www.DemocraticFundamentalism.org - VOTU - Election 2002 - 7/14/2002 - The zealots behind President Bush's U.N. family planning

	Globalization - Countries - United States Daily News in Review - Election 2002 The zealots behind President Bush's U.N. family planning sellout A small band of antiabortion extremists says the U.N. agency supports Chinese infanticide. The rest of the world says they're wrong, but the White House is listening.

	By Michelle Goldberg June 13, 2002 Read more at www.salon.com

	When President Bush started hinting in January that he was going to freeze $34 million that Congress had allocated to the United Nations Population Fund, it marked a complete turnaround from the administration's position just a few months before. In his budget proposal last year, Bush asked for a $25 million appropriation for the United Nations Population Fund (also called the United Nations Fund for Population Activities or UNFPA). In written testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that spring, Secretary of State Colin Powell said, "We recognize that UNFPA does invaluable work through its programs in maternal and child health care, voluntary family planning, screening for reproductive tract cancers, breast-feeding promotion and HIV/AIDS prevention ... We look forward to working with you and your colleagues to secure the funding necessary for UNFPA to continue these activities." Congress complied with Powell's request, appropriating $34 million for the fund. Then Bush reversed himself. Not only has he not released the money, he's threatened to veto a bill that would force him to. And he's doing it based on nothing more than oft-disproved charges by a tiny far-right antiabortion group called Population Research Institute, which claims -- falsely -- that the UNFPA money is used for coercive abortion and sterilization in China. "What I find so outrageous is that Bush withheld this $34 million based solely on testimony from the Population Research Institute, an arm of a far-right group," says New York Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney. "PRI is the only organization that has ever made these allegations. The administration is going against the will of Congress and the international community by allowing a small band of extremists to hamstring its foreign policy." Read more at www.salon.com

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