President Presses Pro-Life Policies
The Bush Administration is aggressively pursuing pro-life policies on several fronts. Actions have been taken in just the past couple of months to defund pro-abortion activities, expand the Mexico City Policy and press for a worldwide complete ban on human cloning.
Defunding
In the Lifesaver one year ago, we reported that President Bush withheld $34 million from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) since funds were being used by China to carry out forced abortions and sterilizations. In late August of this year, the State Department stopped funding Marie Stopes International (MSI) for an HIV/AIDS program because of close ties with the UNFPA.MSI has been partnered with the UNFPA since 1998 to set up “reproductive health programs” in China with a goal, according to MSI, of convincing the Chinese to liberalize their coercive one-child population law. However, investigations by the US and UK governments found that coercion continued in China, leading to the defunding last year. Now, the State Department has concluded that the same law must apply to MSI.
MSI, together with six other organizations, was receiving funds for an HIV/AIDS program in Africa and Asia. The State Department offered to continue the same amount of funding through the other six groups, but the groups refused, preferring to maintain solidarity with Marie Stopes rather than accept the funding, which amounted to $1 million last year.
Mexico City Policy
President George W. Bush, on his first full day in office, reinstated the “Mexico City Policy” which had been initiated by President Reagan and continue by former President Bush, but overturned by President Clinton. The President sent an executive memorandum to the Agency for International Development (AID) requiring that no funding go to organizations that perform abortions or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning.It turns out that some family planning grants are awarded outside of the AID program. As a result, President Bush sent a memorandum to the State Department on August 29 directing that the same requirements apply to all population programs funded by the State Department, not just to those funded by AID.
Cloning
There is a new effort at the United Nations sponsored by Costa Rica to institute a ban on all forms of human cloning. This includes so-called reproductive cloning (resulting in the birth of a human baby) and research cloning (or clone-and-kill, whereby the cloned embryo is created and then killed to obtain stem cells). The ban has the strong support of the Bush Administration.The ban proposed by Costa Rica is similar to the legislation passed by the House of Representatives in February but not yet acted upon by the Senate. President Bush has pledged to sign the ban, having called on Congress to pass it in his State of the Union address in January.
Published in VSHL Lifesaver, October, 2003
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