U.N. supporting forced abortions in China?

By WND Staff

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President Bush is now deciding whether to pay out or impound a $34-million grant to the United Nations Population Fund, which pro-life critics say helps China administer a population policy enforced by coercive abortion.

The grant was included in the fiscal 2002 foreign operations appropriation that the president signed on Jan. 10. At the request of Rep. Chris Smith, R.-N.J., Bush has invoked a clause in this law allowing him to delay the grant to determine whether UNFPA still is assisting China’s coercive population program.

Bush pointedly noted this provision when he signed the bill.

“The act provides additional discretion to determine the appropriate level of funding for the United Nations Population Fund,” he said.

To withhold the grant, Bush must make a finding that UNFPA “supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.”

This requirement differs from the so-called Mexico City policy that prohibits U.S. government grants to groups that perform or promote abortions overseas – practices the UNFPA claims it avoids.

Bush originally requested $25 million for UNFPA. Under similar compromise agreements, President Reagan and the senior President Bush denied U.S. tax dollars to UNFPA. President Clinton funded UNFPA for eight straight years – even when the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress.

The U.N. population conference held in Cairo, Egypt, in 1994 published an agenda that stated that “abortion should not be promoted as a method of family planning,” says UNFPA in a recent report.

“UNFPA fully subscribes to this and does not provide support for abortion services,” the agency says. “We work to prevent abortion through family planning and to help countries provide services for women suffering from the complications of unsafe abortion.”

This report, says Smith, was “designed to secure millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars” for UNFPA. It is, he says, “a textbook example of a cover-up.”

Population Research Institute President Steven Mosher told a congressional committee in October that UNFPA “has supported the one-child policy in China from 1979. Currently, under a program begun in 1998, it operates family planning programs in 32 counties, or county-level municipalities, throughout China. The UNFPA claims that in the counties where it is active, reproductive health programs are ‘fully voluntary.'”

But Mosher testified that “we now have documentation, from on the ground in China, that its claims are completely false.”

A PRI-sponsored investigative team spent four days in China.

“On the first day of our investigation, we interviewed women in a family planning clinic about a mile from the county office of the UNFPA,” testified Josephine Guy. “We interviewed a 19-year-old there who told us she was too young to be pregnant according to the unbending family planning policy. While she was receiving a non-voluntary abortion in an adjacent room, her friends told us that she indeed desired to keep her baby, but she had no choice, since the law forbids.

“Through discreet contact made with local officials, we located the County Government Building,” testified Guy. “Within this building, we located the Office of Family Planning. And within the Office of Family Planning, we located the UNFPA office. Through local officials, we learned the UNFPA works in and through this Office of Family Planning. We photographed the UNFPA office desk, which faces – in fact touches – a desk of the Chinese Office of Family Planning.”


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