Dear Colleague:
Yet again, the Bush Administration withheld funds from the UNFPA because
of its support for human rights abuses against pregnant women in China.
And yet again so-called women's advocates complained.
Steven W. Mosher
President
PRI Weekly Briefing
23 September 2005
Vol. 7 / No. 37
Choice or Control?
By Joseph A. D'Agostino
For the fourth year in a row, the Bush Administration made the right
decision last week by withholding funding from the United Nations
Population Fund (UNFPA). Whether you are pro-life or pro-choice, you
should favor this decision. By denouncing it, feminist and "family
planning" organizations have once again shown that they are more
pro-control than they are pro-choice.
By promoting family planning in mainland China and working with the
Chinese government's population control apparatus, UNFPA effectively
supports and subsidizes China's coercive population control program.
Anyone who believes UNFPA's claim that its participation has moderated
China's brutal policies need only read the article "Enemies of the State?"
in the Sep. 19, 2005 edition of Time (www.time.com),
which details "what
appears to be one of the most brutal mass sterilization and abortion
campaigns in years." Officials in Linyi, Shandong Province began a
campaign in March of this year that included forced abortions and forced
sterilizations of thousands of Chinese women so that local officials could
meet their birth limitation goals.
Communist China's massive, systematic, and official restriction of women's
reproductive freedom has drawn little interest from feminist and family
planning groups and officials, some of whom have even praised the coercive
program. In China, women are typically allowed to have only one or two
children, depending on certain circumstances, before facing severe
penalties. The rights of women, and those of their husbands, in this
nation of 1.3 billion people are unimportant to the International Planned
Parenthood Federation (IPPF), the Planned Parenthood Federation of America
(PPFA), and Population Action International (PAI), who are among the
organizations denouncing the administration's decision. Now, $25 million
of the $34 million in funding Congress appropriated for UNFPA will be
redirected by the Bush Administration to children's health programs due to
UNFPA's support for China's coercive system, and the rest will not be
spent. A provision of law called Kemp-Kasten authorizes the
administration to withhold funding from groups that support coercive
population control programs.
"UNFPA is guilty of shamelessly supporting and whitewashing terrible
crimes against humanity, and the United States will have no part in
subsidizing them. . .," said Rep. Chris Smith (R.-N.J.) in response to the
decision. "If only UNFPA would lobby the Chinese government to prohibit
forced abortion as aggressively as they lobby the United States to
overturn the law against coercion, there would be less suffering in China
right now. The international community should be appalled that UNFPA
spends more time and energy demonizing the U.S. for providing funding to
other organizations than it does in criticizing the murderous Chinese
population control program."
Time's excellent piece by Hannah Beech details the horrific campaign
against mothers in Shandong this year. Nine counties were targeted for
birth suppression. The following gives an example of how massive and
brutal the campaign was: "In the Linyi county of Yinan alone, at least
7,000 people were forced to undergo sterilization between March and July,
according to lawyers who spoke with local family-planning officials,"
reported Time. "Several villagers, the lawyers allege, were beaten to
death while under detention for trying to help family members avoid
sterilization."
A local activist named Chen Guangcheng filed a lawsuit against Linyi
officials for their crimes and is now under house arrest for his efforts.
Chen is blind and thus was forbidden from studying law in China, but
educated himself about the law anyway and has become a thorn in the side
of the Communist dictatorship's Linyi branch.
Time demonstrated the power of the press. Just a few days after the
article appeared, Chinese state-owned media announced the arrest of some
birth planning officials in Linyi. Chen's lawsuit and the other evidence
of the goings-on in Linyi didn't interest the Communist apparatchiks.
Apparently, the Time article did.
The other, less brutal methods of persecuting women and their husbands who
want to have more than one or two children officially continue. Fines of
up to ten times the average annual household income in China, loss of
employment, loss of medical benefits, and loss of education benefits for
their children are among the legal penalties for parents exceeding their
child quotas in China. These methods are officially promoted in China at
the highest levels.
Don't count on UNFPA pulling out of China now that its efforts to moderate
China's population control program have been exposed, again, as a failure.
Don't count on feminist and family planning groups to stop agitating for
the U.S. taxpayer to indirectly fund the forcible abortion and
sterilization of Chinese women through the UNFPA. They do not favor
choice for women. The only choice they are interested in is the choice to
control.
Joseph A. D'Agostino is Vice President for Communications at the
Population Research Institute.
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PRI
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Phone: (540) 622-5240 Fax: (540) 622-2728
Email: jad@pop.org
Media Contact: Joseph A. D'Agostino
(540) 622-5240, ext. 204
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The pro-life Population Research Institute is dedicated to ending human
rights abuses committed in the name of "family planning," and to ending
counter-productive social and economic paradigms premised on the myth of
"overpopulation."