POPULATION-U.S.: Bush Denies Money to U.N. Population Fund

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jul 22 2002 (IPS) - In another apparent bow to the Christian Right, U.S. President George W. Bush has denied 34 million dollars in funding approved by Congress for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) because of its presence in China.

The decision, which had been rumoured for several weeks, was announced by the State Department on Monday.

A recent U.S. delegation to China found no evidence that UNFPA has “knowingly supported or participated in” programmes of coercive abortions or sterilizations. But because UNFPA worked with Chinese state agencies in some counties where such practices persist, all U.S. funding had to be cut, according to Bush spokesman Richard Boucher.

The decision was based on UNFPA’s support for specific Chinese agencies that oversee coercive programmes, he added. “Because money is fungible,” Boucher said, “we won’t be giving our money to a U.N. programme that then gives money to Chinese agencies that then carry out these coercive abortion programmes.”

A 1985 law bans U.S. aid money from “any organization or program which, as determined by the President of the United States, supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization in the People’s Republic of China.”

“U.S. funds for family planning and reproductive health will be spent through the United States Agency for International Development programmes and not through UNFPA,” said Boucher.

Reaction from women’s and population groups was immediate and harsh, particularly because the State Department delegation’s report, while noting that “coercive elements in law and in practice” exist in some counties where UNFPA is involved, exonerated the agency and called for Congress’ decision to be respected.

“The administration’s own delegation recommends that the U.S. contribution to UNFPA be released,” said Terri Bartlett of Population Action International (PAI), a research and advocacy group here.

“It’s domestic politics that has prevented UNFPA from receiving its 34 million dollars, and it is the world’s women – and their families – who will pay the price.”

UNFPA director Thoraya Obaid was also uncharacteristically direct. “UNFPA has not, does not and will not ever condone or support coercive activities of any kind, anywhere,” she said. “Women and children will die because of this decision.”

She noted that in past years, Washington has simply withheld from its contribution the amount of money the UNFPA spends in China, then provided the balance to the agency for its work in other countries.

“We could have done the same this year, which could have allowed U.S. taxpayer dollars to provide life-saving services in the other 141 countries where we work.”

USAID currently has population-related programmes in only 60 countries.

Earlier this month, a British parliamentary delegation, which included an anti-abortion Conservative Party Member of Parliament, released its own report based on an eight-day investigation in China.

It not only found no evidence to substantiate the charges, but also concluded that UNFPA’s work there was playing “an important catalytic role in the reform of reproductive health services in China”.

Bush himself had asked Congress to approve 25 million dollars for UNFPA in his budget proposal last year, and Secretary of State Colin Powell explicitly endorsed its “invaluable work through its programmes in maternal and child health care, voluntary family planning, screening for reproductive tract cancers, breast feeding promotion and HIV prevention,” in Congressional testimony earlier this year.

In November, the administration gave UNFPA 600,000 dollars for its work in Afghanistan.

Powell also personally worked out a compromise late last year between anti-abortion forces in the House of Representatives who opposed any UNFPA funding and a Senate majority who felt that 25 million dollars was not enough.

The deal that finally broke the impasse, which had held up the entire 2002 foreign aid bill for months, called for Washington to provide up to 34 million dollars to UNFPA this year.

But pressed by some House Republicans and Christian Right groups, Bush froze the money pending the delegation’s report on charges that UNFPA money was financing coercive abortions and sterilisation in China.

Those charges originated with a group called Population Research Institute (PRI), a spin-off of an extremist anti-abortion group called Human Life International (HLI).

HLI’s notoriously anti-Semitic founder, Benedictine priest Paul Marx, once blamed American Jews for “establishing and defending the efficient destruction of more than 30 million pre-born children in this country”, according to a recent investigative article by Internet magazine Salon.com.

The same article found that PRI’s director, anthropologist Steven Mosher, has written a number of anti-Beijing books, including ‘Hegemon: China’s Plan to Dominate Asia and the World’, and has denounced the UNFPA as part of a “New World Order” conspiracy.

Mosher was dismissed from Stanford University for “illegal and seriously unethical conduct” regarding his fieldwork on family planning in southern China in the 1980s.

UNFPA officials have warned that the loss of U.S. funding could undermine the agency’s ability to prevent 800,000 abortions and the deaths of 4,700 mothers and 77,000 children under the age of five over the next year.

“Millions of poor women and children’s lives are now at risk for the sake of a handful of anti-family planning extremists,” said Peter Kostmayer, a former seven-term U.S. congressman and currently head of Population Connection, a research and advocacy group here.

“The president had the opportunity to reject the extremists and put the weight of his office behind programmes that are actually delivering on his vision for improved human dignity. Now we know where he really stands,” Kostmayer added.

The decision could also jeopardise the agency’s international AIDS prevention programme, which has received high marks from public-health experts. The total UNFPA annual budget, which relies almost entirely on voluntary contributions, comes to under 300 million dollars, of which less than two percent is spent in China.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson last month announced a grant of almost 15 million dollars for China’s health ministry as part of a larger bilateral programme to help it fight the spread of HIV/AIDS.

The health ministry houses the state family planning commission, which not only has acted as a key contact point for UNFPA programmes in China, but has also just been named to play a lead role in the country’s anti-HIV/AIDS campaign.

Boucher declined to speculate on the fate of those funds. “The requirements of the law,” he said, “are quite clearly directed at population programmes. U.S. anti-AIDS assistance “will be something that will have to be looked at as the money is spent.”