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January 31, 2009

STEPHANIE SALTER: Sorting fact from fiction on money for U.N. Population Fund

By Stephanie Salter

TERRE HAUTE — You probably heard about Barack Obama reinstating U.S. funding for abortion in other countries. You know, taking your taxpayer dollars to provide, or even force, abortions on women all around the world?

Too bad what you heard is a lie.

But then, a headline that reads, “Obama Reinstates Funding for U.N. Program That Rescues Women from Fistula Death and Suffering” just isn’t going to rouse the pro-life political troops the way a repeated lie about abortion and the United Nations Population Fund will.

Known by the acronym of its original title, UNFPA is a women’s health and education program that began in 1969 and became a political football during the Reagan administration. Not long ago, Timothy Wirth, a former congressman from Colorado and the current president of the United Nations Foundation, summed up the situation under George W. Bush:

“For the past seven years, UNFPA funding has been a victim of false accusations and misinformation that had everything to do with politics and nothing to do with sound policy.”

Those politics led to annual overrides by the Bush administration of millions of dollars allocated by Congress. In all, Bush denied the UNFPA about $244 million in funding.

His first week in office, Obama reinstated U.S. allocations.

Here are some facts that routinely are left out of news stories about the UN fund — even by the “liberal” mainstream media.

n The UNFPA’s central mission has been and still is to combat a shameful reality:

In all but developed nations like ours, reproductive-related illness, injury and other medical conditions that could be prevented or treated are the leading cause of death in women of childbearing age. Every 60 seconds in these nations, a woman dies in childbirth or of complications from pregnancy; 20 suffer serious pregnancy-related injuries.

The UNFPA does not perform abortions or promote or support abortion as a method of birth control. Repeat — the UNFPA does not perform abortions or promote or support abortion as a method of birth control.

Neither does it promote or aid coerced abortion or sterilization, a false allegation that has been shot down by government-appointed investigators from the United States and Great Britain.

UNFPA workers in more than 150 nations do provide care and access to information about a wide range of reproductive and sexual health issues, including HIV/AIDS; safe and effective contraceptives; safe and healthy pregnancies, deliveries and post-natal care; ritual genital mutilation; rape as a consequence of war; and — when necessary — medical treatment for botched abortions, and counseling about safe, legal abortion procedures.

• Among the UNFPA’s top priorities is obstetric fistula.

Unheard of now in developed nations, fistula is the result of improper or no medical care for a mother during prolonged labor. Usually in such cases, the baby dies and, if the mother survives, severe internal injuries leave her with a lifelong inability to control her bowels or bladder.

The majority of these women are viewed as damaged goods. They are abandoned by their husbands and families. Unable to work and with no resources to seek corrective medical care, their existence is a living hell.

Fistula also develops as a result of multiple rapes, the systematic violation of women and girls that still accompanies many wars. In 2003, according to the UNFPA’s Campaign to End Fistula, thousands of women emerged in eastern Congo with traumatic fistula caused by gang rapes committed during five years of war.

• When the UNFPA began 40 years ago, one of its most passionate supporters was then the United States ambassador to the U.N., George H.W. Bush. Until he followed Ronald Reagan into the White House, Bush understood that substandard reproductive health care and a lack of control over pregnancy were responsible for death, poverty and paralyzed economic development in emerging societies.

But Bush had been Reagan’s vice president and was beholden to him and to the religious right who Reagan had rewarded by denying congressional funding to the UNFPA.

When Bill Clinton was elected, he immediately reinstated the funding. George W. Bush allowed allocation for one year, then followed his father’s and Reagan’s path. Obama’s executive order again reversed this shameful national course.

How do U.S. policies compare with the rest of the world?

No one else plays football with women’s lives as we do. In fact, during de-funding administrations, the United States has stood alone against 180 other countries that choose to fund the UNFPA.

In 2002, the absurdity of U.S. policy reached its apex. The only excuse the Bush administration could offer for denying funding was an unsubstantiated charge that the UNFPA supported coerced abortions and involuntary sterilization in China.

When separate fact-finding commissions, appointed by the U.S. and British governments, found “no evidence” that the fund had knowingly engaged in such activities, the White House sank to a new low.

Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, a strong advocate of the UNFPA, was forced to turn 180 degrees and defend a policy switch that U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy termed “an embarrassment and a travesty” that “flies in the face of the facts, of the law and of the intent of Congress.”

Even though the UNFPA did not support or participate in forced abortions or sterilization, Powell said, the United States had to deny monetary support to all of the countries served by the fund. Why? Because the UNFPA staff worked with the Chinese government, which implicitly supported such coercive tactics through its one-child-per-couple mandate.

As critics of de-funding argued at the time, such technicalities never seemed to apply when the issue was granting China (and its government) most favored nation trading status with us.

Barack Obama has not reinstated abortion or abortion funding. He has placed the lives and health of poor women — and their children — before the demands of a misguided minority of Americans who would sacrifice millions of females to perpetuate a lie.

He has put down the football and called off the game.

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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