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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Mosher believes that U.N. family planning efforts are part of a "New World Order" conspiracy. He writes, "The assault on human dignity frees the proposed world government to selectively reduce the population of the world to a manageable number." Overpopulation is a myth, Mosher contends. "In fact, underpopulation, not overpopulation, is the threat facing the world," he wrote in a 1999 press release. "By the beginning of 2000, over seventy countries representing over half the world's population will have below replacement fertility -- defined as 2.1 children per woman ... Countries with below replacement rate fertility will eventually die out. It's just a question of time." An article on the PRI's Web site claims that not only is the world not getting crowded, but that "[t]he whole world's population could fit in the state of Texas ... and very comfortably indeed."
In 1998, Marx turned PRI into a separate organization, "to enable it to operate more effectively in the secular world," according to a July 2000 press release. Mosher claimed in an e-mail interview this week that "PRI has no relationship with HLI," yet Marx is listed as the group's chairman on PRI's tax filings for the fiscal year 2000.
Under Mosher, PRI has made a mission out of targeting the UNFPA, despite the fact that U.N. law prohibits the organization from providing or funding abortion services. And he's found a valuable ally in New Jersey congressman Chris Smith.
Last October, Smith chaired a House panel on PRI's allegations and called Mosher and other members of PRI to testify before it. In a letter to President Bush dated Jan. 31, Smith urged him not to fund UNFPA, writing that "the UNFPA clearly supports a program of coercive abortion and involuntary sterilization," and that it "does more than simply operate in China."
The evidence Smith cites for this comes from "an undercover fact finding team" sent to Sihui, one of 32 counties where the UNFPA operates in China. He wrote, "The investigators were told that family planning is not voluntary in Sihui, and coercive family planning policies in Sihui include: age requirements for pregnancy; birth permits; mandatory use of IUDs; mandatory sterilization; crippling fines for non-compliance; imprisonment for non-compliance; destruction of homes and property for non-compliance; forced abortion and forced sterilization." The letter goes on to accuse UNFPA of complicity in these outrages.
Smith neglects to mention that the "investigators" were a PRI team. The PRI released a video of its findings, featuring several women, whose faces are digitally altered, talking of being forced to abort in Sihui. The implication is that since the UNFPA was operating in the county, it is responsible. The United Nations was unable to check on the video's veracity because PRI refused to release information that would allow the team to locate the women. Smith's office did not return several calls for comment.
Based on PRI's findings, Smith urges Bush to exercise a prerogative given presidents in the Kemp-Kasten Amendment, a law passed in 1985 that orders money to be withheld from any organization or program which, "as determined by the President of the United States, supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or sterilization."
Now it seems that Bush, whose press office didn't return calls for comment, has made the determination that Kemp-Kasten should apply to the UNFPA. In January the Asian Forum of Parliamentarians on Population and Development sent a plea to the president, saying, "The United Nations Population Fund assists poor countries as well as refugee populations to improve services for family planning and maternity health and to control the spread of HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases ... denying funds to UNFPA will destroy the very prospect of good family life and a better future for youth, especially in developing countries." In response, Elliott Abrams, special White House assistant for democracy and human rights, wrote that the withholding was based on "legitimate questions" about UNFPA's "association" with forced abortion and sterilization in China.
These "legitimate questions" have been answered many times before. Today, the UNFPA operates in only 32 counties in China, counties in which it is working with the Chinese government to implement voluntary family planning programs instead of coercive ones. It is hoped that these counties will serve as models as the country tries to move away from the draconian excesses of the one-child policy. Because of the attention PRI has managed to generate, says UNFPA director of information Stirling Scruggs, 145 diplomats have visited the Chinese counties where UNFPA operates. "They're the most-reviewed development projects in the world," he says. None of those diplomats have raised concerns about what they saw.
Mosher isn't wrong about China's grotesque record of coercive abortion and sterilization. "I was in China for three-and-a-half years, and I had numerous meetings to complain about instances of coercion," says Scruggs. "Everything mentioned [in PRI's report] happened in China." But it didn't happen under the auspices of the UNFPA.
