Bush Admin. Scraps Agency’s Plans to Back Pro-Abortion Conference
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
April 26, 2004
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — Just one day after a few hundred thousand abortion advocates gathered in the nation’s capital, the Bush administration is pulling the plug on a federal agency’s plan to support an international conference that is backing abortion.
The Global Health Council, which is organizing the four-day conference, expected to receive support from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
The "reproductive health" conference features several pro-abortion groups and other political groups that are spending millions to defeat Bush, which led the Bush administration to scrap the funding plans.
"We expect they will be notified officially" today, a senior government official told the Washington Times. "The conference has increasingly moved from a teaching forum to a platform for expressing partisan political views."
Both the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the UNFPA, which has been criticized for backing China’s coercive one-child policy of forced abortions and sterilizations, were heavily involved in the conference.
Doortje Braeken of Planned Parenthood and Thorya Ahmed Obaid of the U.N. Population Fund are set to speak at the June event, the Times reports.
Event organizers have planned for one day of the event to focus on lobbying members of Congress and the Bush administration representative told the Washington Times that funding such activity is a misuse of taxpayer dollars.
The Times reports that USAID has planned to spend $190,000 on the conference.
Organizers of the "Youth and Health: Generation on the Edge," conference angered Department of Health and Human Services officials when they included the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) in a recent promotional brochure.
Pro-life members of Congress wrote a letter last week to HHS officials complaining of the funding.
The House Republican Study Committee, a group of pro-life Republican congressmen, drafted a letter to HHS Secretary Tommy
Thompson and USAID administrator Andrew Natsios expressing ”great concern and disappointment” over funding of the conference by their agencies.
