Jim Lobe

For the fourth year in a row, President Bush has refused to contribute to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), providing $25 million of the $34 million that Congress had earmarked for the agency to the child survival and health account of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). In a letter from Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns to Congress, the administration said it had determined that UNFPA’s support for China’s population programme “facilitates government’s coercive abortion programme”, thus violating a 20-year-old law that bans the use of US aid to finance or support abortions overseas. As in previous years, both UNFPA and US population groups denounced Bush’s decision, particularly coming as it did in the same week that Bush delivered a relatively conciliatory speech to the UN General Assembly in which he stressed his administration’s support for the Millennium Development Goals, which include reducing maternal mortality.

“A US decision to restore funding to UNFPA would have been a swift and concrete indication to the rest of the world that the reality of US policy now matches US rhetoric,” stated a letter sent to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice by the directors of 21 US population, environmental, and church groups. Bush’s decision brings to $136 million the amount that Congress has appropriated for UNFPA since 2001, despite the fact that Washington has been the world’s biggest bilateral donor of family planning assistance for developing countries. Long

a target of anti-abortion forces in the US, UNFPA, with an annual budget of about $300 million, has been the world’s most important provider of family planning aid. In 2002, a special State Department mission found no evidence that UNFPA provided support to coercive practices in China, while a British delegation praised UNFPA’s projects as a “force for good” there. Nonetheless, the administration, in a novel interpretation of the 1985 Kemp-Kasten Amendment, has argued since 2002 that any agency support to China may indirectly support coercive practices by freeing up resources that might not otherwise be available for that purpose.

To protest China’s coercive population policies in the past, Congress had required UNFPA to hold the US contribution in a separate account to ensure that none of it went to China. It also required that the amount of money UNFPA spent in the country be subtracted from the total US contribution. But this avenue, which was adopted by former Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush, has been rejected by the latter’s son. Instead, anti-abortion forces changed the law to give him discretion to withhold congressionally appropriated money for UNFPA - an option that he has now exercised once again. Many critics have charged that the administration’s policy amounts to pandering to his Christian Right supporters and is actually counter-productive to its goals of improving maternal and child health and reducing abortions.