President Trump Defunded UN Group That Supports China’s Population Control, Joe Biden Didn’t

International   |   Micaiah Bilger   |   Jul 3, 2020   |   6:39PM   |   Washington, DC

President Donald Trump took a strong stand for the rights of women and children when he defunded the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in 2017 because of its connections to forced abortions in China.

That decision has increasing significance after the AP reported harrowing new details this week about the oppressive population control measures that still are occurring in the communist country. And it raises questions about the November election and the likelihood of pro-abortion Democrat Joe Biden restoring that funding as President Barack Obama did during his administration.

For many years, pro-life advocates have been exposing China’s massive human rights abuses through its oppressive population control measures. Under its one child policy, the communist country forced women to abort their unborn babies through all nine months of pregnancy and penalized families with huge fines and jail time if they had a second child.

About five years ago, China loosened its one child policy, but pro-life advocates warned that forced abortion practices continue.

Based on these concerns, Trump took action. Starting in 2017, he ended Obama-era funding to UNFPA, a United Nations population control agency that promotes abortions worldwide. UNFPA has a long history of supporting China’s population control regime, which includes forced and coerced abortions and sterilizations and persecution of families with “illegal” second or third children.

Earlier this week, the AP exposed how these abuses are still a problem. It reported about police raids on families’ homes in search of illegal children, families going into hiding to protect their children, government intimidation and more.

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According to the report: “One woman, After Gulnar Omirzakh, said the government ordered her to have an IUD inserted after her third child. Two years later, officials turned up at her house and told her she had three days to pay a $2,685 fine for having more than two children. She said: ‘God bequeaths children on you. To prevent people from having children is wrong… They want to destroy us as a people.’”

Chinese government leaders slammed the report as “fake news,” but the AP’s findings are not new.

Decades ago, Steven W. Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, was one of the first to expose the forced abortions and other horrific human rights abuses in China.

He wrote in 2012: “It is well known that those who violate the one-child policy have sometimes been subjected to coerced abortions or, if they have already given birth, have been forced to pay punitive fines and have been sterilized. But it has also recently come to our attention that Chinese villagers who cannot afford to pay these fines have their ‘illegal’ children abducted and sold by Chinese population control officials.”

Trump ended tens of millions of dollars in support to UNFPA because of these and other revelations, but Democrat presidents have a history of funding it.

According to information from the Family Research Council, both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush cut off funding to UNFPA during their administrations. In 1993, President Bill Clinton resumed funding, but for fiscal year 1999 signed a foreign aid appropriations bill that zeroed out funding for UNFPA. Funding to UNFPA was again completely cut off under President George W. Bush.

In 2008, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell explained: “UNFPA’s support of, and involvement in, China’s population-planning activities allows the Chinese government to implement more effectively its program of coercive abortion. Therefore, it is not permissible to continue funding UNFPA at this time.”

However, President Obama resumed U.S. taxpayer funding of UNFPA in 2009.  From 2009 to 2016, over $300 million was appropriated for UNFPA.

Biden was vice president under Obama, and he promised that one of his first acts as president would be to restore funding to Planned Parenthood, the billion-dollar abortion chain. Recently, he also abandoned his long-time support for the Hyde Amendment and embraced his party’s position on taxpayer-funded abortions. If elected, he likely would restore funding to UNFPA, too.

UNFPA has been found to be complicit with coercive population control in China in the past.  The agency denies that it has supported forced abortion.  According to a Washington Times report, however, UNFPA’s former head, Dr. Nafis Sadik, received the Population Prize Award from the Chinese State Family Planning Commission in 2002.