Bush Administration Defunds UNFPA

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.

Lost in the furnace-hot rhetoric were two truths: (1) that for more than two decades the UNFPA has been a vocal cheerleader and facilitator for China's brutally coercive birth-quota program, which relies heavily on coerced abortion, and (2) that not a penny was lost but merely redirected.

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.

This evidence and other testimony regarding systematic coercion in China was presented at a hearing of the House International Relations Committee on October 17, 2001, posted at www.house.gov/international_relations/fullhear.htm

(see especially www.house. gov/international_relations/guy1017.htm). Moreover, a report by three British members of Parliament who traveled to China in April found that even in the 32 counties "where UNFPA insists that only voluntarism exists," Chinese citizens "still have to pay a 'social compensation' payment if they have more than one or two children. . . . Chinese officials confirmed that the compensation payment is set at a level which most families would find extremely difficult to pay. It therefore acts as a pretty powerful incentive to conform. This is a form of coercion." (The British team recommended continued funding of the UNFPA by the United Kingdom, but its observations provide additional evidence that the Kemp-Kasten Amendment would be violated by U.S. funding of the UNFPA.)

As a result of this and other evidence, the Bush Administration determined that the UNFPA remains in violation of the Kemp-Kasten anti-coercion law. The amendment prohibits giving U.S. "population assistance" funds to "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." It was the UNFPA's extensive involvement in China's coercive program that prompted the enactment of the Kemp-Kasten Amendment. In 1985, the Reagan Administration determined that the UNFPA was in violation of the law.

Unsurprisingly, that determination was challenged in a federal lawsuit by the Population Institute, a U.S. advocacy group receiving substantial funding from the UNFPA. But the following year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld the cutoff.

In a ruling written for a unanimous three-judge panel, Judge Abner Mikva upheld the Reagan Administration determination that "the UNFPA's activities in China aid the aspects of China's program that Congress condemned." All this changed in 1992 with the election of Bill Clinton. The Clinton Administration essentially refused to enforce the Kemp-Kasten anti-coercion law.

Nevertheless, the law has been renewed each year by Congress. It flatly prohibits funding of any organization that either (1) "supports" or (2) "participates in the management of" a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.

"In China, government officials continue to subject women and their families to crushing fines and employment sanctions, and even destroy their homes, for becoming pregnant without government permission," said NRLC's Johnson. "U.S. law prohibits funding an agency that in any way participates in such a coercive program."

For two decades, top UNFPA officials have vigorously defended China's program against its critics, and have held China's program up as a model for other developing nations. For example, UNFPA Executive Director Nafis Sadik told a congressional briefing on May 24, 1989, "The UNFPA firmly believes, and so does the government of the People's Republic of China, that their program is a totally voluntary program."

NRLC takes no position on federal funding of contraceptive services. Nor does NRLC take any position on what the funding level for the population assistance program should be - - as long as President Bush's "Mexico City Policy" and the Kemp-Kasten Amendment remain in effect.

NRLC is strongly opposed to any weakening of these two policies, which would result in resumption of U.S. taxpayer support for organizations which promote abortion and even programs of coercive abortion.