USA Cuts UNFPA Funding
For Immediate Release
July 22, 2002
Contact Scott Weinberg
(540) 622-5240
WASHINGTON, DC — Population Research Institute President Steve Mosher today applauded the decision of the Bush administration to cut US funding for the UNFPA, pursuant to the Kemp-Kasten Amendment which prohibits US funds from going to groups that support forced abortion and non-voluntary sterilization.
Mosher was the first American social scientist permitted to conduct field research in China, and first documented China’s one-child policy of forced abortion. Last September, he launched an independent investigation of UNFPA’s program in China. The victims of forced abortion in UNFPA’s program in China stated without exception that coercion is as bad as ever in the history of the one-child policy.
PRI investigators returned from China with audio-, videotaped and photographic evidence showing the following:
- In an abortion facility, a nineteen-year-old woman says she is too young to be pregnant according to the family planning policy. As she is receiving a non-voluntary abortion in an adjacent room, her friends say that she indeed desires to give birth to her child, but
the law forbids.
- A victim of forced sterilization says women who wish to bear additional children are forced in for abortions. Punishment for attempting to escape forced abortion includes destruction of homes.
Right now things are very strict,
she says. - A woman whose home was destroyed for hiding her pregnancy says she knows many other women whose homes have been destroyed for hiding their pregnancies.
The majority [of women] have their children without proper spacing and suffer the consequences,
she says. Consequences include crippling fines, imprisonment of relatives and destruction of relatives’ homes.The whole family was arrested,
a relative of this woman states.Everything in the house was stolen [by district family planning officials].
- In a model residential area, a woman says: *We have to have [our IUD] checked four times a year. The birth control workers come and tell you ‘it’s time.’*
Whether the birth control work is done well affects how much money the village birth control workers get,
another witness states.
Both the Chinese State Family Planning Commission and the UNFPA state in writing that they work together
in this program. More than two-dozen victims and witnesses said that coercion, only coercion and nothing but coercion, exists in this UNFPA county program in China.
The Bush Administration has acted on sound policy in defense of women in China,
Mosher added.
