This Year at Least, the U.S. Will Not Fund Organizations that Support Forced Abortions

PRI Weekly Briefing
9 July 2004
Vol. 6 / No. 24

Today, the House Appropriations Committee struck a blow against coercive population control programs. By refusing, on a vote of 32 to 26, to refund the UN Population Fund, the Committee in effect criticized China’s forced abortion regime and the organization that supports it. [1]


Even Secretary of State Colin Powell, after reviewing information provided by Population Research Institute, concluded on 21 July, 2002, that “the PRC has in place a regime of severe penalties on women who have unapproved births. This regime plainly operates to coerce pregnant women to have abortions in order to avoid the penalties and therefore amounts to a 'program of coercive abortion.'" "...UNFPA's support of, and involvement in, China's population-planning activities allows the Chinese government to implement more effectively its program of coercive abortion.
Therefore, it is not permissible to continue funding UNFPA at this time."

Nita Lowey was proposing an amendment that would eviscerate a 19-year-old human rights law—the Kemp-Kasten Amendment—that allows the President to prevent US funding from going to any organization that supports or participates in the management of a coercive abortion program.

The committee was right to reject it. Why should the U.S. abandon its human rights principles to support an organization that refuses to withdraw from a program of forced abortion? We should be pressing the UNFPA to conform to human rights standards instead of lowering those standards to accommodate a brutal and oppressive one-child policy and the U.N. population group that supports it.

UNFPA continues to make wild and unsubstantiated claims about the harm that will be done to “women” if it doesn’t get its money. The truth is that it is intrusive population control programs themselves that cause harm to women and children, while siphoning funds away from real health care needs, such as AIDS, malaria, and other infectious diseases.

I close by quoting Dongfan Ma, who was forced to have an abortion in China and now lives in the United States in freedom, "Through this denial of UNFPA funds by President Bush and supported by a bipartisan group of US Congressional Representatives, conscience and human nature will triumph over barbaric policies imposed on families in China."


Endnotes
[1] The “yes” votes (26), in favor of funding the UNFPA were Sanford, Boyd, Clyburn, Cramer, DeLauro, Dicks, Edwards, Farr, Frelinghuysen, Hoyer, Jackson, Kaptur, Patrick Kennedy, Kilpatrick, Kirk, Lowey, Moran, Obey, Olver, Pastor, Price, Rothman, Roybal-Alard, Sabo, Serrano, Visclosky.

The no votes (32), against funding the UNFPA, were Aderholt, Berry, Bonilla, Crenshaw, Cunningham, Doolittle, Emerson, Goode, Granger, Hobson, Istook, Kingston, Knollenberg, Kolbe, Latham, Jerry Lewis, Mollohan, Nethercutt, Northrup, John Peterson, Regula, Rogers, Sherwood, Simpson, Tiahrt, Vitter, Walsh, Wamp, Dave Weldon, Wicker, Wolf, Bill Young.

Absent were (7) Culberson, Fattah, Hinchey, LaHood, Murtha, Sweeney, Taylor



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