“The purely ideological decision of one country.” That is how Belgian Deputy Premier Alexander De Croo described President Trump’s reinstatement of the Mexico City Policy, which protects American taxpayers from having to fund overseas organizations that perform abortions or lobby foreign governments to legalize abortion.
One group in the crossfire, the United Nations Population Fund, received taxpayer funds for decades even as it collaborated with China’s authoritarian communist government in helping enforce its brutal and anti-choice (from any perspective) policy of forced abortions. This is something the group continues to lie about to this day, after echoing Chinese government propaganda for years about the “strictly voluntary” nature of the so-called “one-child policy.”
A 2012 report by the House Foreign Affairs Committee stated that:
Since 1979, UNFPA has provided more than $216 million in assistance to China’s population program, primarily to Chinese government entities. China presently sits on UNFPA’s Executive Board. From the outset of their cooperation, both the Chinese regime and UNFPA denied the existence of human rights abuses in the enforcement of China’s One-Child policy. On numerous occasions, UNFPA’s Executive Director defended the Chinese program as “strictly voluntary.” Only when the accumulation of evidence and reporting made such denials untenable did UNFPA say anything different, before reverting to its habitual willingness to rely on misleading and counterfactual assurances by the Chinese government about voluntariness and coercion. UNFPA’s late attempts to portray itself as a champion of reproductive freedom in China ring hollow, and appear motivated more by public relations damage control than by a principled commitment to fundamental human rights that should have long ago severed UNFPA’s consistent support to the Chinese government.
American taxpayers can rest easy that they aren’t on the hook for this sort of thing any more. But De Croo’s and other governments have made their own ideological decision to provide at least $93 million to groups that do (presumably to the exclusion of the ones that remain eligible for U.S. funding), and private donors have stepped forward with at least $70 million more, coming to a reported total of $190 million.
Nations and philanthropists pledged close to $200 million Thursday for family planning at an international conference that aimed to make up for the gap left by President Donald Trump’s ban on U.S. funding to groups linked to abortion.
Some 50 governments attended the hastily convened one-day conference in Brussels and the funding drive was boosted by Sweden, Canada and Finland each promising 20 million euros ($21 million). Private donors like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provided tens of millions more.
So they’ll get their money, and American taxpayers won’t have to provide it. This is a win for everyone, except for poorer nations that value their sovereignty over Western cultural imperialism and the victims of forced-abortion programs, whose longstanding collaborators will continue to get their money. And of course, let’s not forget the unborn victims of abortion, who get no choice at all.
There are many worthy and uncontroversial NGOs out there that help women in developing countries, just as there are so many health clinics within America (about 95 percent of them, actually) that provide comprehensive services for women and are not attached to America’s largest abortion provider.
In any event, if there’s ever been proof that overseas abortion organizations don’t need help from the American taxpayer, this donation conference provides it. It’s a shame that any taxpayer should have to fund this, but the American taxpayer doesn’t need to.
