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Produced for LMC-TVbyFran Snedeker |
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Produced for LMC-TVbyFran Snedeker |
President Bush is holding "hostage to politics" for "untrue" reasons funding earmarked for the U.N. Population Fund, which the organization could use to prevent two million unplanned pregnancies and 4,700 maternal deaths worldwide, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial says. According to the Journal-Constitution, Bush, for the fourth consecutive year, is withholding $34 million in funding from UNFPA because he says the organization supports coerced abortions in China. However, "[t]wo independent review panels and Bush's own team of investigators found no credible evidence that [UNFPA] underwrote abortions or involuntary sterilizations in China," the editorial says. Bush decided to "persist with the destructive boycott" because "it's a sop to the extremists in his party, for whom the United Nations represents a cesspool of liberalism and for whom sex education can be summarized in a single word: abstinence," the Journal-Constitution says. The UNFPA funding could "expand maternal health and HIV prevention efforts," but instead "fanatics" are trying to "export" abstinence-only sex education policies to places such as sub-Saharan Africa, where women and girls constitute about 60% of the region's HIV-positive population, the editorial says (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 10/19).
"For years, UNFPA has been guilty of shamelessly supporting and whitewashing crimes against humanity by putting a U.N. seal of approval on a program based on forced abortion and coercive population control," Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) writes in an Journal-Constitution opinion piece. The State Department this year said that in China's Hunan province and other areas in which the UNFPA operates, "official regulations mandate forced abortion and crushing fines for those who do not obey its enforcers," according to Smith. UNFPA's presence in China "provides cover for the Chinese government to continue to perform these human rights violations," and the U.S. "cannot and should not take part in subsidizing these horrors," Smith says. "By withholding funding for UNFPA, our president and our country stand with the oppressed by refusing to cooperate with their oppressor, sending a strong message that we will not fund the brutal and oppressive lapdogs of the Chinese," Smith writes, concluding, "Other countries need to hold UNFPA and the Chinese population control program accountable" at the International Criminal Court "for crimes against humanity" (Smith, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 10/19).