Dear Colleague:

This Friday, July 9, the Appropriations Committee of the U.S.
House of Representatives will vote on an amendment that would force
President Bush to hand over tens of millions of dollars to the United
Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).  These population controllers help to
manage China's one-child policy, with its attendant abuses of forced
abortion and sterilization.  The UNFPA should not receive one penny of
U.S. funds.

Steven W. Mosher
President

PRI Weekly Briefing
6 July 2004
Vol. 6 / No. 23

China's Forced Abortion Machinery Grinds On-UNFPA Disinformation Campaign
Continues-US Funding Should Not.


Harry Wu, head of the Laogai Research Institute, sent me a summary of a
family planning directive recently issued in China.  The directive comes
from Jieshi, a Guangdong provincial town not far from the area where I did
field research in 1979-80, and just a hop, skip, and a jump down the road
from a UNFPA "model family planning program" in operation since 1999.  I'd
like to share it with you.
 
Jieshi itself is no mean place, having a population of some 200,000, and
it abuts the edge of the larger city of Lufeng.  I tell you this to let
you know that Jieshi is no provincial backwater laboring under the misrule
of a petty tyrant, but is part of a larger metropolis in the most
modernizing part of China.  What is happening there is not the exception,
but the rule.  The continuing tyranny of the one-child policy is national,
not local.
 
So just what does Directive No. 43 of the Jieshi Party Committee, dated 26
August 2003, say?  It announces the beginning of the "Autumn 2003 Planned
Births Campaign," and lays out an incredibly detailed plan--complete with
quotas for abortions--for its prosecution.  During the 35 days of the
campaign, the directive specifies that 818 women must be fitted with IUDs,
1,369 women must be sterilized, and 271 women must be aborted.
Incredibly, the target for abortions is broken down even further, into
early- and late-term abortions.  The directive demands exactly163
early-term abortions (duo tai) and exactly 108 late-term abortions (yin
chan).
 
Like all such campaigns, the Autumn 2003 Campaign is to be unleashed on
the population without warning, so that there is no time for women to
flee.  The campaign was to begin the same day that the directive was
released, and was to run for precisely 35 days, ending on September 30,
2003.
 
All of the residents of Jieshi are asked to be vigilant and to denounce
all "unlawful" pregnancies and births.  But, as if admitting that a
resentful population will not cooperate with the authorities, the
directive put heavy pressure on officials to make sure they achieve their
numerical targets.  Officials at every level must report numbers of
abortions, etc., up the chain of command every five days, and must
evaluate the performance of their subordinates every 10 days.  Party
secretaries and village heads who fail to meet their quotas will have
their salaries cut by half, while family planning officials directly in
charge of the program will forfeit their entire salary.
 
Perhaps the most chilling sentence in the entire directive warns officials
that "there must be a 100 percent success rate."  This means that every
single woman who has been singled out for forced contraception,
sterilization, and abortion, must in fact be contracepted, sterilized, and
aborted, without exception.  No one must be allowed to escape the family
planning dragnet.
 
Jieshi officials are exhorted to "overcome difficulties with creativity,
so that the Autumn Campaign can be successfully carried out, and the way
prepared for the annual population control plan."  This last is a
reference to China's national system of targets and quotas, which is the
driving force behind abuses in Jieshi elsewhere.
 
What does all this have to do with the UN Population Fund?  A lot, as it
turns out.  In recent years the UNFPA has defended its long-running
involvement in the one-child policy on the grounds that China is gradually
moving away from forced abortion by quota to a system of fines based on
the "social cost" of additional children.  They point to the passage of
the "Population and Birth Control Law" on 1 September 2002, as evidence of
their influence in moderating the more Draconian elements of the program.
At present, they are busily assuring everyone that, as The New York Times
puts it, that the Chinese government is merely "taxing parents who have
more than one child."[1]
 
The example of Jieshi suggests the new law is little more than
windowdressing, designed to placate China's (and the UNFPA's) foreign
critics.  The reality is that those who become pregnant outside the
national plan are still rounded up and aborted, and that those who manage
to have two children are rounded up and sterilized, and that newlywed
women are forced to wear IUDs until the state decides that it is time for
them to have their child.  This is the way things have been done in China
for the past 25 years.  It is the way things are done still.
 
The UNFPA smoothly suggests that it has detected in China a "shift from an
administrative family planning approach to an integrated, client-oriented
reproductive health approach."  Tell that to the 271 women of Jieshi who
were forcibly aborted a few months ago.
 
The House of Representatives should tell the UNFPA to take a hike.

Endnotes

[1] Christopher Marquis, "U.S. is accused of trying to isolate U.N.
population unit," The New York Times, p. A3.

n.b. The Times, in the same article, called Population Research Institute
the "group leading the fight against the fund."  On that point, at least,
they were not mistaken.

 
© 2004 Population Research Institute. Permission to reprint granted.
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