LIFE DIGEST: U.S. aid blocked from abortion provider
by: Tom Strode - Oct 7, 2008 - comment
The Bush administration has cut off federal aid to a leading international provider of abortions because of the organization’s support of China’s coercive population control program.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) informed Marie Stopes International (MSI) of its decision Sept. 26, saying it had determined aid to the London-based organization would violate a 1985 law. That measure, known as the Kemp-Kasten Amendment, prohibits family planning money from going to any entity that, as decided by the President, “supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.”
In a letter to MSI, Kent Hill, the assistant administrator of USAID’s Bureau for Global Health, described Maries Stopes as “the major implementing partner” of the program in China operated by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). The Bush administration has refused for seven consecutive years to forward federal money to UNFPA because it concluded the organization’s work in China has violated Kemp-Kasten. During that time, the administration has withheld a total of nearly $235 million from UNFPA.
Officials in many parts of China have practiced a forced family planning program for nearly three decades in an attempt to curb the birth rate in the world’s most populous country. The policy limits couples in urban areas to one child and those in rural areas to two, if the first is a girl. Penalties for violations of the policy have included fines, arrests and the destruction of homes, as well as forced abortion and sterilization. Infanticide, especially of females, also has been reported.
Although Marie Stopes is not supported directly by USAID, it receives USAID-funded condoms and other contraceptives from some countries that are supported by the State Department agency, Hill said. USAID has informed American missions in those countries to make certain MSI does not receive USAID-funded contraceptives from the governments of those countries, he said.
MSI denied it supports forced abortion or sterilization, but it acknowledged in a news release it has partnered with UNFPA for 10 years to implement the U.N. organization’s family planning program in China.
MSI’s “aggressive promotion of abortion and its longstanding collaboration with China’s coercive program leave little doubt that it is not only aware of the massive human rights abuses that have resulted in that country, but is actively collaborating with it,” Steven Mosher said in an Oct. 2 commentary for LifeNews.com. The president of the Population Research Institute, Mosher is considered an expert on China’s population control policy.
The amendment invoked by the State Department to block funding to UNFPA is named after Republican Reps. Jack Kemp of New York and Robert Kasten of Wisconsin, who sponsored the measure.
Sterilization proposal for poor blasted
A Louisiana lawmaker has elicited an onslaught of criticism by proposing poor women be paid to be sterilized.
Rep. John LaBruzzo, R.-Metairie, sought to address the problem of “generational welfare” by recommending poor women be paid $1,000 apiece if they underwent sterilization voluntarily, Cybercast News Service (CNS) reported Oct. 6.
Alveda King, niece of the late Martin Luther King Jr. and a spokeswoman for Priests for Life, was among those who decried LaBruzzo’s proposal.
“Sterilizing the poor is fighting economic poverty with moral bankruptcy,” said King, a post-abortive woman, in a written statement.
“The founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, used to say, ‘More children from the fit, less from the unfit,’” she said. “A eugenicist to the core, she would have loved this idea of the government bribing poor people into sterilization. Aside from its being reprehensible, though, we have already seen that this type of plan doesn’t eliminate poverty.
“For 35 years, we have offered the poor, especially inner city African Americans, abortion as a solution to their poverty,” King said. “Can anyone seriously claim that aborting one-third of the current African-American population has left blacks better off? You can’t improve the present by killing the future.”
Franks introduces ban on race- and sex-selection abortions
Rep. Trent Franks, R.-Ariz., has introduced legislation to prevent abortions based on race and sex.
The Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, H.R. 7016, would outlaw the performance of race- and sex-based abortions, coercion to produce such procedures and the acceptance of funds to underwrite such abortions. The punishment would be a maximum of five years in prison, plus a possible fine.
A study published in March in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported Chinese, Korean and Asian Indian parents in the United States are using technologies to produce male births after they have one or two daughters. The researchers surmised some Asian parents are using ultrasound technology to determine the sex of unborn babies, resulting in a subsequently inordinate number of abortions of girls, according to the report.
An inordinate number of African-American babies have been aborted for many years. African Americans made up 12.3 percent of the U.S. population, according to the 2000 census, but black women had 36.3 percent of the abortions that same year, the Centers for Disease Control reported.
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