Bush Jihad Against UNFPA Enters Fourth Year

September 23rd, 2005 at 07:44 Björn Hallberg

Aid as a weapon, again. To further the agenda, appease conservatives Christians, to publicly castigate international organizations as something that hurts “american values”, promoting unilateralism and keeping China on the list of bad guys. The US never gets tired of willingly letting poor people suffer to promote themselves.

IPS - For the fourth year in a row, U.S. President George W. Bush has refused to contribute to the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), providing 25 million dollars of the 34 million dollars that Congress had earmarked for the agency to the child survival and health account of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Long a target of anti-abortion forces in the U.S., UNFPA, with an annual budget of about 300 million dollars, has been the world’s most important provider of family planning assistance.

In 2002, a special State Department mission found no evidence that UNFPA provided support — either moral or material — to coercive practices in China, while a British delegation praised UNFPA’s projects as a “force for good” there. Even Rice’s predecessor, Colin Powell, had publicly indicated his reservations with Bush’s action.

But to the Bush Whitehouse, the facts don’t matter. And from an ideological point of view, one can suspect that this is also some kneejerk reaction to not only birth control but the kind of more general individual choice conservatives and so called libertarians always boast about. As long as the personal choice doesn’t conflict with the religion of government that is.
This tells us a bunch of things. Most importantly about where the US is going, as the article notes, not even Reagan and Bush Sr cut the funding off (but rather ear-marked it for not being sent to China).
And how many other UN bills is the US *NOT* footing at the moment? I guess they are mighty proud of sending thousands of women to their death in order to promote their folly. Quite frankly it’s despicable.

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