LWV logoLeague of Women Voters of the Upper Valley

Hanover, NH, Norwich, VT and neighboring towns

updated 7/29/04     Home Page >> talks at recent League forums

Saving Women’s Lives: The Right Thing to Do

Introduction

I am pleased to be invited to speak to the League of Women Voters of the Upper Valley. I have found that your web site includes the text of an excellent address to the League on November 19, 2002, by Charlotte Houde-Quimby on Reproductive and Maternal Health in Developing Countries. It includes sections on contraception, safe motherhood, and HIV/AIDS, and describes the work of the United Nations Population Fund very well indeed. I will not repeat her talk. Instead I will focus on the decisions of Presidents Reagan and two Bushes to eliminate U.S. funding to the United Nations Population Fund for spurious reasons and from political motivations. I have called my talk: "Saving Women’s Lives: The Right Thing To Do."

The United States Committee for the United Nations Population Fund

I am a retired officer of the United Nations Population Fund. At various times during my sixteen years with the U.N. Population Fund, I was responsible for building the Fund’s field staff, for overseeing the Fund’s Interregional and Non-Governmental Organization Programs, and finally for all the UNFPA’s programs in the Asia and Pacific Region. I have attended all the international conferences organized by the Fund, from Bucharest to Mexico, to Cairo, to The Hague.

Today I am the Vice-Chairman of the U.S. Committee for the United Nations Population Fund. The Committee was organized in 1998.

The mission of the U. S. Committee is to build moral, political, and financial support for the United Nations Population Fund and its work, and to increase awareness in the United States of the importance and interrelationship of reproductive health, gender equity, population growth, and sustainable development.

The U.S. Committee works collaboratively, I hope hand-in-glove, with UNFPA, and others committed to these issues to ensure that the United States government will sooner or later again provide leadership-level financial and policy support to UNFPA. It also works to increase awareness and support of the work of UNFPA and the goals of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in the American public, with philanthropic foundations, the private sector, and the media.

The Committee has received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Compton Foundation, the Forest E. Mars Trust, the General Service Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, Open Society Institute, Summit Foundation, United Nations Foundation/Better World Fund, the Wallace Global Fund, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. This list of impressive donors does not mean that the U.S. Committee is rolling in dough. Those of you who work in the non-profit world know that "more is better."

History of U.S. Funding of the United Nations Population Fund

In 1969, the United States led the international community in creating UNFPA–an organization dedicated to addressing the voluntary family planning and reproductive health needs of women and men in developing countries. I should explain the origin of the acronym "UNFPA." It stands for "United Nations Fund for Population Activities," not United Nations Family Planning Association, and this abbreviation/acronym is still used, although the General Assembly changed the name of the agency to United Nations Population Fund.

While the United States was the largest financial contributor when the UNFPA was founded, Norway was another generous donor in these early days of the Population Fund. Many years later I asked a colleague at UNFPA, a Norwegian, how it was that every year Norway’s legislature approved a generous voluntary contribution to UNFPA without the acrimonious debates and charges and counter charges that have recently marked the progress of the U.S. support for the Fund. He replied, "It’s simple. We Norwegians just believe it is the right thing to do."

Well, in any case, in the 1970s the United States was the largest contributor to UNFPA and for years it even promised to match the contributions of other nations. In 1973 the Congress approved the Helms Amendment to the Foreign Aid bill, which barred U.S. funding for abortion services at home or abroad. UNFPA’s work, which has never included abortion assistance, was not affected.

In 1985 the Congress approved the Kemp-Kasten Amendment, which prohibits U.S. funding for any international organization that the president determines "supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or sterilization." This gave a lot of room for maneuver to presidents, which they like.

In March 1985 a review of UNFPA’s work in China by the U.S. Agency for International Development found the UNFPA not to be in violation of Kemp-Kasten.

Nonetheless, in September 1985, President Reagan cut UNFPA funding by $10 million (the amount the fund was spending in China) after unfounded allegations that the agency directly or indirectly supported coercion there. A month later the Reagan Administration decided furthermore that UNFPA was in violation of Kemp-Kasten because it was judged to be involved in the management of China’s population program.

As a result of this determination, for the seven years from 1986 through 1992, no U.S. funds went to UNFPA.

What was the UNFPA program really doing in China if it was not "managing" China’s program?

When I was the officer in charge of all the Asian programs of UNFPA, including China, I had a staff of seven officers working with me in New York. Of course, everything we did was subject to approval of the Executive Director of UNFPA and the member states of the U.N. Development Program Governing Council, of which the U.S. was always a member. In Beijing we had one representative, with a program officer, and a staff of perhaps three Chinese. Hardly a staff to "manage" China’s program. I visited China half a dozen times to discuss with our staff and the Chinese government officials the progress of the UNFPA program.

What was UNFPA funding in China? The largest single project we had was a grant of 20 million dollars to pay for computers to be used for the Chinese Census. The computers, by the way, were purchased in the U.S. from IBM. UNFPA funded training of Chinese in statistics and demography, much of it in the U.S.

