At a time when United Nations Population Fund
(UNFPA) funding from the U.S. and Great Britain is increasingly in doubt,
chiefly because of its involvement in coercive abortion and coercive
sterilization in China, the population control organization is attempting the
change the subject. Instead of attempting to correct human rights abuses in its
programmes, it is highlighting its environmental work—and once again targeting
the poor.
UNFPA Hides Coercion Behind a Green Front
By Steve Mosher
Moves are underway in both the U.S. Congress and the British Parliament to
restrict, or eliminate entirely, the funding that these two countries provide to
the U.N. Population Fund.(1) The impetus for these efforts comes from evidence
gathered by PRI in China that the UNFPA participates in the support and
management of a coercive family planning program in China that relies on
non-voluntary abortion, sterilization, and IUD insertion.(2)
This evidence was presented to members of the Committee on International
Relations in the U.S. House of Representatives on October 17, 2001. To date, the
UNFPA has given no response to the questions raised at that hearing. Instead,
they are hiding their support of coercion behind a false front of
environmentalism. On November 7, 2001, the UNFPA will launch a major public
relations campaign to promote a new Malthusian tome called “Footprints and
Milestones: State of the World’s Population 2001.”
The “footprints” referred to include every environmental scare story known
to Homo Environmentalis. Carbon emissions, global warming, and resource
depletion all have their tracks, we are told, but the biggest footprint (and the
root cause of all the other footprints), is being left by “overpopulation,”
especially “in poorer countries.”(3)
In order to deal with these multiple environmental crisis (all of which are in
dispute, by the way), the UNFPA advocates reducing the number of babies born in
poor countries. Or as the report delicately puts it, “Slower population growth
in developing countries will contribute measurably towards relieving
environmental stress.”(4)
Another troubling aspect of the report is its emphasis on “targets” for
contraceptive use. Originally set at the UNFPA’s 1994 International Conference
of Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt, to “help slow population growth
and reduce the future size of world population (ICPD),”(5) such targets
constitute another reason why the organization should be denied U.S. funding.
Under the Tiahrt Amendment, the pursuit of such targets in U.S.-funded family
planning programs is illegal.
The report is an effort to massage the media into accepting expanded population
control programs aimed at the world's most vulnerable women, and to create a
positive press at the next U.N. Conference on the Environment, Rio + 10, next
year.
The report ducks the hard questions, questions like: Since the population of
many developing nations is projected to decline in the years to come, why are
aggressive population control programs still needed? Indeed, were they ever
needed at all? We now know that many developing nations will become old before
they become rich, if they ever become rich at all, thanks in part to the family
planners at the UNFPA.
And what of the UNFPA’s decades-long love affair with China’s one-child
policy? One “milestone” that passes without mention is how the new head of
the UNFPA, Thoraya Obaid, abased herself during a recent visit to Beijing. Ms.
Obaid reportedly told the People’s Daily “China, having adopted practical
measures in accordance with her current situation, has scored remarkable
achievements in population control”. This verbiage came straight from
China's State Family Planning Commission, which constantly exhorts its cadres to
undertake “practical measures” (such as forced abortion and forced
sterilization) to continue China's “remarkable achievements” (forced
reduction in the birth rate) in its effort to control China's population.
Can we trust an organization that praises, in so many words, coercive population
control programs and advocates numerical targets for contraception? More to the
point, should we be funding it?
ENDNOTES
1. "Lord’s amendment to stop UK government funding for China’s coercive
One-Child policy," International Development Bill, UK House of Lords,
October 25, 2001.
2. "Coercive Population Control in China: New Evidence of Forced Abortion
and Sterilization," Hearing of the Committee on International Relations,
U.S. House of Representatives, October 17, 2001.
3. "Footprints and Milestones: The State of World Population 2001,"
UNFPA, www.unfpa.org/swp/2001, p. 2.
4. Ibid., 3.
5. Ibid., 3.
