LIFE DIGEST: Bush administration again blocks funds for UNFPA
- Jul 10, 2008 - comment
The Bush administration announced June 27 it has refused for the seventh consecutive year to forward federal money to a controversial United Nations family planning fund linked to the support of China’s coercive population control program.
Congress had designated nearly $40 million for the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), but the State Department again determined, as it has every year since 2002, a grant to the organization would violate a 1985 law. That measure, known as the Kemp-Kasten amendment, prohibits family planning money from going to any entity that, as decided by the President, “supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.”
During the last seven years, the Bush administration has withheld nearly $235 million from the UNFPA based on its findings.
Officials in many parts of China have practiced a forced family planning program for nearly three decades in an attempt to curb the birth rate in the world’s most populous country. A law codifying the policy throughout China went into effect in 2002, although the national government forbids physical coercion for abortion or sterilization.
The policy limits couples in urban areas to one child and those in rural areas to two, if the first is a girl. Penalties for violations of the policy have included fines, arrests and the destruction of homes, as well as forced abortion and sterilization. Infanticide, especially of females, also has been reported.
The United States has regularly urged China to eliminate coercive abortion and sterilization, and it has called on the UNFPA to redesign its programs so it could receive U.S. funds, according to a written statement from the State Department. “Since no key changes have taken place, these restrictions are being applied again,” said Tom Casey, a State Department spokesman.
Richard Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, applauded the action. “All pro-life Americans ought to be grateful that in spite of the most intense pressures, both external and domestic, the Bush administration has once again held the line in not allowing tax dollars to be used to help support the coercive abortion policies of the People’s Republic of China,” Land said.
The amendment is named after Republican Reps. Jack Kemp of New York and Robert Kasten of Wisconsin, who sponsored the measure.
Tiller escapes indictment by grand jury
A Kansas grand jury has declined to file charges against the country’s best known, late-term abortion doctor after a six-month investigation.
A citizen-initiated grand jury in Sedgwick County adjourned July 2 without indicting George Tiller for performing illegal, late abortions, according to The Wichita Eagle. Tiller’s clinic, Women’s Health Care Services, advertises on its website it has “more experience in late abortion services over 24 weeks than anyone else currently practicing in the Western Hemisphere, Europe and Australia.”
The grand jury said in a written statement it found “questionable late-term abortions” performed by Tiller but said state law was confusing, The Eagle reported. Kansas law bars abortions after 22 weeks’ gestation on babies considered viable unless two doctors decide continuing the pregnancy would cause “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function,” according to the newspaper.
“As the current law is written and interpreted by the Kansas Supreme Court, late-term abortions will continue for many circumstances that would seem, as a matter of common interpretation, not to meet the definition of ‘substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function,’” the grand jury’s statement said, The Eagle reported.
Mary Kay Culp, Kansans for Life’s executive director, criticized District Attorney Nola Foulston for inadequate guidance to the grand jury. “The law doesn’t need to be changed. The enforcers of the law need to be changed,” she said, according to the newspaper.
Kansas permits citizens to call grand juries by means of a petition drive. Pro-life advocates led the campaign that resulted in a grand jury to investigate Tiller.
In a different case, Tiller still faces a charge of failing to obtain another independent doctor’s opinion before performing a late-term abortion, The Eagle reported.
German woman not ill but chooses assisted suicide
A 79-year-old German woman recently chose assisted suicide not because she was either sick or nearing death but because she feared living in a nursing home.
Bettina Schardt, 79, a resident of the Bavarian city of Wurzburg, took her life June 28 with the assistance of Roger Kusch, a well known assisted suicide promoter and a former government official, according to The New York Times.
Government officials decried Kusch’s counseling of Schardt before she consumed the lethal drugs.
“What Mr. Kusch did was particularly awful,” said Beate Merk, the justice minister of the German state of Bavaria, The Times reported. “This woman had nothing wrong other than her fear. He didn’t offer her any other options.”
Merk declared her intention Bavaria would not become another Switzerland, which permits assisted suicide. Almost 500 Germans have gone to Switzerland in the last decade to kill themselves with the aid of a Swiss organization, according to The Times.
“We want to make it illegal for people here to offer ‘suicide by reservation,’” Merk said. “That is inhumane.”
Kusch, however, proclaimed his resolve to help others commit suicide. His offer “is to allow people to die in their own beds,” Kusch said, The Times reported. “That is the wish of most people, and now it is possible in Germany.”
Further Learning
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