April 7, 2002
U.N. Agency on Population Blames U.S. for Cutbacks
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
UNITED NATIONS, April 5 — The Bush administration's decision to withhold $34 million appropriated by Congress for the United Nations Population Fund because of accusations that it condones forced abortions in China is causing the agency to cut its staff and shelve new programs, fund officials said this week.
A spokesman for the fund, Stirling Scruggs, said that according to its estimates of how the loss of $34 million would affect the recipients of family planning aid, "this could mean 2 million unwanted pregnancies, 800,000 induced abortions, 4,700 maternal deaths and 77,000 infant and child deaths."
Agency officials, including the fund's executive director, Thoraya Obaid, say the loss of a major part of its budget comes at a time when demands for contraceptives are rising in the developing world, where women are increasingly taking charge of their reproductive lives.
In a speech on Monday to the United Nations Commission on Population and Development, Ms. Obaid said that 120 million women who wanted to space births or stop having children were unable to get contraceptives. Demand is expected to rise by 40 percent over the next 15 years.
"Today, we are faced with a paradox," she said. "The need for reproductive health services is great and growing. At the same time, the funding for such services is declining."
Japan and Denmark, two other large contributors to the fund, have reduced contributions this year, citing budgetary constraints, but on a much smaller scale than the United States, which had been the fund's largest donor.
The American contribution, the equivalent of 13 percent of the agency's $260 million budget for 2002, was frozen after Representative Christopher H. Smith, a Republican of New Jersey and one of the most outspoken abortion opponents in Congress, wrote to President Bush in December charging that the population fund acquiesced in Chinese birth control policies that include forced abortions and involuntary sterilization.
The accusation that United Nations money was supporting these Chinese policies was made by the Population Research Institute, an organization that was founded by Human Life International, an anti-abortion group with branches in dozens of countries.
The research institute said a team of its investigators had evidence that American money was being used "illegally" by the population fund for forced abortions, forced contraception and forced sterilization.
The population fund has long responded to these criticisms by arguing that its work in China is limited to counties where the one-child family policy is no longer enforced. It also says that it does not use American money for Chinese programs.
Ms. Obaid went to Washington in January to ask the Bush administration to reconsider its freeze on the $34 million. After that, fund officials say, the administration said it would send a fact-finding delegation to China to settle once and for all the recurrent questions about United Nations family planning work there. That delegation has not yet been formed, officials here have been told.
Amy Coen, the president of Population Action International, a private organization in Washington that focuses on voluntary population planning and related health issues, criticized the freeze as motivated by domestic politics.
"When the most powerful president in the world will not release money already allocated to prevent unwanted pregnancy, to stop the spread of H.I.V./AIDS, for the poorest citizens in the world," she said, "where is the morality in that? This is pure politics."
The population fund has programs that supply condoms to men in groups at high risk for H.I.V./AIDS, and these expenditures may also be cut, fund officials say. Supplies are already scarce.
"Last year in sub-Saharan Africa, there were just three condoms for every man," Ms. Obaid said in her speech on Monday.
Patrick Friel, the fund's expert on contraceptive services, said in an interview on Thursday that demands for condoms for use outside marriage amounted to $297 million this year. If condoms dispensed within family planning programs for married couples are added to that, there would be a need worth $954 million.
Female condoms are also being distributed as widely as possible to women who can use them as both a contraceptive and a second line of defense against sexually transmitted diseases, Mr. Friel said.
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