July
15, 2003, 12:50 p.m. UNFPA,
UNworthy
The
House takes up population-control funding.
omen's
groups on the Left would love for you to think that because they oppose
increased funding to the United Nations Population Fund (in an amendment
sponsored by Reps. Chris Smith, Jim Oberstar, and Henry Hyde) pro-lifers
want to kill aid to women and children. Not so. In a not-unfamiliar
occurrence, the conventional spin is simply not true.
In what is likely
to be a close vote, the House of Representatives will vote Tuesday afternoon
on $50 million each year for two years ($100 million total) to the UNFPA
in the State Department authorization bill (HR 1950).
The record on who
wants money going to women and children is a little less black and white
than the predominant spin would have it. Rather than go to the UNFPA,
which has-according to the State Department-violated U.S. law by funding
coercive population programs, the administration transferred $34 million
from the UNFPA to the Child Survival and Health Programs Fund in September.
The money would have been used, in the transfer scenario, to provide for
basic health needs of women and children in Afghanistan and Pakistan,
which both have high infant mortality and maternal death rates. When USAID
asked Congress to authorize the money transfer, the next step in the process,
a hold was put on it (reportedly by Vermont Democrat Sen. Patrick Leahy).
That money went nowhere.
In an amendment sponsored
by New York Democrat Rep. Joseph Crowley, members would send the money
to the UNFPA, and do so under a gutted version of Reagan-era law that
forbade U.S. money from funding coercive population-control programs.
In the new language, the U.S. UNFPA would only be prohibited from "directly"
funding coercion, meaning, as the amendment defines it, "knowingly
and intentionally working with a purpose to continue, advance, or expand
the practice of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization, or playing
a primary and essential role in a coercive or voluntary aspect of a country's
family planning program." Not exactly easy to determine.
In a report issued
earlier this year, the State Department found that forced abortion and
sterilization policies exist in 32 countries where the UNFPA has operations.
Questions are raised annual by the State Department and private groups
about the extent of UNFPA involvement with some of those programs.
Planned
Parenthood wants the money in question to go to UNFPA because "because
it is the single largest global source of multilateral funding for maternal
health and family planning programs, providing desperately needed health
care services to poor women and their families in 150 countries."
You've gotta wonder though: Why is taxpayer money in our hands, distributed
under our laws, not better than handing it over to an organization that
has a record of a laissez-faire approach to tyrannical regimes and their
coercive, truly anti-women policies? Do they really believe they have
more to fear from George W. Bush and pro-life conservatives than the women
of China, or other authoritarian human-rights violators do from their
regimes? One hopes, at least, members of Congress can see more clearly
than that.
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omen's
groups on the Left would love for you to think that because they oppose
increased funding to the United Nations Population Fund (in an amendment
sponsored by Reps. Chris Smith, Jim Oberstar, and Henry Hyde) 
