| In L. Frank Baum’s classic, The Wizard of Oz, a man behind a curtain claims to achieve "feats of stratospheric skill never before performed by civilized man" until Dorothy’s dog, Toto, pulls back the curtain and reveals him to be a scam artist.
If Toto were turned loose in today’s White House, he might figure out a way to expose the illusion that the Bush administration is a champion of human rights and a staunch opponent of abortion. Based on the administration’s actions, just as in that Oz scene, its rhetoric is all smoke and mirrors.
For the fourth year in a row, President Bush refuses to release Congress’ appropriation to the United Nations Population Fund, the largest multilateral organization providing reproductive health and family planning assistance to the world’s poorest countries.
The administration’s rationale for withholding the U.S. contribution is that UNFPA supports China’s national family planning program, which allegedly relies on forced abortion and involuntary sterilization to reduce that country’s fertility rates.
But White House masters of manipulation, in their blind fealty to religious fundamentalist support, install mirrors and blow billowy clouds of smoke to conceal inconvenient facts about what the $34 million congressional appropriation could accomplish: the prevention of 800,000 abortions, 4,700 maternal deaths, 77,000 infant deaths, and as many as 2 million unwanted pregnancies.
There’s more that the Bush administration would prefer the American people, who have been shown in poll after poll to strongly support international population assistance, not to know.
First, UNFPA operates in some 120 countries, in addition to China, and Congress attached a string to the U.S. contribution prohibiting a red cent of it to be used in China.
Second, a number of investigations into the relationship between UNFPA and the Chinese program, including one by a team hand picked by the Bush administration, have all found that there is no force or coercion involved in the population efforts the Fund supports there. | | Virtually all of these probes have concluded that UNFPA is the best hope for ensuring voluntarism in China’s national family planning program. For the world’s leading multilateral population assistance agency to ignore China, whose 1.3 billion people account for fully one-fifth of the world’s population, would be downright ludicrous. Our planet is already straining its resources to the limit to accommodate its 6.5 billion people. Yet our human numbers continue to grow by nearly 80 million a year and are projected to reach 9.2 billion by mid-century. Of that, 8 billion will inhabit developing countries, with little hope that there will be sufficient food, clean water and resources to care for them.
Meanwhile, these countries already have one billion people who live on less than $1 per day; 1.1 billion who cannot depend on safe drinking water; 815 million, 200 million of them children, who go to bed hungry every night; and 115 million children who do not attend primary school.
To add nearly 3 billion people to countries where day-to-day living is all too often a struggle for survival is a scenario for a perpetual nightmare of global insecurity - widespread poverty, armed conflict, disease, pestilence and massive migration - to say nothing of fertile breeding grounds for future generations of terrorists.
To deny so many people the information, education, and means to determine the size and spacing of their families falls far short of measuring up to the longtime proud American reputation for responding urgently and generously to cries for help among less fortunate friends and neighbors in the world community.
During George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential election campaign he paid ample lip service to something called "compassionate conservatism" and it resonated. But it was dropped in his campaign for re-election. If ever there was a time to clear the smoke, put away the mirrors and revive that old battle cry -- only this time supported by meaningful action -- it is now.
Editor’s note: Werner Fornos is the president of the Population Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit organization, and recipient of the United Nations Population Award. |
