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Bush Withdraws US Support for UN Population Fund
President Ignores Own Expert Panel; Women's Health and Lives At Risk
July 22, 2002 - Bowing to pressure from extreme anti-family planning organizations and ignoring its own expert panel, the Bush Administration announced today that the United States would withdraw all support from the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). The decision, announced from the State Department but clearly made by the President and his political advisors at the White House, will have serious repercussions for international family planning efforts and the prospects for women’s health around the world.
For months, anti-family planning organizations, led by Population Research Institute, an obscure, virulent anti-family planning group, have charged that UNFPA is complicit in Chinese coercive family planning efforts that are contrary to international norms and basic human rights. To investigate these charges, the Bush Administration sent its own three-member team to China. The Administration’s expert panel determined that UNFPA does not directly or indirectly support coercive activities in China. Unsatisfied with this outcome and attempting to appease a narrow political constituency, the Administration has concocted a convoluted rationale to justify its decision, which blatantly contradicts its own recent initiative to support China in anti-AIDS efforts.
Quotes in various articles by Administration officials have attempted to cloak the unfounded decision on the basis of opposition to taxpayer funding of abortion. But US law has prohibited such funding since the early 1970s and UNFPA does not provide funds for abortion services, nor does it support abortion as a method of family planning. Moreover, the Administration’s own team, recent State Department Human Rights reports and a blue-ribbon panel sent to China from the United Kingdom have found that UNFPA is a force for voluntarism, human rights and progress in China.
The Administration’s decision to defund UNFPA also represents an acrobatic flip-flop.
The Administration’s decision to cut or eliminate UNFPA funding represents a startling reversal not only of legislation passed unanimously in the US Senate and by a 3-to-1 margin in the House, but also of previous Administration policy. In his first budget proposal to Congress in early 2001, President Bush requested $25 million in funding for UNFPA. The Administration also approved the release of $21.5 million in fiscal 2001 funds for UNFPA after determining that UNFPA was in compliance with US law. In May, Secretary of State Colin Powell testified to Congress that UNFPA “provides critical population assistance to developing countries” (testimony before the House Foreign Operations Subcommittee, May 10, 2001). Again in late 2001, the Administration signaled its support for UNFPA’s life-saving work by providing $600,000 in funding to support the agency’s work in support the health of Afghan refugees.
The loss of U.S. funding is already having a significant impact on UNFPA activities. Recently, UNFPA said that the delay in US funding was causing cuts in personnel and programs. UNFPA estimates that the decision to cut off funding could lead to as many as “2 million unwanted pregnancies, 800,000 induced abortions, 4700 maternal deaths and 77000 infant and child deaths.” Moreover, the decision will impact women’s health and family planning efforts all around the world. UNFPA operates family planning programs in more than 140 countries around the world, versus the approximately 80 countries with programs operated by the US Agency for International Development, which will receive the funds intended by Congress for UNFPA.
UNFPA’s program in China, approved by the Fund's Executive Board of
36-member States, adheres strictly to the highest standards of voluntarism and human rights. At the insistence of UNFPA, Chinese authorities have agreed to abolish family planning quotas and targets in the 32 Chinese counties in which it operates. An independent fact-finding mission in October 2001 found that found that the Fund's program in China is playing an important catalytic role in the reform of reproductive health services from an administrative approach to a client-oriented approach that promotes informed choice of contraceptive methods through information, education and counseling.
The positive impact of UNFPA’s effort in China was independently documented in the State Department’s 2001 Human Rights Report on China, which found that:
“Some counties have informed the general public about the UNFPA program and have eliminated the system of strict, government-assigned birth quotas (allowing couples to choose without authorization when to have their first child); other counties have not yet done so, or have only begun to do so. In Sichuan Province, a couple can legally have a second child without applying for permission if they meet all the requirements; however, regulations and implementation vary from town to town. The Government has welcomed foreign delegations to inspect the UNFPA project counties. Although access to these areas has varied from province to province, foreign diplomats visited several counties during the year.”
To learn more about the overwhelming editorial support in favor of continued UNFPA funding, click here. Similarly, you can click here to learn about broad, bipartisan Congressional support in favor of the immediate release of UNFPA funds.
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