Father Marx founded PRI to make a difference. And so we are. After decades of unchallenged increases in population control funding, we began to turn back the tide in 1996. That was the year that President Clinton budgeted a $169 million increase in population control spending, only to have Congress reject his plans after an intensive—and effective—educational campaign by PRI. Similar efforts by the lame-duck President in 1999 and 2000 for $200 million and $190 million also failed, this time by an even larger margin.
In 2001, PRI investigators were off to China, where they uncovered evidence of the U.N. Population Fund’s (UNFPA) complicity in that country’s infamous one-child policy. Testimony before House and Senate committees followed, along with meetings with Bush Administration officials. To date, PRI’s groundbreaking investigation, along with follow-up reports, has cost the U.N. population control agency over $190 million—and counting.
2003 also witnessed the Bush administration ending funding for an AIDS program for African and Asian refugees, because one of the organizations involved in the program, Marie Stopes International, is a partner with UNFPA in China. To this day, UNFPA is still involved in forced abortion and sterilization in China. Thus another $1 million never found its way into the coffers of the population controllers.
How many babies have been saved by this three-quarters of a billion dollars in funding cuts? It’s hard to say with any precision, but one thing is certain: PRI’s funding cuts translate into boatloads of abortion-causing drugs and devices that will never be swallowed by, or injected into, or inserted into, women around the world.