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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
When right-wing zealots got $34 million cut from global family-planning funds, two women vowed to raise money from their friends to replace it. A million dollars later, they're just getting started.
May 2, 2003 | Eight and a half months ago, Jane Roberts and Lois Abraham were strangers, but both were equally outraged by President Bush's decision to freeze $34 million allocated to international family planning. Working separately, they sent out e-mails to everyone they knew, asking them to donate a dollar and pass the message on.
People did pass it on. Soon, Roberts and Abraham learned about each other and joined forces to form 34 Million Friends. On May 1, after ceaseless e-mailing, letter writing and phone calling, they held a press conference in Manhattan to make an announcement: They'd raised their first million. One hundred thousand people, most of them Americans, sent in donations to try to replace the money their government withheld.
It all began last July, when Bush caved in to pressure from the religious right to deny the United Nations Population Fund, or UNFPA, the $34 million Congress had allocated to it. Bush himself had requested $25 million of that funding in his budget proposal, but he was later persuaded by the claims of the Population Research Institute, a tiny group opposed to family planning, that the fund supports coerced abortions in China.
The Population Research Institute is a shadowy Virginia-based organization dedicated to "stopping human rights abuses committed in the name of family planning, and through research and education to dispelling the myth of overpopulation." Its Web site contains a variety of odd theories about global population control programs. Among them is the idea that the high incidence of HIV/AIDS among African women is the result of "the targeting of women and girls for invasive contraceptive, sterilization and abortion procedures by so-called Sexual and Reproductive Health programs." Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., a longtime PRI ally, called members of PRI to testify before the House, giving its charges a measure of legitimacy in right-wing circles.
The United Nations, England and the Bush administration itself have all sent delegations to China to investigate the allegations, and all have found them baseless. The administration's own team reported, "We find no evidence that UNFPA has knowingly supported or participated in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization in the PRC [Peoples Republic of China]. We therefore recommend that [the] $34 million which has already been appropriated be released to UNFPA."
Bush cut the funding anyway. As a result, the UNFPA was forced to cease family planning programs in rural Kenya, and to curtail obstetric training for doctors in Bangladesh and for midwives in Algeria, among other cutbacks. The agency estimates that the $34 million could have prevented 3 million unwanted pregnancies, over 7,000 maternal deaths and 1.2 million abortions.
Reading about what Bush had done, Roberts, a retired French teacher from Redlands, Calif., sent a letter to her local newspaper asking, "As an exercise in outraged democracy, would 34 million Americans please send $1 each? This would right a terrible wrong." She later e-mailed everyone she knew with the same request. Meanwhile, Lois Abraham, an attorney in Taos, N.M., e-mailed 40 people, mostly other lawyers, asking them to donate a dollar to UNFPA and to forward the information to their friends.
Both contacted the fund to tell them what they were doing, and officials put them in touch with each other. Soon, communicating via e-mail, they'd launched 34 Million Friends of UNFPA. The idea, Roberts says, was both to make up for the lost money and to show that the country supports international family planning even if the president doesn't.
