U.N. Stands for Unconscionable

BOTTUM, J.

U.N. Stands for Unconscionable Bush was right to cut off funding for the U.N. Fund for Population Activities. BY J. BOTTUM WHEN COLIN POWELL announced last Tuesday the administration's decision...

...All that happened last week is that the Bush administration stopped pretending to believe them when they say they aren't...
...Bush Denies Women Health Care, Human Rights," read one editorial headline...
...Powell is on record as being generally sympathetic to UNFPA, but his letter to Congress takes seriously the moral problem of American support for an agency implicated in China's coercive population policy—and the legal problem of adhering to the 1985 Kemp-Kasten law that prohibits funding of any organization that participates in coercive abortions and the 2000 Tiahrt amendment that prohibits American funds' being passed on to international organizations that support coercive contraception programs...
...And happy with the opportunity to act as moral tutor to the backward United States, the European Union voted to replace the missing money (though carefully limiting its use to 22 former European colonies, not China), citing what the E.U...
...Chinese citizens' participation in Beijing's policy of one child per family is entirely voluntary, the Chinese ambassador to the United States insisted—and, anyway, the UNFPA is working in merely 32 counties in China, where the United Nations fund hopes to show that voluntary population controls work better than involuntary ones...
...Though you would never know it from the hysterical criticisms of self-proclaimed "pro-choicers," what Powell is upholding is the idea of choice...
...Though official UNFPA policy prohibits the promotion of abortion, over 17 percent of the fund's annual spending is passed through to non-governmental organizations that have no such restriction...
...The World's Women Left in the Lurch," read another—and on and on: "Abortion Foes Win Counter-productively," "'W' stands for Wrongheaded," "Life-Saving U.N...
...Begun by President Alberto Fujimori with special legislation when he assumed dictatorial powers, the program officially registered UNFPA as its "Technical Secretary" for organizing what it called "ligation festivals...
...Such organizations, the former director of UNF-PA, Nafis Sadik, has explained admiringly, "are willing to take risks that governments certainly won't, even U.N...
...The official U.S...
...Amidst all the hyperventilating about the supposed indecency of the United States, very little attention was paid to the damning report issued last week by the Peruvian government about UNFPA's collaboration in the ruth-less—and racially motivated—steril-ization of 300,000 rural and Indian women in Peru during the 1990s...
...Sen...
...While other international organizations grew increasingly queasy with the coercive and racial aspects of the project (even the Clinton-era U.S...
...When UNFPA launched the "United Nations Population Award" in 1983, it chose as one of its first recipients Qian Xinzhong, the minister of the Chinese State Family Planning Commission...
...The UNFPA, it also bears noting, is not an admirable bureaucracy that just slipped up in China...
...organizations won't, but [national governments and the U.N.] can finance...
...In the midst of the firestorm of criticism, almost no commentator noticed this wasn't merely politics for the Bush administration, some Machiavellian payoff to the president's pro-life supporters by Karl Rove, but a matter of principle...
...Much of the American apparatus of international agencies, non-governmental organizations, women's advocacy groups, and population-control organizations is just as deeply inter-connected—and just as deeply implicated in forced abortions, coercive sterilizations, and single-minded pursuit of fewer births...
...Regardless of the modest size of UNFPA's budget in China or any benefits its programs provide, UNFPA's support of, and involvement in, China's population-planning activities allows the Chinese government to implement more effectively its program of coercive abortion...
...Meanwhile, Rep...
...You'd think from all of this that President Bush had declared war on half the globe...
...Thus, after leaving UNFPA, Sadik joined the board of directors of the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, an organization wholly dedicated to eliminating restrictions on abortion...
...As all parties to this debate well understand, the UNFPA is part of an interlocking directorate of national and international organizations devoted to abortion, contraception, and sterilization...
...Indeed, the UNFPA's record through the years shows an institutionalized bias in favor of brute force measures...
...Agency for International Development withdrew early in 1998), the U.N...
...UNFPA, the Peruvian inquiry found, "brought not only special financing but also demographic goals, for the focalized reduction of the Peruvian population and the fecundity of Peruvian women...
...Development and Humanitarian Aid commissioner, Poul Nielson, called the "decency gap" created by the Americans...
...Never mind that the funding was curtailed because the UNFPA J. Bottum is Books & Arts editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Later, at the end of her term as head of UNFPA, Sadik was awarded the prize herself...
...Committee for UNFPA uses as its spokeswoman Robin Chandler Duke, former president of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League...
...Indeed, UNFPA's executive director, Thoraya Obaid, insisted that he had, and that "women and children will die because of this decision...
...If there is a single principle that unifies Americans with conflicting views on the subject, it is the conviction that no woman should be forced to have an abortion," Powell insisted...
...fund "increased their support and even participation in the task . . . in the period 1995-2000...
...supported China's gruesome policy of forced abortions...
...Patrick Leahy railed at the decision as "an embarrassment and a travesty...
...If this sounds like something of a contradiction—there's nothing coercive in China, except in those counties where UNFPA doesn't work— that's because it is...
...The Chinese Foreign Ministry, responding to the State Department's description of forced sterilizations and abortions in China, issued a diatribe against the United States...
...Effort a Victim of White House Politics...
...Carolyn Maloney of New York denounced the Republicans' "mindless zeal to take care of their right-wing base...
...BY J. BOTTUM WHEN COLIN POWELL announced last Tuesday the administration's decision to shift to other organizations $34 million earmarked for the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, the reaction was apoplectic...

Vol. 7 • August 2002 • No. 45


 
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