One More Time: White House Defunds UNFPA for Fifth Straight Year

CONTACT:

Sarah Craven, UNFPA 202-255-7262 Afshin Mohamadi, Office of Rep. Carolyn Maloney 202-225-7944 Deni Robey, Americans for UNFPA 646-526-5321

WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 – For the fifth year in a row, President Bush has overruled Congress to withhold U.S. funding from UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund. Spurious charges from his right wing that the family planning agency is linked to coerced abortions in China have now cost programs helping poor women around the world a total of $161 million.

The funds could have prevented up to 27,000 maternal deaths, four million induced abortions and 385,000 infant and child deaths, or provided contraceptives to prevent up to 12 million unwanted pregnancies, according to UNFPA.

President Bush is reported to have ordered the funds withheld on Wednesday Sept. 13 but did not make the action public until late Friday evening, Sept. 15. “Clearly, this is not a decision the administration can rationalize,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney (NY-14), who has led efforts in Congress to support UNFPA. “Otherwise they would have informed the public.”

Congress has appropriated $22 million to $34 million for UNFPA each year since 2001, but the administration has claimed the so-called Kemp-Kasten amendment has required it to withhold the funds, despite the State Department’s own blue-ribbon investigation in 2001 that flatly rejected any UNFPA involvement in abuses in China.

Anika Rahman, president of Americans for UNFPA, noted that American private philanthropists had recently expanded funding for international family planning programs. “It is a sad commentary on our government’s priorities when private American citizens give more money to global women’s health than the president and Congress,” she said.

The decision “defies both reason and decency” and “forfeits yet another opportunity for the United States to regain its leadership in providing population and family planning assistance to the world’s poorest people,” said Lawrence Smith Jr., president of the Population Institute, based in Washington. “The Bush administration is playing politics at the expense of providing women with the means to take control of their health, their families and their lives.”

CLICK HERE to read statement by R. Nicholas Burns, U.S. Dept. of State

CLICK HERE to read the Press Release from Rep. Carolyn Maloney (NY-14)

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