An article that I wrote for Townhall last week showed that the Obama Administration lavished hundreds of millions of dollars on the United Nations Fund (UNFPA), a controversial U.N. agency that for decades has operated a family planning program in China complicit with the Communist Government’s repressive one-child policy.
A recent report from the U.S. Department of State now shows that the Obama administration in its last year obligated $68 million in federal funding to the controversial U.N. agency. Altogether, since 2009, the Obama administration has given over $340 million to the UNFPA in either disbursements or obligations.
Read the full article on Townhall’s website
Every year, Congress appropriates funding specifically for UNFPA. In the early years of the Obama Presidency, when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, significantly higher spending levels were approved for UNFPA than under the previous administration.
After 2010, Congress began to cut back on funding to UNFPA. Yet, in the last years of the Obama White House, the U.S. Government nonetheless significantly increased funding for the U.N. agency by resorting to other sources of foreign aid.
U.S. State Department annual reports to Congress reveal that the majority of funds obligated to UNFPA were not from funds that Congress specifically appropriated to the agency.
The Bush Administration cut funding to UNFPA in 2002 on account of UNFPA’s family planning program in China after it was determined that UNFPA’s activities were too closely tied with China’s one-child policy. According to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell,
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. [i]
A rather stark difference becomes evident when comparing how much the Obama Administration gave UNFPA in just three years and how much the U.N. agency received during the entire extent of the Bush Administration.
Fortunately, the President can easily cut funding to UNFPA. The Kemp-Kasten Amendment allows the President to cut funding to any organization that he or she deems to be supporting a program that promotes coercive abortion or forced sterilization. There is perhaps no organization more clearly involved with supporting a program of coercive abortion and sterilization than UNFPA. Is it not time to stop U.S. tax dollars from subsidizing an agency that has aided and abetted China’s one-child policy?
[i] Amendments Made in Order under the Rule (H.Res. 316) for the Foreign Relations Authorization Act (H.R. 1950) , July 15, 2003, quote available through Americans United For Life at http://www.aul.org/2010/04/the-kemp-kasten-provision-and-unfpa-funding/.
