Support Primary Health Care, not the UNFPA


Support Primary Health Care, not the UNFPA

Tell the UNFPA to go peddle its Anti-People Ideology Elsewhere

 By Steven W. Mosher

Wall Street Journal

August 31, 2004

President Bush has taken a lot of heat for defunding the U.N. Population Fund.  His pinched-face critics clamor, “You don’t care if women die.”  What claptrap.

Woman are dying in China, in case the UNFPA hasn’t noticed, along with multitudes of little girls. The UNFPA’s funding is suspended because the U.S. State Department found the organization deeply involved in China’s vicious one-child policy.  Forced abortions and sterilizations in China are nothing new, of course.  Even Hilary Clinton was forced to acknowledge these horrors during her speech at the Beijing women’s conference few years ago. 

But don’t expect the UNFPA, which has been active in China since 1979, to mourn the 300 million girls now said to be missing from the Chinese population.  They are too busy congratulating Chinese officials on their success in reducing China’s population growth.

The larger question is this:  Who put these population control ideologues in charge of women’s health?  Who made International Planned Parenthood alumni-who largely make up the hierarchy of the UNFPA-the arbiters of what women want healthwise. There is a lot more to good health than inserting IUDs, tying Fallopian tubes, and injecting Depo-Provera, which we now know increases the risk of sexually transmitted diseases.  Clean water and adequate primary health care would be a good start.

If our purpose in giving money to the UNFPA was to save the lives of women and children–as the UNFPA now claims-then, to use former Senator Jesse Helms colorful phrase, This is money down a rathole.  If the money the Clinton administration for eight years gave to the UNFPA had instead been used ramp up real primary health care programs (instead of population control programs in disguise), ten times as many women and children would have been saved.  

Whoever thought up the idea of indiscriminately distributing contraceptives to women in the developing world was not primarily concerned with their health, anyway.  Giving powerful, steroid-based drugs to developing world women, who are often malnourished and in poor health, with no preliminary physical exam and no follow-up, qualifies as medical malpractice. Moreover, contraceptive failure rates are high, which leads to increased reliance on abortion as a back-up, with all the risks that entails.

 The UNFPA-and all population control programs-have outlived their usefulness. The population of the world is rapidly leveling off and will soon begin to decline, leading to potentially catastrophic economic and social disruptions. Europe is not merely old, it is dying.  And the rest of the world will soon follow.  Why should the United States spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year to further reduce fertility in countries whose populations will all-too-soon be in decline anyway?

Improving primary health care in the developing world will benefit everyone, men and children as well as women.  If you ask women in the developing world-something the UNFPA never seems to get around to doing–this is what they want anyway, for they know such programs will strengthen their families and help ensure that their children reach adulthood.

 That there exists a global need for massive “reproductive health care” programs is a fantasy of developed world feminists.  Let them fund it, not us.

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