WASHINGTON — The Bush administration announced July 16 that it will block $34 million of funding for the United Nations Population Fund. It is the third consecutive year that the administration has blocked the funds, and trying to restore them has become a perennial battle over the international agency's complicity in China's coercive one-child policy.

Congress appropriates money each year for international family planning and maternal health programs — including UNFPA — but a provision of law called the Kemp- Kasten Amendment prohibits U.S. funds from going to organizations that participate in coercive programs. The presidential administration decides which organizations violate Kemp-Kasten, and President Bush has decided that UNFPA does so.

Pro-population control and proabortion members of Congress tried July 9 to restore UNFPA funding while doing an end run around the issue of UNFPA's involvement in communist China. In a House Appropriations Committee hearing, Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., offered an amendment to a foreign operations bill that would have directed $25 million to UNFPA, but for use only in Iraq, Afghanistan, Tanzania, Jordan, Kenya and Pakistan.

“Her amendment is really a ploy at trying to avoid U.S. human rights law,” said Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Kan., who led the fight against restoring the funding. “Kemp-Kasten says that an organization — not a country — cannot receive U.S. funding if it participates in a coercive family planning program.”

“Those six countries are a critical concern to our nation,” said Julie Edwards, spokeswoman for Lowey. “The amendment had an offset policy.” This policy would have deprived UNFPA of funds in proportion as it directed U.S. money to China, assuming it did so, she explained.

“We know money is fungible and UNFPA is not trustworthy,” Tiahrt said in response. And Steve Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute (PRI), commented: “If I were to give you $5,000 for writing project A, that would free up $5,000 for something else.”

Pro-Life Countries

Tiahrt said he believed there was an underlying agenda to the countries that Lowey chose. “Most of those countries are pro-life countries,” he said. “She wants to give it to a pro-abortion organization. That organization could lobby for legalized abortion.” Though UNFPA “is not supposed to perform abortions,” he said, “Secretary of State Colin Powell has said it collaborates with forced abortion in China.”

Said Powell on July 21, 2002, “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.”

Lowey's effort failed, 32-26, and Edwards said it was unlikely that Lowey would be able to repeat her attempt on the House floor. The Senate could be different.

Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., a Catholic, told the Register that the Senate might restore the funding but that it would then probably be eliminated to conform to the House's decision in the final foreign operations bill. Brownback said he would oppose UNFPA funding even if the group did not work in China. “This is a bad use of money,” he said. “I think it's wrong to use this money for something that a large proportion of people find morally wrong. There's plenty of other uses for this money, such as for refugees.”

Fiercely pro-abortion and profamily planning Sen. Barbara Milkulski, D-Md., whose biography lists her as Catholic, promised a fight to restore the money. “We're going to work on it,” she said. “If we can send our jobs over there, we can work on family planning.”

Tiahrt and Mosher said they were convinced China's one-childper-woman population control program remains coercive. “It's true that in the big cities in China, because of modernization, because of urbanization, because of women in the workforce, because of the materialism that has gripped parts of China, there is less interest in having children” than in the past, said Mosher, who has followed China's program since its inception in the late 1970s. But in rural areas and among all those who wish to have more children, he said, “coercion remains. That includes forced abortion.” Women who have second children can be fined an amount “equivalent to two to three years of their annual income,” he said. “They can be imprisoned. . . . We still have evidence of this coming out of China.”

UNFPA claims to have a positive effect in the areas of China in which it operates while supplementing China's domestic family planning programs. “We exposed that,” Mosher said. “We found that in the ʻmodel counties' in China where UNFPA operates, there was the same level of coercion as in other counties.” He noted that China's imbalance of boys and girls is worsening, since many Chinese prefer to have a son rather than a daughter if they are allowed only one child and thus abort girls. The male-to-female ratio of births in China has reached 120 to 100, he said. “It's getting worse,” he said. “Ultrasound is more and more available in China. There are 10 to 15 million abortions a year in China. I would estimate that over half of them include some form of duress.”

The gender ratio problem has contributed to social ills the Chinese government doesn't like to talk about, Mosher said. “They don't talk about the great rise in homosexuality in China today,” he said. “There's a great rise in prostitution in China. Gangs are on the rise, alternate families. There is a rise in cross-border trafficking in women.”

Meanwhile, In Peru

Another country that has had recent systematic coercion in its population control program with UNFPA's financial help is Peru, which admitted in July 2002 that a forced sterilization program for Indian women had been in place under now ex-President Alberto Fujimori. The Peruvian government apologized, and Tiahrt said he was unaware of more contemporary abuses. “I have not heard any complaints from Peru recently,” he said.

“From 1993 to 2000, the Peruvian government undertook a sterilization campaign that resulted in the sterilizations of more than 315,000 Peruvian women, most of them indigenous Indians,” reported Human Life International in February 2003. “Easily 90% of these women were forced into these operations.”

Joseph D'Agostino writes from Washington, D.C.