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reporter quite familiar with the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) says
he has never talked to a UNFPA spokesman without eventually being
lied to. The recent discovery by the National Catholic Register
of a report UNFPA commissioned two years ago that has never seen
the light of day lends credence to the claim. (UNFPA's spokesman
claims it doesn't exist.)
The Virginia-based
Population Research Institute sent investigators to Peru in 1998
to discover if President Fujimori's UNFPA-funded population programs
were coercive. PRI investigators, including U.S. House investigator
Joseph Rees, returned with horrific stories of women having to bargain
away their fertility for bags of groceries. The stories were so
horrible that the House convened hearings and the usually population-control-friendly
U.S. Agency for International Development curtailed at least part
of its operations in Peru. UNFPA, however, denied everything and
kept the funding spigot on full blast.
It turns out
UNFPA initiated their own report and hired abortion- and sterilization-friendly
doctors from the Peruvian Ministry of Health to investigate PRI's
charges. No doubt UNFPA expected a whitewash, but they didn't get
it. Their own report confirmed the atrocities. The report found
that women were sometimes forced to accept "contraceptive choices,"
citing cases where the decision "would be external to the person."
The report also quoted one population-control worker who said that
women complaining of painful complications from sterilizations exhibited
the "wrong way of thinking about family planning."
What did UNFPA
do about these findings? They buried the report and then lied about
it. Holding the report in his hands, Peruvian journalist Alejandro
Bermudez asked chief UNFPA spokesman Stirling Scruggs about it and
Scruggs said the report did not exist. The director of UNFPA's Latin
American and Caribbean division also denied the report existence.
Mirtha Carrera-Halim who runs UNFPA-Peru confirmed its existence,
however.
Only a few
weeks ago Rep. Chris Smith and Population Research Institute leveled
charges that UNFPA sponsored programs in China still utilize coercive
means. UNFPA lost U.S. funding a few years ago because of its involvement
in the coercive Chinese one-child policy. UNFPA insisted the policy
was not practiced in the 32 Chinese counties where they are now
active. Even though top UNFPA personnel consistently praise the
Chinese policies, Congress resumed funding. This was based in part
on the promise that coercion no longer went on in UNFPS funded counties.
The PRI investigation,
however, showed a close link between UNFPA and the Chinese population-control
authorities and even interviewed women from UNFPA counties that
had recently had forced abortions. UNFPA refused to send even one
representative to answer the charges before Congress. UNFPA did
send a team to China to investigate the charges. Not intending to
repeat the mistakes in the Peruvian report, UNFPA sent mostly UNFPA
personnel who not surprisingly found no problems whatsoever. In
its report UNFPA criticized PRI for not revealing the identities
of the Chinese women who had criticized the Chinese government.
UNFPA is up
for increased funding. The Senate wants to increase their funding
to $37 million while the House wants to keep it at the current level
of $25 million. Rather than this debate, the House and Senate should
start from square one and insist on independent investigations of
these ongoing allegations against UNFPA-funded programs. Even those
who support family-planning programs would be aghast at the violations
of women's rights that are funded by this increasingly out-of-control
and unaccountable U.N. agency.
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