With a commanding, overwhelming bipartisan vote of 192-233, the House of Representatives today soundly rejected a bid to subsidize the United Nation's Population Fund, which has refused to divest itself from coercive population and forced abortion programs in China. 

    "For 25 years, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has been an aggressive and shameful accessory to gross crimes against women and babies in the Peoples Republic of China," said Rep. Chris Smith, Vice Chairman of the International Relations Committee. “Despite being admonished to do otherwise on countless occasions, the UNFPA continues to be the chief apologist and enabler for past and ongoing crimes against humanity.” 

    Smith, who is also co-chair of the House Pro-Life Caucus, helped lead the floor fight against an amendment offered by Ms. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) that would have suspended all US laws, including human rights laws, in order to permit US-taxpayer funding of the UNFPA. He said the US has withheld funding for the UNFPA for the past several years because of it’s support for China’s forced abortion policy, and he said that today’s 50 vote margin was the strongest rejection of the program yet.

    Smith said, “Let’s not forget that the UNFPA has whitewashed, sanitized, and facilitated--it has been an accomplice--China’s barbaric one child per couple coercive population control program that has victimized hundreds of millions of women and murdered hundreds of millions of children. Brothers and sisters are illegal and children can only be born if, and only if, permission is granted by the state. In China, there is no welcome mat for children and their parents have huge fines imposed upon them if they escape forced abortion and bring their child into this world."

    Smith said that in all counties throughout China, including in UNFPA supported counties, severe fines are imposed on women who have babies out of plan. He said some women do resist the harsh economic penalty—euphemistically called a social compensation fee—and are forcibly aborted. He said some are jailed and tortured. “As violations of human rights go –coercive population control in China is among the worst and most degrading systematic abuse in human history. Last December, I chaired a hearing focused on Mrs. Mao Hen Feng—a Chinese woman who has been imprisoned and tortured because of her resistance to coercive population control.” He added, “ The UNFPA was nowhere to be found in her defense."

    “Mrs. Mao—and millions of women like her—needs advocates, not accommodators and enablers of abuse. We must stand with the victims—the oppressed, not with the oppressor. At a minimum, we should not lavish millions of dollars on the friends of the oppressor like the UNFPA,” he said.

    Smith concluded by citing the UNFPA’s support for China’s coercive population program as among the worst of the scandalous activities that has rocked the international organization in recent years.

    “As scandals go, this may be the UN’s worst. Like the oil for food scandal, or the rape of 13 year old girls by UN Peacekeepers in the Congo, the UNFPA scandal in China must be exposed and stopped. The UNFPA provides political cover, respectability, tangible support and technical capabilities that, predictably, results in massive acts of cruelty and murder in China,” he said.