U.N. plans ways to limit births: the United Nations population fund supports abortion and sterilization programs throughout the third world and is seeking to impose birth-control methods as human rights

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 21, 1999 | by Catherine Edwards

A delegate who attended the preparatory committee meeting in New York during March asked Insight not to reveal his name. He says that when he expressed concern about proposed U.N. reproductive-rights policies he was harassed and intimidated by other delegates who took the U.N. line. "The delegates fear for their jobs," explains Austin Ruse of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute.

Alex Marshall, a UNFPA spokesman, assured Insight in May that the United Nations has no ideology. Yet accreditation at the UNFPA's recent forum in The Hague was put into the hands of the World Population Federation, or WPF, an aggressive promoter of population control. Not coincidentally, only four of 720 accredited NGOs were pro-life. "We tried to get a balance," says Joke van Kampen of the Netherlands-based WPE "Other prolife groups applied but we felt that four groups was a reasonable balance to the others." Among the other groups were 80 chapters of Planned Parenthood.

At the preparatory committee meeting in New York, the host for the NGO forum was Population and Communications International, or PCI, a group that creates soap operas to air in developing countries to encourage population control, AIDS prevention and empowerment of women and girls. Says spokesman Tony Davis, "We hope that girls and women should not be thought of as baby-bearers. We create positive characters in soap operas who model more-progressive ideas and the negative characters maintain the more-traditional values." PCI receives funding from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, as well as from population-control advocates Ted Turner and Bill Gates. PCI also receives funding from the UNFPA.

Last year Congress cut off funding for the UNFPA because of complicity in China's coercive abortion programs in which women in their third trimester may be carried off in pig baskets for forced abortions. Most recently, the UNFPA caused a stir when it shipped abortifacient morning-after pills to Kosovo refugees, who mostly are Muslims and do not believe in birth control. A UNFPA official told Enza Ferrara, a physician at the hospital in Scutari, Albania, that the Kosovar refugees need emergency contraceptives "because they are too many. We have to stop them reproducing.... Don't you see they are refugees; they can't have children!"

UNFPA has maintained population-control programs in Peru for more than 20 years and helps fund the government's population-control programs. In April a U.N. investigating commission confirmed that these funds were used by the ministry of health in the forced sterilization of 243 women. The 1994 Cairo program of action on population and development, to which Peru is a signatory, explicitly forbids forced sterilization. There is a UNFPA sign on the door of the family-planning clinic in Marcavelica, Peru, at which investigators say sterilizations occurred. Diego Palacios, UNFPA's Lima-based administrator, assures Insight he is unfamiliar with the clinic, declares that the UNFPA sign on its door in Insight's photograph must be an old one -- and repeats again and again that, no matter what villagers say, no forced sterilizations took place. Maria Mulatillo is one woman who experienced coercion to be sterilized. Mulatillo says she had to remove her child from a nutrition program after she refused sterilization at a government clinic.