Over at The Inkwell, the IWF’s blog, one of the Charlottes explains why feminists oppose Ellen Sauerbrey, Bush’s nominee for “Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration at the United Nations”:
[She] supports the Bush administration’s withholding $34 million from the U.N. Population Fund because the agency has made financial contributions to China’s policy of forced-abortions to limit family size.
The IWF has no position on abortion…but I’m going out on a limb and say that many of us would agree that forced abortion is wrong.
Charlotte misstates the issue. Everyone, liberal and conservative alike, agrees that forced abortion is wrong. And everyone agrees that it would be wrong for UNFPA (the UN Population fund) to support forced abortion. There’s no controversy there.
The controversy is over whether or not the accusations against UNFPA are true. Every Western agency that has sent investigators to China to try to verify the accusations (made by an ultra-right-wing, anti-birth-control group) has come away convinced the accusations are untrue – including a group sent by Bush’s own state department. Furthermore, virtually all the investigators came away convinced that UNFPA was doing a lot to help the women of China – not by giving them forced abortions, but by giving them more choices.
For instance, the UK investigators, headed by Edward Leigh, a pro-life MP who has frequently criticized UNFPA, wrote:
The UK MP delegation was convinced that the UNFPA programme is a force for good, in moving China away from abuses such as forced-family planning, sterilisation and abortions…. It is vitally important that the UNFPA remains actively involved in China, with continued financial support from the UK and other Western Governments.
We all want less abusive practices in China. But the one western agency which is effectively working in China to change abusive practices is UNFPA, and defunding them is a step in the wrong direction. That’s why feminists who care about helping women in China – and in hundreds of other countries where UNFPA operates, providing essential help and medical care – are right to oppose Ellen Sauerbrey’s nomination.
For a detailed discussion of how paltry the evidence against UNFPA is – and how group after group, from all over the idealogical spectrum, has found the charges against UNFPA baseless – see this earlier post.
Is it not the case that the withheld $34 million was in fact given to USAID for their family planning programs?
The result was not less family planning, but merely a different allocation of those resources.
Yes, that’s true – although since the aid is now being disbursed through the US government, it’s more politicized, and also goes to fewer of the most needy places. I’d also argue that moving money from a group with a long track record of effectiveness, to a brand-new group, is seldom a way of making sure money is well spent.
With all due respect, Richard, I think your point really does nothing to defend the IWF position I was criticizing in this post.
With all due respect, Richard, I think your point really does nothing to defend the IWF position I was criticizing in this post.
I’m not sure the IWF position is worth defending.
From my personal view, I just don’t see how “uncoercive” abortion can possibly be in a country like China with such a strong cultural bias permitting gender selection abortions. Just like an American woman doesn’t need to be kicking and screaming to be raped, the fact that a Chinese woman walks into a clinic on her own and requests an abortion of her female fetus does not make her decision “unforced” when she knows what everyone else in the family will think about her giving birth to a second daughter.
In my view, the unspoken view was probably that the funds were withheld because the UNFPA does anyabortion at all — coerced or not, and the forced abortion was just a pre-text. My point is only, why do I care? If my town has two abortion clinics run by two different companies, and one closes down based on rightwing lies, and the other opens a second clinic to replace it, why should I waste my time on the issue?
Since U.S. contributions weren’t going to China anyway, even when they were contributing to the UNFPA, the critique is essentially that the U.S. is doing lots of non-abortion family planning, and the UNFPA will be required to do more abortion family planning. It just works out to a different division of labor?
I have seen to evidence that USAIDS does a bad job of what it does. Is your concern really just an inefficient allocation of resources? If so, I can point you to a number of more egregious examples than a world with two independent family planning organizations.