Bush Administration Defunds UNFPA.(George W. Bush)(Brief Article)

Nobody said it would be easy. When President George W. Bush announced that his administration would deny U.S. funding ($34 million) to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and redirect those funds to other programs, there began an avalanche of criticism that falsely insisted that the President did not care about the lives and health of women in the developing world.

On July 22, the Bush Administration announced its conclusion that the UNFPA's support for China's program violates the Kemp-Kasten anti-coercion law, which has been in effect since 1985. In response, pro-abortion Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) made it known that he will seek to win approval of language weakening the Kemp-Kasten law, as part of the foreign aid appropriations bill that Congress will act on later this year.

NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson told NRL News, "Top UNFPA officials have been completely cozy with China's birth-quota bosses. For 20 years, UNFPA leaders have consistently praised China's program and attacked its critics."

As one Bush Administration official put it, "If there is a single principle that unifies Americans with conflicting views on the subject, it is the conviction that no woman should be forced to have an abortion. ... Regardless of the modest size of UNFPA's budget in China or any benefits its programs provide, 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."

Writing in The Weekly Standard, J. Bottum reminded readers that the UNFPA's involvement has not been incidental or accidental.

"Indeed, the UNFPA's record through the years shows an institutionalized bias in favor of brute force measures. Though official UNFPA policy prohibits the promotion of abortion, over 17 percent of the fund's annual spending is passed through to non-governmental organizations that have no such restriction. Such organizations, the former director of UNFPA, Nafis Sadik, has explained admiringly, `are willing to take risks that governments certainly won't, even U.N. organizations won't, but [national governments and the U.N.] can finance.' As all parties to this debate well understand, the UNFPA is part of an interlocking directorate of national and international organizations devoted to abortion, contraception, and sterilization."

Apologists prefer to focus attention on 32 Chinese counties (out of about 2,800) in which the UNFPA says that China's government "has agreed to lift" birth quotas. But last year a private team of investigators associated with the Population Research Institute (PRI) traveled in one of these counties - - without government officials witnessing their interviews - - and documented that local officials were employing destruction of homes, incarceration of family members, and other forms of coercive pressure on women who were pregnant outside of the quota system.