US Restores Funding to UNFPA, Lifeline to Women Around the World

American abortion politics often have a greater impact on women’s health abroad than at home. Republican presidents depend on the support of the anti-abortion movement, but there’s only so much they can do domestically, constrained as they are by the Supreme Court and the political realities of a broadly if ambivalently pro-choice electorate. So, ever since Ronald Reagan, they have used foreign policy to reward their base, imposing the global gag rule and freezing the U.S. contribution to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Obama, like Clinton before him, revoked the gag rule during his first week in office. Now, under his leadership, the United States is going to start contributing to the UNFPA once again, rejoining most of the other countries in the world in backing a global agency that does life-saving and life-enhancing work all over the planet.

The just-passed 2009 omnibus spending bill contains $50 million for UNFPA. Conservatives tried hard to thwart the appropriation – in the Senate, most Republicans voted for an amendment sponsored by Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker that would have cut the funding. It failed, 55-39. But the agency remaining the bete noir of influential conservatives, and the controversy over the U.S. contribution to it isn’t going away. The right will just find other ways to attack it.

The UNFPA works in more than 150 countries to promote reproductive and sexual health and safe motherhood. It offers technical and financial assistance to help countries expand access to family planning and lessen maternal mortality by training midwives and doctors and upgrading health centers. It works to fight fistula and prevent new HIV infections. The vast majority of the world’s nations support it – in 2007, according to the agency’s annual report, 182 countries contributed a total of $457.1 million. The United States, of course, was not among them.

Indeed, Bush’s initial decision to defund the UNFPA was an early and stark warning that, under his leadership, American policy would be in thrall to the religious right. Probably at Colin Powell’s behest, Bush’s first budget actually asked for a $25 million appropriation for the agency, the same as the year before. In written testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Powell had said, “We recognize that the 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.” Congress responded by exceeded the administration’s request, appropriating $34 million.

Within days, though, the right leapt into action. Several dozen congressmen urged the president to freeze the US contribution, citing the report of an anti-family planning Catholic organization, The Population Research Institute, that the UNFPA was involved in coercive abortions in China. A State Department team went to China to investigate, and concluded that the charges were baseless. A three-person British delegation, led by anti-abortion Tory MP Edward Leigh, also undertook a fact-finding mission. Upon returning, Leigh told The Washington Times that “there was evidence UNFPA is trying to persuade China away from the program of strict targets and assessments. My personal line is British or U.S. funds should not be used for coercive family planning, and I found no evidence of such practices in China.” In the end, none of this mattered. Bush froze the funds – which represented 12 percent of the agency’s budget – anyway.

Now that Democrats are running things, we’re seeing a return to reality-based policymaking on women’s health. Even out of power, though, the right has found ways to interfere with UNFPA. In 1999, during NATO’s war in Kosovo, the UNFPA worked to provide reproductive health to Kosovar Albanian refugees. A systematic rape campaign by Serb forces had left many with unwanted pregnancies, and so the agency offered emergency contraception and tried to facilitate access to safe abortion, which was legal in both Kosovo and Albania. The UNFPA also provided safe delivery kits, including soap, razor blades and plastic sheeting. All of this was standard practice and would have received little attention, had the Population Research Institute not gotten involved.

A few weeks after the bombing stopped, a PRI consultant named Austin Ruse showed up in Albania on a “fact-finding” tour. “The concern was that the refugee women were being coerced into sterilizations and even abortions,” he wrote in an article titled “UN Pro-life Lobbying: Full Contact Sport.” As even Ruse acknowledged, they weren’t. “In the eight days I was there, I discovered only one case that could be considered an abuse,” he wrote. “A peasant woman in Vlora had been given an abortion at the government’s regional hospital and not been told of the negative medical consequences to her.” Nevertheless, Ruse insisted that the UNFPA was aiding Slobodan Milosevic’s campaign to ethnically cleanse the Kosovars, a slander he spread among both people in the region and sympathetic right-wing pundits at home, where it made its way into The New York Post, among other places.

Niek Biegman, Holland’s NATO representative heard the rumors while visiting Dutch troops in the field. He called it “criminally irresponsible.” After all, Biegman told me, had the traumatized Kosovars believed that the UNFPA was complicit with the genocidal Milosevic, “they might have killed the UNFPA people.”

Out of power once again, opponents of global family planning will surely find new fronts to fight on. Given the economic crisis, conservative congressmen may demagogue against UNFPA support in much the same way that they did against contraception provisions in the stimulus bill. People who work in development and women’s health know that giving women control over their fertility is a crucial way to save lives and combat poverty. They are going to have to communicate this to a public that may balk at what will surely be painted as at best a frivolous foreign expenditure. While Congress’s move to restore the UNFPA’s funding is a first step worth celebrating, it’s not the end of the battle.