Biden Significantly Boosts Funding to UN Agency Complicit in Human Rights Abuses

By | April 7, 2022

WASHINGTON D.C., April 8 (C-Fam) The newly released White House budget for 2023 requests $56 million for the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and calls for removing stipulations preventing the powerful UN agency from funding programs in China.

This despite a recent Congressional report confirming China’s ongoing “genocide” of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, including through brutal population control programs.

President Biden renewed funding to UNFPA, withheld for four years by the Trump administration due to UNFPA’s complicity in China’s coercive population control program. Biden’s second budget proposal includes an additional $23.5 million for UNFPA, a 72% increase from 2022 enacted levels.

Despite Congressional support for UNFPA, foreign policy funding bills have always included guardrails on UNFPA contributions. Biden’s 2023 budget proposal however removes these long-standing restrictions. Language prohibiting funds for abortion and funds to China have been eliminated. Also removed is the stipulation of a dollar-for-dollar reduction of U.S. funds for the amount UNFPA contributes to China.

The Biden administration decision to allow China to be eligible for UNFPA funding including funding contributed by the U.S. comes the same week a bipartisan Congressional committee found the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has committed “serious human rights abuses,” including “genocide” perpetrated in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).

The 2021 report issued last Friday by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China describes how “Uyghur and other Turkic Muslim women who were formerly detained in mass internment camps in the XUAR have reported being subjected to coercive birth control measures, including forced implantation of intrauterine devices (IUDs), forced sterilization, and forced abortion.”

Biden’s proposal comes as a shock to human rights advocates who have been confronting population control in China for decades.

“Given the fact that forced abortion and involuntary sterilization continue at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party until this day, it is deeply concerning that the Biden administration proposes to increase the funding to the UNFPA,” women rights advocate Reggie Littlejohn told the Friday Fax.

Littlejohn, founder and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, said, “throughout the entire history of UNFPA in China, the CCP has engaged in coercive population control.”

Littlejohn said, “Unless UNFPA can prove through absolute transparency regarding exactly where they are in and what they are doing in China it is contrary to Kemp-Kasten and morally repugnant for the Biden administration to force innocent U.S. taxpayers to underwrite some of the greatest human rights atrocities on earth today.”

Republican administrations routinely apply the Kemp-Kasten amendment to withhold funds from the UN population control agency. Democrat administrations and lawmakers however support contributions to UNFPA because they view the agency as an essential partner in delivering and promoting family planning in poor countries. UNFPA has defended its continuing partnership with China, denying any direct involvement in China’s population control programs.

The President’s budget proposal also eliminates long-standing pro-life safeguards known as “riders” and maintains current funding levels for international family planning at $572 million, despite reports of near saturation of contraception in the global south.   Annual appropriation for U.S. bilateral reproductive health/family planning is largely responsible for the growing presence of global abortion groups throughout the developing world.

The Biden budget commits $2.6 billion for gender equity as pre-announced by the administration last month to coincide with International Women’s Day. Funding previously committed for the economic empowerment, entrepreneurial opportunity and job training of women overseas —$200 million, has been re-directed to Biden’s Gender Equity and Equality Action Fund where funds will be used to “advance sexual and reproductive health and rights.”

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