BEIJING —A Chinese woman was four-and-a-half months pregnant with her second child when she refused orders to report to a hospital for an abortion.

“I went into hiding in my mother's village. Then my brother, my older sister and my younger sister were all arrested,” she said. “I had no choice but to go somewhere else to hide. They arrested three people in my mother's family but didn't destroy any homes. They arrested six people in my mother-in-law's family and destroyed three homes.”

The woman's testimony was taped in a covert fact-finding mission sponsored by the Population Research Institute last September in China's Guangdong province in Sihui county, where the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has desks in the same office as the Chinese Family Planning Office. It was one of more than two dozen video and audio-taped testimonies documenting pressure, imprisonment, severe financial penalties, destruction of houses and property, forced abortions and involuntary sterilization to keep birth rates down in the region where UNFPA officials claim women freely choose the number and spacing of their children.

Now Congress is in a heated tugof-war over whether the UNFPA is entitled to $34 million in American tax dollars to spend on family planning programs—including operations in 32 Chinese counties—or whether such funding violates U.S. law (the Kemp-Kasten Amendment forbids taxpayer funding of coercive family planning programs and abortion).

On May 13 a three-member “assessment team” appointed by the State Department left on a two-week mission to China to investigate UNFPA programs there and to determine if they are coercive. The team leader, William Brown, former ambassador to Thailand and Israel, was accompanied by Bonnie Glick, a foreign service officer, and University of Arizona public health professor Theodore Tong. They are expected to issue a report to President George W. Bush by the end of June.

Congressional Votes

Before the envoy set out, on May 9 the House Appropriations Committee narrowly passed an amendment to the supplemental appropriations bill requiring that all $34 million be released to the UNFPA by July 10, barring evidence that the population control agency is violating the law. Human rights advocates saw the 32-31 vote as unfair since two representatives who intended to vote against it were absent; Rep. John Sweeney, R-N.Y., reportedly rushed in late but his vote was refused.

The vote was reversed on May 15, however, when representatives passed by a 32-30 vote an amendment by Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Kan. It restored discretion to the president to determine whether UNFPA “participates in the management of coercive abortions and involuntary sterilization” and to deny or grant funding to UNFPA no later than July 31.

Pro-life and human rights advocates fear the state department's report will whitewash abuses that have been well documented by others. “China is a police state … where the comings and goings of foreigners are closely monitored, and Chinese live in fear of speaking out of turn,” said Steven Mosher, president of the Front Royal, Va.-based Population Research Institute, which commissioned the September 2001 fact-finding investigation that documented China's abuses.

Mosher is the first sociologist to have documented China's brutal enforcement of its one-child policy, and he has written several books on the subject.

Although the Chinese government has agreed to let the State Department visitors go where they wish, Beijing officials will accompany them and have required 24 hours notice of where they intend to go. “A day is more than enough time for the Chinese government to alert officials of their coming and for cover stories of ‘voluntarism’ to be in place,” Mosher said.

Rep. Tiahrt's aide, Knapp, concurred. “We assume the Peoples Republic of China will take [the team members] to only the places it wants them to go,” he said. “We don't mean to impugn our team, but the conditions are hardly conducive to finding the truth.”

UNFPA Responds

“We at the UNFPA are pleased that the team is going to China. We hope that this will settle the issue once and for all,” said UNFPA spokesman Stirling Scruggs.

“We have never supported coercion of any kind in any part of the world.”

But China is unapologetic about its coercive one-child policy, instituted in 1979. In late 2000 the government redoubled its coercive population control measures, claiming to have prevented at least 250 million births since 1980. “We cannot just be content with the current success, we must make population control a permanent policy,” stated an editorial in the state-run communist newspaper, The People's Daily.

The one child policy stipulates that couples living in cities may have one child if they are married, but marriage is prohibited to those younger than age 23. In rural areas, couples may be permitted a second child after an interval of several years, especially if the first child is a girl.

The policy has resulted in widespread sex selective abortions and an alarming sex ratio imbalance: 116.9 males for every 100 females, according to 2000 census data released this month by officials in Beijing. (The normal ratio is 105 to 107 boys for every 100 girls). In one region, the birth ratio was 135 boys to 100 girls.

Some experts estimate there are already 70 million more men than women in China, a problem portending enormous social and economic instability, including increased trafficking in kidnapped young women.

Other ill effects of China's birth control policy have been reported internationally. A scandal erupted in 2000 after a doctor who tried to save an unlicensed newborn saw government birth control officials seize the baby and drown him in a rice paddy.

In March 2000, China drew fire from human rights groups worldwide when, as part of a widespread crackdown against religion, it arrested 20 members of a religious group opposed to the severe reproductive restrictions.

“We believe there is still coercion in China, but not in our counties,” explained UNFPA's Scruggs. “But you can never be absolutely sure of anything.”

Scruggs conceded that in some of the Chinese counties that UNFPA operates, people suffer crippling financial penalties if they have more children than they have been licensed for. “That's something we're trying to change,” he said. “We talk with Chinese officials every time there's evidence of coercion. We are there as a voice of the UN and of all governments.”

However, Scruggs acknowledged UNFPA has been similarly trying to discourage the national preference for girls for 20 years, with “gender empowerment” programs that have been copied by other agencies. The UNFPA effort has produced little benefit, as the sex ratio has dramatically worsened since 1990.

U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., said he holds Scruggs and the UNFPA “in contempt” because they have turned a blind eye to “massive human rights atrocities … right under their noses” and in so doing have become China's “chief accomplice” and “enabler.”

Far from condemning and trying to change China's brutality, Smith added, UNFPA has publicly “lavished praise” on China for its population control campaign. And he criticized a report UNFPA issued last year claiming no link between China's one-child policy and UNFPA. The U.N. agency's self-exoneration was based on an investigation of UNFPA operations in China conducted by two former UNFPA executives and a committee chairman at the United Nation's 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo.

The UNFPA envoys were escorted by Chinese family planning officials with whom they shared a barbecue after a whirlwind investigation that, according to Smith, included only 15 minutes in the Family Planning Service offices in Sihui county.

Smith feared that a similar report from the State Department team in China could be devastating. Not only might millions of American tax dollars start flowing through UNFPA to coercive programs, but it would serve as a seal of international approval for ongoing, brutal human rights abuses in China, he warned.

Smith and other pro-life advocates also feared President Bush might decide to interpret the Kemp-Kasten Amendment as President Clinton did—and as did a 2001 memo signed by Secretary of State Colin Powell—to allow funding of UNPA operations in regions where coercion is found not to exist.

“We urge you to use the original interpretation of Kemp-Kasten,” said a letter to the president drafted by the Population Research Institute and to be signed by pro-family organizations said. “Two previous presidents, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, determined that UNFPA activities in China alone were sufficient to render UNFPA ineligible to receive U.S. funds.”

‘Bottom Line’

“The bottom line is people should be calling the White House to let the president know where they stand,” PRI spokesman Scott Weinberg said.

Added Rep. Smith: “To adhere to the law we should have nothing whatsoever to do with a country that is coercing women to abort. Forced abortions by the Nazis were properly ruled a crime against humanity at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. It is no less a crime today.”

Celeste McGovern writes from Portland, Oregon.