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Friday, Oct 10, 2008
A small band of antiabortion extremists says the U.N. agency supports Chinese infanticide. The rest of the world says they're wrong, but the White House is listening.
Jun 13, 2002 | When President Bush started hinting in January that he was going to freeze $34 million that Congress had allocated to the United Nations Population Fund, it marked a complete turnaround from the administration's position just a few months before.
In his budget proposal last year, Bush asked for a $25 million appropriation for the United Nations Population Fund (also called the United Nations Fund for Population Activities or UNFPA). In written testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell said, "We recognize that UNFPA does invaluable work through its programs in maternal and child health care, voluntary family planning, screening for reproductive tract cancers, breast-feeding promotion and HIV/AIDS prevention ... We look forward to working with you and your colleagues to secure the funding necessary for UNFPA to continue these activities." Congress complied with Powell's request, appropriating $34 million for the fund.
Then Bush reversed himself. Not only has he not released the money, he's threatened to veto a bill that would force him to. And he's doing it based on nothing more than oft-disproved charges by a tiny far-right antiabortion group called Population Research Institute, which claims -- falsely -- that the UNFPA money is used for coercive abortion and sterilization in China.
"What I find so outrageous is that Bush withheld this $34 million based solely on testimony from the Population Research Institute, an arm of a far-right group," says New York Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney. "PRI is the only organization that has ever made these allegations. The administration is going against the will of Congress and the international community by allowing a small band of extremists to hamstring its foreign policy."
Despite its innocuous name, PRI is indeed extreme. The Virginia-based group is a spinoff of Human Life International, a hardcore antiabortion organization founded by Benedictine priest Paul Marx, a notorious anti-Semite known to blame Jews for abortion. In a 1993 HLI newsletter, Marx wrote, "Today, certain members of this people whose ancient religion and culture managed to survive Auschwitz and Buchenwald are presiding over the greatest Holocaust in the history of the world. American Jews have been leaders in establishing and defending the efficient destruction of more than 30 million preborn children in this country."
Marx started PRI in 1989, and according to an HLI press release from two years ago, HLI has invested more than $1 million in the group. In 1995, Marx hired Steven Mosher to head PRI.
Mosher's history is as checkered as Marx's. He was thrown out of the anthropology program at Stanford University 19 years ago for what the university, quoted at the time by Science magazine, called "illegal and seriously unethical conduct" that "endangered his research subjects." Mosher had been doing field work in his then-wife's village in Southern China, and was accused of bribing local villagers and smuggling rare coins. Perhaps most seriously, he published pictures in a popular Taiwanese magazine of Chinese women undergoing late-term abortions without concealing their faces, which could have led the government to retaliate against them.
Mosher claimed that by expelling him Stanford was caving to Chinese pressure and filed a lawsuit, which he later dropped. Since then, he's become militantly antiabortion and anti-China -- his most recent books are "Hegemon: China's Plan to Dominate Asia and the World" and the techno-thriller "China Attacks," co-written with Chuck DeVore. So he hooked up with the Population Research Institute, whose aim, according to a fundraising letter, is to "drive the final nail into the coffin of U.N. Population Fund abortionists."
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