Posted on 07/17/2002 6:08:22 AM PDT by rhema
Accusing the White House of playing political games with the lives of poor women overseas, pro-abortion members of Congress pressed President Bush Tuesday to explain why he has held up $34 million for U.N. family planning programs that have looked the other way as China has implemented a policy of coercive abortions and sterilizations.
A group of 48 pro-abortion members of Congress sent a letter to Bush asking that he release the findings of a U.S. delegation that traveled to China in early May to see how the funds are used. The group asked Bush to meet with them so they could "share our understanding" of how U.N. Population Fund programs in China operate.
Congress approved the $34 million last year, and Bush signed it into law, but the funds have not been released. Pro-life organizations point out that the U.N. program tolerates abortions and sterilization performed by force in China, an accusation that program officials and abortion supporters deny.
In their letter, lawmakers expressed dismay at media reports saying Bush was thinking of cutting the funds, and said such a policy would indicate a sharp turn away from his administration's previously stated support for the program.
"For the past 18 months, your administration believed that the UNFPA was performing a vital service around the world," the letter said. "We fear that this decision is being made based not on the facts, or on what is in the best interests of the lives of women, but rather on political calculations."
"We urge you to examine the facts and ignore the pleas from anti-family planning groups that have made unsubstantiated claims about the work of the UNFPA in China," the lawmakers said.
However, Serrin Foster, president of Feminists for Life, says documented abuses in China would never be tolerated in the U.S.
"If women in America were given age requirements for pregnancy, issued birth permits, issued mandatory IUD's, forcibly sterilized or forced to undergo an abortion and then fined or imprisoned for noncompliance, no one would support it," Foster exaplined. "President Bush is clearly demonstrating his support for women by withholding UNFPA funding."
White House aides say Bush has not made a decision on when to release the family planning money, and said that he is thinking about cutting off the funds.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters Monday that the administration intended to release the delegation's report when Bush decides what to do about the funding. Since Bush has not made a decision, "I'm not in a position to give any more details of the report," Boucher said.
The delegation's report, submitted to the White House within days of their return from China, could resolve the matter, lawmakers said. They said they suspect the group found no evidence that the funds go toward forced abortion.
"If the report was bad news for population funding ... that report would have been all over the newspapers yesterday," said pro-abortion Rep. Lynn Woolsey, a California Democrat.
"The administration will not let us see it," said pro-abortionRep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY). She accused a key presidential advisor, Karl Rove, of squashing the report and "catering to the right wing" for political purposes. Lawmakers suspect its content is similar to a report by a British delegation that visited China a month earlier.
The report by the British delegation, dated July 2 and submitted to international development secretary Clare Short, said they did not find evidence that the U.N. funding was misused.
However, pro-life advocates say the British reporters, and likely the American investigators as well, were put on a show by Chinese officials and had no chance to dicover the abuses other researchers have found.
"Those who choose to disbelieve the women who testified in an undercover investigation in Sihui County, China, that family planning was not voluntary need to examine the documents presented at a House International Relations Committee hearing on October 17, 2001," Feminist for Life's Foster said.
One investigator familiar with the Chinese population control abuses agreed.
Population Research Institute President Steve Mosher, the first U.S. social scientist to document China's controversial "one-child policy" in 1979-80, said any team appointed with Beijing's consent and which planned to operate openly in the country would not have "a snowball's chance in hell of finding accurate information.
Blash(v.t.): to denigrate disingenuously, hypocritically, and gratuitously (used only by pro-abortion zealots in the furtherance of their grisly cause)
Acctually, more would support it than you think. There are millions of leftists whose main concern is population growth and view such actions as appropriate.
Those pro-abortion leftists may have the undivided, fawning attention of the pro-abortion media, but they're greatly outnumbered by Americans who have compassion for the unborn.
Check out this article:
Who are the real abortion extremists? The media don't exactly trumpet these abortion poll results
As to this article, and the screeching of the Dems, all I can say is that they never let the facts get in the way of politics. Especially when it's the politics of death they're screeching about.
Why should they start now? When out-and-out lies were the underpinnings of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, even a little truth and candor would sound the death knell of the pro-death movement.
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