In 1985 I visited the State Statistics Bureau in Beijing after the census had been completed. We met in the vast computer room where the large IBM computers were humming away. These were the days when computers were so delicate that dust-free rooms had to be prepared to house them, and we visitors were all dressed in white gowns, caps, and slippers, like doctors. The Director of the Census declared with pride that China’s first modern census was complete, and he could report that on last April 10th China had a population of one billion, one hundred thirty five million, three hundred thirty five thousand, four hundred and thirty three persons. I was impressed, and said so, and I asked how long it had taken to count all the Chinese with such precision. As I recall the census itself had taken a month to complete, but the training of the staff was what took time. The director said it took a year to train enumerators to take the census. Not very many enumerators were needed, just one million.

I visited maternity hospitals in Beijing and Shanghai and Chengdu and Guang-zhou where UNFPA was providing medical equipment and assistance to schools and universities. I visited a condom factory outside Chengdu where UNFPA was funding new machinery. I visited many local family planning clinics where UNFPA was providing x-ray machines and incubators, medical instruments and contraceptives, in Xian and in Huhhot, capital of Inner Mongolia. I met the Vice-Governor of Szechwan Province who thanked us for the technical assistance they had received from the U.S. Census Bureau. UNFPA had not funded this; it was part of the U.S. Census Bureau’s international programs, so I guess the United States, too, could have been said to be involved in the "management" of China’s program.

In May of 1993, the U.S. political climate had changed and the Clinton Administration formally announced that it would resume funding UNFPA. Using his authority under the Kemp-Kasten amendment, President Clinton provided $14.5 million to UNFPA the following August.

In subsequent years, the amount of U.S. funding for UNFPA fluctuated, and while a contribution of some amount has been made in every year up to 1999, the U.S. was no longer a leader in the funding of this important part of the United Nations development work.

In the Fall of 2001, the new Bush administration reviewed UNFPA's activities and determined that UNFPA was not in violation of Kemp-Kasten and requested from Congress $25 million for UNFPA for fiscal year 2002. Secretary of State Colin Powell praised UNFPA for its "invaluable" work.

Congress on a bipartisan vote increased this amount and appropriated $34 million for UNFPA for Fiscal Year 2002.

Conservative extremists invented and circulated allegations that UNFPA was complicit in "forced abortions" in China. UNFPA replied that these charges were totally false.

In February 2002, President Bush placed a "hold" on the UNFPA appropriation.

In May 2002, a carefully chosen, experienced State Department fact-finding mission to China reported to the President, "We find no evidence that UNFPA has knowingly supported or participated in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization in the People’s Republic of China." It recommended release of the $34 million for FY 2002.

Despite this report, in July 2002, President Bush changed his mind, if not Secretary Powell’s, and invoked Kemp-Kasten, canceling the $34 million appropriated and authorized by Congress for UNFPA, and reserving it instead for USAID.

President Bush’s decision was clearly not about China’s program but about domestic politics. Right wing Christian fundamentalists, whose opinions are so firmly fixed against abortion, had influenced his decision. Their fight against abortion unfortunately comes with a human cost to others. Without U.S. support of the Fund the programs that will suffer most are those in the 140 other countries where UNFPA works. $34 million dollars was 12.5 per cent of the UNFPA budget. The Executive Director of UNFPA, Thoraya Obaid, a wonderful woman from Saudi Arabia, estimates that the $34 million could prevent two million unwanted pregnancies, nearly 800,000 induced abortions, 77,000 infant and child deaths, and 4,700 maternal deaths.

The widely divergent interpretations of Kemp-Kasten that have been employed over the years vividly illustrate the serious need to clarify the intent of the provision, so that the fate of the U.S. contribution to UNFPA is not dependent upon who occupies the White House but upon the action of the Congress.

There have been efforts to clarify the application of Kemp-Kasten. In the debate on a U.S. contribution to UNFPA in FY 2004, Congressman Joseph Crowley (D-NY) submitted an amendment to Kemp-Kasten that would have required the President to make a positive finding that UNFPA is in violation of Kemp-Kasten if he wished to avoid releasing $34 million for UNFPA. The Crowley Amendment was defeated on the House floor. New Hampshire’s two Representatives voted against the Crowley Amendment.

The FY2004 Omnibus Appropriations bill, just passed by the Congress after late night debates, allocates $432 million for international voluntary family programs, and earmarks $34 million for UNFPA. But under the Bush administration UNFPA has been denied congressionally-approved contributions for the past two years, based upon unsubstantiated charges by anti-family-planning activist groups that the Fund was complicit in human rights abuses in China. These claims have been consistently refuted by numerous high-level delegations that have visited China, and the Bush Administration’s own fact-finding mission in 2002 found no evidence faulting UNFPA. Nonetheless, U.S. funds were withheld from the U. N. agency. Will the President withhold them again?

To help prevent a repeat of this refusal to release funds, language proposed by Senator Patrick Leahy was included in the omnibus bill that prohibits further withholding of funds without a presidential determination explicitly stating how UNFPA is in violation of the long-standing Kemp-Kasten amendment.
Home www.uppervalleyleague.org      Next  >>