Humanitarian activists celebrated the news this week that the Trump administration halted funding to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers said in a press release that the decision was made “on the basis that the UNFPA’s activities in China are complicit with the nation’s coercive population control program…which includes forced abortion and involuntary sterilization.” The world has long known that China’s inhumane one-child policy has led to a terrifying regime of forced abortions and coercive government-mandated sterilization. Halting funds to the UNFPA acknowledges the role of international organizations in addressing the decades of anti-Life abuses in China.
Littlejohn stated, “We are thrilled that the U.S. is no longer funding forced abortion and involuntary sterilization in China. The blood of Chinese women and babies will no longer be on our hands.” She further explained further:
The UNFPA clearly supports China’s population control program, which they know is coercive. Under China’s One (now Two) Child Policy, women have been forcibly aborted up to the ninth month of pregnancy. Some of these forced abortions have been so violent that the women themselves have died, along with their full term babies. There have been brutal forced sterilizations as well, butchering women and leaving them disabled. Where was the outcry from the UNFPA? In my opinion, silence in the face of such atrocities is complicity.
In 2015, international reports optimistically touted the “end” of China’s one-child policy, but Pro-Life activists were not fooled. The reality was that the new so-called two-child policy was little more than a rebranding of the same brutal and inhumane practices of forced abortion and sterilization that have marred China’s human rights record for decades. The UNFPA has denied complicity in the atrocities carried out in the name of population planning. Yet, Littlejohn points out that UNFPA’s former head received the Population Prize Award given by the Chinese State Family Planning Commission, among other incriminating evidence of support.
The Trump administration’s decision to halt funding to a group complicit in China’s crimes and human rights violations is a positive step. Groups like Women’s Rights without Frontiers and China Life Alliance have been instrumental in raising public awareness of the atrocities taking place under China’s coercive family planning programs. Holding international groups like UNFPA accountable for their role in aiding China’s crimes is an important step in bringing justice to the victims.