I know I’m probably one of about six people who cares about this, but it’s important to me and I’m hoping to bump the overall number to maybe eight or nine.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page today offered a spirited defense of Ellen Sauerbrey, President Bush’s choice to be Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, despite her obvious lack of qualifications. In its reasoning, the paper badly misstated important facts.
Among [Sauerbrey’s] alleged sins is that she supports the administration’s decision to withhold $34 million from the U.N. Population Fund because some of the agency’s contributions go to China’s appalling forced-abortion policy.
The Population Fund is one of the principal cheerleaders of China’s one-child policy, which has been enforced through fines, imprisonment, forced abortion, sterilizations and even, human-rights groups charge, infanticide. Several weeks ago Mr. Bush invoked a 20-year-old policy — known as the Kemp-Kasten Amendment — which prohibits federal funding of “any organization or program which supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.”
One would think that women’s organizations would applaud this decision — and the appointment of an American woman who champions it. Mandatory limitations on family size and involuntary sterilizations hardly represent “reproductive freedom” or “a woman’s right to choose.”
If the U.N. Population Fund did support such a policy, the Journal’s point might make sense. Unfortunately for the paper’s editorial board, they’re completely wrong. The U.N. Population Fund does not contribute to, nor is it a principal cheerleader for, China’s forced-abortion policy.
In 2001, when right-wing complaints about the Population Fund and China first arose, the U.N. launched an investigation. Niek Biegman, a former Dutch ambassador to NATO, led the probe and found the charges to be false.
After his trip to China, Biegman concluded, “The [Population Fund] is very much in the business of helping the Chinese government fulfill its obligation under the Cairo Plan of Action, which is entirely based on a voluntary approach to family planning.” He says that with [the Population Fund’s] help, the Chinese tested this “new paradigm” in six counties, later expanded to 32. “The UNFPA is expressly active in those cantons where [the Chinese] changed their policy to move away from coercion towards a voluntary policy and a choice of family planning methods,” he says.
In other words, the program has helped steer China away from draconian policies.
But the U.N. could be wrong about reviewing its own work, so in 2002, England dispatched officials to launch an independent investigation. The delegation was led by a Catholic member of the Conservative Party, who concluded, “My personal line is British or U.S. funds should not be used for coercive family planning, and I found no evidence of such practices in China.”
Not satisfied with the report from England or the studies done by 60 other international observers, the Bush administration sent its own team. In May 2002, the American investigators found “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].”
True to form, the Bush White House suppressed the report, literally hiding it from public view for two months.
Despite overwhelming evidence, the administration ultimately overruled Colin Powell and both houses of Congress and became the first president in four decades to pull U.S. financial support for the U.N. Population Fund. The reason? Alleged ties between the Fund and forced abortions in China. (They really do “make their own reality.”)
The Wall Street Journal either a) knows all this and is intentionally trying to deceive its readers; or b) wrote its lead editorial without getting its facts straight. Which is it? Carpetbagger reports, you decide.