Funds blocked for U.N. agency linked to Chinese program
- Jun 15, 2004 - comment
The Bush administration has once again blocked $34 million designated to a controversial United Nations family planning fund linked to support of China’s coercive population control program.
Secretary of State Colin Powell announced July 16 the money designated by Congress for the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) would be withheld for the third consecutive year. The administration determined contributions to the organization would still violate the Kemp-Kasten amendment, a 1985 measure that bars family planning money from going to any entity that, as determined by the President, “supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.”
The House of Representatives Appropriations Committee voted 32-26 a week earlier against an amendment that would have provided $25 million for the UNFPA in next year’s budget.
Barrett Duke, the ERLC’s vice president for public policy, commended the action but said, “It is disconcerting, however, that 26 members of the committee considered the UNFPA to be an acceptable recipient of $25 million from taxpayers. I wonder if they would have been quite so eager to support UNFPA if it were their wives or daughters who were going to be victimized by the Chinese government’s barbaric population control program. U.S. taxpayer dollars should be used to support life and programs that honor life.”
The UNFPA has denied charges it supports coercive population control, but a U.S. investigative team in 2002 reported the UNFPA provided computers and vehicles to Chinese population-control offices, a State Department spokesman said. An independent investigation in 2001 provided evidence the UNFPA was helping in China’s program. A team from the Population Research Institute, an American pro-life organization, reported witnesses told it the family planning in a UNFPA-run program was involuntary. Coercion, in the form of not only sterilization and abortion but imprisonment and property destruction, existed in the UNFPA program, according to the report.