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Ed. Note: This article was taken from a July 17 entry in the blog Daily Kos. The name of the author is unknown.
If somebody is calculating the cost of the Bush administration's ceaseless pandering to their right-wing base, the estimate should include at least 80,000 deaths because the administration continues to stupidly and cruelly withhold assistance for international family planning programs:
The Bush administration announced yesterday that it is withholding the United States' contribution to the UN Population Fund for the third straight year, once again accusing the family-planning organization of supporting coercive abortion in China.
The decision to withhold $34 million -- about 10 percent of the fund's total budget -- from the world's largest international source of funding for family planning came on the last day of the International AIDS Conference in Bangkok, where US officials emphasized abstinence as an important way to combat AIDS.
In Washington, family-planning activists and some members of Congress said the decision was a political move to curry favor with conservative voters who want to restrict family-planning practices worldwide. Some cited a 2002 investigation by a State Department team and a 2003 State Department human rights report, which both said that the fund was working to combat coercive family-planning practices in China...
''We recognize that the aim of the UN Population Fund is to promote a transition to truly voluntary family planning in China, but the circumstances of their operations are such that they are assisting the Chinese in managing their programs," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said. ''These Chinese programs have penalties that amount to coercion."
Boucher said the State Department had concluded that the US government was prohibited from giving the funds because of the 1985 Kemp-Kasten Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for organizations that support forced sterilization or abortion...
Initially, the Bush administration showed support for the Population Fund. During his confirmation hearing, Powell praised the fund's ''invaluable work" and released $25 million for the fund in 2001, according to Sarah Craven, the fund's Washington representative. In 2002, Congress increased the figure to $34 million.
But the administration opted to hold up the funds after Bush received a letter in February 2002 urging him to do so from three Republican leaders in Congress. Richard Armey of Texas, who was House majority leader at the time; Tom DeLay of Texas, who was majority whip; and Dennis J. Hastert of Illinois, speaker of the House, wrote that the fund essentially ''participates in the management" of China's coercive family-planning programs.
If the Chinese program was coercing women into terminating pregnancies, then we should withhold our financial support. While the Chinese probably did impose unwanted abortions in the past, all the available evidence indicates that they not only stopped that practice, it also suggests that the Chinese program supported by UNFPA has been exemplary:
In 2003 a team of nine religious and faith-based organization leaders and ethicists, representing Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant groups, conducted a mission to China. They concluded that the UNFPA is not involved in any forced abortion or involuntary sterilization and is a catalyst for positive change.
In 2002, the administration sent its own hand-picked Blue Ribbon Panel to investigate allegations of UNFPA involvement in coercive abortion in China. The team found "no evidence that UNFPA has knowingly supported or participated in the management of a program of coercive abortion" and recommended that the "$34 million which has already been appropriated be released to UNFPA."
Also in 2002, the United Kingdom sent an all-party group of three Parliamentarians who determined that the UNFPA in China was a "force for good."
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