it truly should.

Human beings are all equal. Each life is worth just as much as another. This is a fundamental fact of life. Not a single one of us was created in any way different than any other - human procreation itself is the grand equalizer. Where once was a man and/or womans pleasure, is now another man and/or woman. From that source, we are all derived, and thus: all equal from birth.

The 'value' that "Africa" has, is completely and utterly arbitrary. The arbitrary nature is derived entirely from cultural ideas and ideology, which worth is also completely arbitrary, depending on its proponents ability to carry the idea forward. The idea that Africa is 'poor', that Africans are 'uneducated/uneducatable' and so on .. these are just ideas, not based on any real fact.

The fact is, any kid in African Village #21239 has just as much human potential as any other kid in the world.

Life itself, is the rarest substance in the universe. What Life, itself, decides to do about that, is derived from a near-infinite ability for Life, itself, to decide. Once "African Village Kid, Age 9" starts learning to code on the Linux Kernel, for example, the ability to decide, equally as a species, can be observed.

And it is this fact on which 'equality' and 'worth' depend - nothing else.

The page claims -- I don't know whether it's correct, but actually that isn't relevant for this purpose -- that universal access to contraception could prevent about 90k maternal deaths, 640k infant deaths, and 14M unsafe abortions, per year.

The only thing on that page that at all resembles "people are just a drain on natural resources" is this: at the end of the page there are five "Additional benefits for society": reduced HIV transmission, reduced pressure on natural resources, improved education and employment opportunities for women, improved economic growth, improved status for women.

So. They give many reasons for supporting family planning. They say it saves lives and improves health and helps the economy and improves the status of women. Tucked in towards the end is the remark that, by the way, it also reduces "pressure on natural resources".

Do you, really, think it is fair to summarize this by saying they think that "people are just a drain on natural resources"?

Personally, I think it's grotesquely dishonest.