July 6, 1999
Volume 1/ Number 8
Dear Friend and Colleague:
The US Senate last month passed a bill to enforce payment of the US “debt” to the United Nations. Included in this bill is language that would resume funding for the UN Population Fund’s (UNFPA), which is heavily involved in China. PRI argues that the UNFPA should not receive US funds for its population control programs in China and elsewhere.
Steven W. Mosher
President
US Congress on the Verge of Restoring Funds for Population Control in China
On 22 June 1999 the US Senate passed by a vote of 97-2 a State Department Reauthorization Bill (S886) which would force payments from the US taxpayer for approximately $1.5 billion owed to the United Nations in outstanding dues. Embedded in the bill is language to resume funding the UNFPA to the tune of $25 million a year.
Last October the US Congress refused to fund the UNFPA because of its renewed collaboration with China’s coercive one-child policy. In the months that followed, UNFPA propagandists attempted to reinvent China’s one-child policy, giving it a “kinder, gentler” mien. The truth is that China’s war against its own people has grown more intense, not slackened (PRI Review, “Spin Doctoring Won’t Change the Truth about China’s One-Child Policy,” April / May, 1999, 16).
Nonetheless, a cabal of environmentalists, feminists and population controllers have announced that they will attempt to restore UNFPA funding. Population Research Institute believes that the UNFPA should not receive US tax dollars, and has detailed its objections in a new publication entitled Money for Nothing: why the United States should not restore UNFPA funding.
Money for Nothing, PRI’s third policy backgrounder, argues against funding the UNFPA on four grounds:
1. China’s program of forced abortions and sterilizations is a population control scandal of the first order. There can be no justification for the UNFPA to collaborate in any way with a country that inflicts such a policy on its people.
2. UNFPA’s population control programs are an inefficient and wasteful way of reducing maternal mortality.
3. UNFPA’s indiscriminate use of contraceptives is detrimental to the health of women in developing countries who are malnourished or in poor health.
4. UNFPA (and population control programs in general) has outlived its usefulness because of falling birth rates worldwide.
PRI also notes that the Cairo+5 population meeting in New York, which was orchestrated by the UNFPA, produced a document which ignores authentic development in favor of population control. Couched in the language of “reproductive rights,” the document hails abortion as a basic human right, promotes adolescent sexual freedoms, and undercuts parental rights, all moves intended to lower the global fertility rate. As the US House of Representatives considers whether to restore funding to the UNFPA, all of these factors should be taken into account.
