For the past year, publicly-funded health providers in Oregon have vied for financial incentives by questioning and advising low-income women on what contraceptives they use and their plans for having children. The Oregon Health Authority says the first-in-the-nation practice will improve care and cut costs. The pro-life director for Oregon’s Knights of Columbus calls it population control.“It is unfortunate that women who are not perceived as rich enough to have children are being targeted,” says Bill Diss, a member of Holy Rosary Parish.In Oregon, 16 groups of health providers have formed to care for low-income patients using Medicaid. Called coordinated care organizations, they include Health Share of Oregon and Family Care, both in Portland, Trillium Community Health Plan in Lane County, Willamette Valley Community Health in Marion and Polk counties and Jackson Care Connect in Jackson County. Almost a million patients are enrolled in Oregon’s coordinated care organizations.The organizations receive bonus money from the state if they meet quotas in areas such as teen doctor visits, substance abuse treatment, improved access to care and conversion to electronic records.New for 2015 was “effective contraceptive use” by women.The state focuses on women ages 15 to 50 who are not pregnant and ask what contraceptives they use and the result. When enough women enrolled in the coordinated care organizations end up using contraceptives effectively, that becomes a step toward a boost of government money for the group.The Oregon Health Authority has long urged health providers to increase women’s access to contraception and to “enhance partnerships” with family planning clinics like Planned Parenthood.Diss, who came to prominence as chief protester against a new Planned Parenthood clinic in Northeast Portland, says Oregon has a history of attempting to engineer the population. He points to a state eugenics board that between the 1920s and 1980s approved sterilizations of almost 3,000 people who were mentally ill, had epilepsy, had committed crimes, or were homosexual. Also sterilized were residents of reform schools and girls who were considered promiscuous. Gov. John Kitzhaber issued an apology in 2002.Diss says the new contraceptive metric is a descendent of such policy.“For some reason many rich people believe it is their duty to control population of certain classes,” he says, citing donations by Clarence Gamble, of Procter & Gamble, to control population among poor blacks in the South, a project begun by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. Diss says that today, the Buffet Foundation and Bill and Melinda Gates have contributed heavily to Planned Parenthood, which in the past decade has located clinics in areas with a large black populations, like Northeast Portland.Diss rues the fact that a majority of his fellow Catholics probably will allow such policies to carry on. “In 2014 and 2012 Catholics in Oregon could have easily signed petitions to allow measures to have been placed on the ballot to stop state funding of abortions for people on Oregon's Health Plan,” he says. “If Catholics do not care about millions being spent on aborting the ‘not so rich people’ of Oregon, will they care about harmful contraceptives being forced on these citizens?”Susan Muskett, senior legislative counsel for the National Right to Life Committee, writes that the reproduction of Oregon women seeking aid is now the government’s business. In an article on the Witherspoon Institute’s Public Discourse website, Muskett says the “invasive questioning” of low-income women will violate privacy and religious freedom.“Faithful Catholic women who seek government aid in Oregon will find themselves bombarded by intrusive questions about their family planning decisions and will be lectured to use forms of contraception they believe to be gravely and intrinsically immoral,” Muskett writes. Recognizing the class and race implications of the Oregon policy, Muskett says other states nevertheless are likely to follow Oregon’s lead.