China’s One-Child Abuses Subject of U.S. Members Letter to Obama and Bipartisan Commission Report

By Lisa Correnti | October 14, 2011

Just two days after the House Foreign Affairs committee advanced H.R. 2059 to defund the United Nations Population Fund (UNPFA), a letter from 100 members of the U.S. House of Representatives was sent to President Obama asking that he immediately stop the funding of the UN population control agency due to its involvement with China’s one-child policy.

Authored by Congressman Chris Smith (NJ-R), a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and chairman of its human rights subcommittee, the letter is critical of the Presidents decision to provide funding to UNFPA and of his administrations failure to address the issue. “All of us should be defending the women of China from this state-sponsored cruelty of forced abortion and forced sterilization, not supporting and enabling it. Chinese victims—especially women—need advocates, not enablers. Regrettably, your Administration has long enabled the one child policy by its silence and financial support for organizations like the UNFPA that support the Chinese government’s brutal program,” the letter states.

China’s one-child policy and other human rights abuses were also discussed yesterday in a House press conference held by Congressman Smith and Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) to announce the release of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China annual report which monitors current human rights conditions and violations.

This bipartisan commission consisting of nine Senators and Representatives, and five Presidential appointees conclude in their 2011 report that “China’s population planning policies in both their nature and implementation constitute human rights violations according to international standards.” Women in both rural and urban areas continue to be coerced to obtain abortions by government officials when they are found to have an “unauthorized pregnancy.”

In the press conference Rep. Smith, who chairs the China Commission, responded to the population planning abuses cited in the report, “China’s implementation of their one-child per couple policy remains one of the most brutal and barbaric attacks against women and children—ever. Through coercion, financial penalties and the use of forced abortion and sterilization, the Chinese government continues its population control program and limits the number of children women may bear. It is no coincidence that according to the World Bank and the World Health Organization, that approximately 500 women committed suicide a day in China in 2009.”

Despite Chinese law prohibiting coercive behavior by government officials enforcing the one-child policy, the report concludes that abuse is widespread. Documented are multiple violations by government officials that include family planning campaigns called “‘spring family planning service activities’’ that used coercive means to prevent
or terminate ‘‘out-of-plan’’ pregnancies and the alleged kidnapping and sale of children to orphanages born in families violating the country’s population planning policies.

The Obama administration has been relatively quiet on China’s population control program. While in China in August, Vice President Joe Biden said he was not “second-guessing” the China government’s one-child policy. “Your policy has been one which I fully understand—I’m not second-guessing—of one child per family,” said Biden.

It would seem the continued abuse suffered by Chinese women and children would require it be second-guessed by someone in the Obama Administration, to assure at the very least, that this abuse is not being supported by U.S. foreign financial assistance to UNPFA.

If the Obama administration refuses to re-examine the UNPFA involvement in China’s one-child program and continues its funding stream – $145 million from FY 2009-2011, then Congress will have to do it legislatively by passing H.R.2059 – but it cannot be done without the support of the Democrat controlled Senate.

The Commission’s findings will be presented to President Obama and to Congress. Lets hope it gives them pause.

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