New Bush blow to UN population
program By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - In what critics are calling its
latest slap at women and multilateralism, the
administration of US President George W Bush announced
on Friday that the US$34 million Congress had earmarked
for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA; formerly
the UN Fund for Population Activities) will be used for
other purposes.
The decision, which marks the
third year in a row the administration has withheld
congressionally appropriated funding to UNFPA, was not
unexpected, particularly given the administration's
efforts to fire up its Christian-right-wing base in
advance of November's presidential election.
But
at the same time, it belies recent attempts by Bush
himself to reassure US allies abroad that his
administration may be somewhat less inclined to go it
alone on the international stage in light of the
setbacks its unilateralism has suffered in Iraq.
"I was really surprised at the egregious nature
of the [UNFPA] announcement today," said former senator
Tim Wirth, director of the United Nations Foundation
(UNF). "This marks another blow to US credibility in the
international community. The administration has once
again embarrassed the United States."
The
announcement came in the form of a tersely worded
statement released by State Department spokesman Richard
Boucher, which said the department had determined that
UNFPA's programs in China violated a 20-year-old law,
the Kemp-Kasten Amendment, which forbids US aid to any
agency that "supports or participates in the management
of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization".
While State Department officials have never
found any evidence that UNFPA provides any direct
support for coercive practices, the administration has
argued since 2002 that any agency support to China may
indirectly support such practices by freeing up
resources that can be used by the dwindling number of
Chinese counties that enforce them.
Out of its
$300 million annual budget, UNFPA spends only $3.5
million in China, most of it for a pilot project that is
explicitly designed to promote voluntary family-planning
practices, a project that a recent British delegation
recently characterized as a "force for good" in
persuading county authorities to give up coercive
practices.
But the State Department concluded
that "no key changes [in UNFPA's programs in China] have
taken place", and that the ban on all US aid to China
would remain in force.
The head of UNFPA's
Washington office, Sarah Craven, said the decision was
"deeply regrettable", particularly because it was based
on assumptions about UNFPA's work that were "absolutely
false and baseless".
The $34 million Congress
approved, she noted, represented about 10% of the
agency's budget. "That money could have prevented up to
2 million unwanted pregnancies, 800,000 induced
abortions and maternal deaths, and 77,000 infant and
child deaths annually," she said, adding that UNFPA
provides resources and expertise in family-planning and
reproductive health in 141 developing countries.
With the announcement, the Bush administration
will have canceled a total of $93 million appropriated
by Congress for UNFPA since 2002, the first time that an
administration had interpreted Kemp-Kasten so broadly.
Previously, Congress had required UNFPA to hold
the US contribution in a separate account to ensure that
none of the money went to China. It also required that
the amount of money UNFPA spent in the country be
subtracted from the US contribution.
But
anti-abortion forces, which are especially strong in the
Republican-led House of Representatives, succeeded in
2002 to change the law to give the president discretion
to withhold congressionally appropriated money for UNFPA
- an option that Bush exercised in both 2002 and 2003.
Pro-UNFPA lawmakers succeeded this year in
requiring the State Department to file a report on
UNFPA's activities in China before the president could
act, but the report, which is supposed to be filed with
Congress but has not yet been made public, reportedly
asserts there were no substantial changes in the past
year that would affect the application of Kemp-Kasten.
"This is simply pandering to the right-wing
mullahs of this country," said New York Representative
Carolyn Maloney, a veteran champion of UNFPA who this
year proposed that Bush earmark all UNFPA funds for its
programs to help women with obstetric fistula, a
particularly debilitating condition caused by untreated
obstructed labor that affects million of women in poor
countries.
"The world's neediest women and
children are again paying the price for the president's
re-election campaign to play to his far-right base,"
said Maloney in a statement.
The administration
talks "about wanting to work in a multilateral way,
[but] this go-it-alone attitude has really weakened the
United States in the international community", she said,
noting that the administration in June threatened to cut
its contributions to the World Health Organization (WHO)
and the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) if they continued
carrying out joint programs with UNFPA. "It's just
outrageous."
Since the 2002 US cutoff, UNFPA's
European donors have increased their contributions. Just
the week before last, the United Kingdom announced a
sharp hike in its aid to the agency, as well as to the
Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and
other reproductive-health programs in poor countries.
"It's a travesty that the administration didn't
follow in the steps of their British allies," said Amy
Coen, president of Population Action International, who
noted that Bush's hostility toward both family-planning
and reproductive-health programs was also on display
last week at the 15th UNAIDS conference in Bangkok,
where the US delegation was strongly assailed for its
unilateral approach to fighting AIDS and its
programmatic emphasis on abstention and fidelity in
preventing the spread of the epidemic.
"There
are very close parallels between UNFPA and the AIDS
agenda," said Wirth in a statement, noting that the
latest US regulations require Washington's aid
recipients to stress the "lack of effectiveness of
condom use".
"There is no evidence" for that
conclusion, said Wirth. "This is being made up for
political reasons."
Lois Abraham, co-founder of
34-million-strong Friends of UNFPA, a grassroots group
that has raised almost $2 million in private
contributions from more than 100,000 US citizens since
2003, compared the administration's process in reaching
its decision on UNFPA to that which brought it to war in
Iraq.
"I see a very strong parallel here between
accepting information that is wrong because it supports
what you want to do and ignoring information that is
credible and right," she said, noting that several
church groups had recently gone to China and determined
that UNFPA programs there are preventing abortions from
taking place.
The State Department did not say
how it would spend the money it is denying to UNFPA,
although in the past it has said it would be used for
bilateral population and child-survival programs.
At an unrelated campaign event on Friday, Bush
said his administration had just found $25 million more
in the State Department budget to devote to US efforts
to fight human trafficking, but it could not be
confirmed if that money is to be taken from the UNFPA
earmark.
