Congresswoman Lies about UNFPA and Abortion

By | 2026

WASHINGTON, D.C. May 8 (C-Fam) At a hearing on UN reform in the U.S. House last week, Representative Madeleine Dean (D-PA) gave false information about the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and abortion.

She told the House Foreign Affairs Oversight and Intelligence Subcommittee that “there is misinformation about what kind of healthcare services the agency does and does not provide…neither UNFPA nor any other UN agency provides abortions. Full stop.”

Dean held up a UNFPA birthing supplies kit and said, “The [Trump] administration should be ashamed” for cutting funds to the agency. UNFPA reported a loss of $377 million in canceled U.S. government grants.

Dean’s comments echo UNFPA talking points: “UNFPA does not fund or perform abortions.”

However, a single example proves these to be false claims by UNFPA and Congresswoman Dean.

In 2017, UNFPA provided funding to the abortion group Ipas in order to train abortionists and to provide abortions in refugee camps in Bangladesh, where Rohingya Muslim refugees from Myanmar were living. Five years later, in 2022, Ipas continued to provide “comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services” in partnership with UNFPA at 49 locations.

In Bangladesh, abortion is illegal, but an unusual loophole exists in the law: a first-trimester abortion conducted without a prior pregnancy test is referred to as “menstrual regulation,” and is legal. An annual report from UNFPA’s Bangladesh office claims that in 2021, “UNFPA-supported midwives…conducted 2,122 menstrual regulation procedures.”

Legal technicalities aside, the procedures are identical apart from the pregnancy test, and Ipas refers to “menstrual regulation (as abortion is known in Bangladesh),” leaving no ambiguity.

However, UNFPA’s promotion and provision of abortion internationally extends far beyond Bangladesh.  Its procurement platform, the UNFPA Supplies Partnership, offers manual vacuum aspirators, which are used to perform surgical abortions, as well as misoprostol and mifepristone, the drugs used in medication abortions, separately as well as in a combined package.

UNFPA also acts as the leading agency in implementing the Minimum Initial Service Package (MISP) in humanitarian crisis settings.  The MISP was updated in 2018 to include abortion, not just the management of its complications, as one of its core services.  A UNFPA report assessing MISP readiness published last month includes questionnaires about the provision of “safe abortion care,” including training and “abortion values clarification and attitude transformation.”

These “values clarification” workshops were originally promoted by Ipas as a way to wear down medical workers’ moral objections to abortion to expand the number of providers and reduce stigma.

In addition to UNFPA’s direct role in promoting and providing abortions, it also collaborates with other UN bodies to politically advocate for abortion at the national and international level.  While paying lip service to respecting national sovereignty, including with regard to abortion laws, UNFPA has taken a clear position against the criminalization of abortion at the national level.  It also promotes language on “sexual and reproductive health and rights” in UN resolutions—a phrasing that has never been accepted nor defined in the General Assembly, but is understood by its advocates as including abortion as a right.

UNFPA recently partnered with the World Health Organization (WHO) in offering an online course on “integration of a human rights-based approach to comprehensive abortion care,” which draws from WHO’s abortion guidelines, which oppose any legal or practical barriers to abortion access.

Representative Dean was correct about one thing: there is misinformation about UNFPA’s relationship to abortion.  Unfortunately, she chose to continue to misinform rather than provide more accurate information.

Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter