Cut for family planning lauded

JONATHAN RISKIND Times Leader Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON – A proposal to cut off U.S. funding for an international family planning program advanced in the GOP-led House last week, with Republican Reps. of Lycoming Township and Lou Barletta of Hazleton among the backers.

Marino

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Abortion rights and reproductive health services advocates criticized the move to strip U.S. funding for a United Nations family planning program.

Meanwhile, the abortion debate on Capitol Hill also revved up last week over a draft 2012 spending bill that contains a number of anti-abortion rights initiatives, including a reprise of an attempt to cut off federal money to Planned Parenthood.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee in a party line vote approved legislation eliminating funding for the UN Population Fund, a family planning services program that operates in developing countries worldwide.

Marino, a member of the committee, lauded the move to cut off U.S. taxpayer dollars for the UN program.

“By contributing to the UNFPA we are borrowing money from China, 42 cents on the dollar, and giving it to the United Nations, which turns around and gives it to countries like China to support its one-child policy including abortion,” Marino said before the 23-17 committee vote to send the bill to the House floor. “This is state-sanctioned murder and the kind of thing that Americans are screaming about.”

Barletta, who is not on the committee, agrees with the move to strip funding for the UN program, said Shawn Kelly, Barletta’s spokesman. Barletta, like Marino, is a co-sponsor of the bill and he also has signed a letter to President calling for a halt to U.S. contributions to the fund, which Barletta, too, asserted is linked to China’s “one-child policy.”

Barletta also “strongly disagrees with paying for international family planning while people in Northeastern Pennsylvania are struggling to recover from epic flooding,” Kelly said. “Rep. Barletta believes we should help Americans recover from disasters first.”

The Bush administration didn’t provide U.S. funding for the program, which GOP critics claim aids China in forcing women to undergo abortions against their will. But the Obama administration and the United Nations say the program has nothing to do with involuntary abortions in China or encouraging women to have abortions, but rather works to extend safe and effective family planning methods and reproductive health care to women in developing countries where such care is difficult to obtain.

Obama’s 2012 budget requested $48 million for the UN Population Fund, a continuation of funding that started in 2009 when the Obama administration reinstated U.S. participation in the program.

Planned Parenthood, a nonprofit group that offers reproductive health services and abortion services and has become a target of abortion rights foes, says cutting off funding to the UN program will only make it harder for poor women in developing countries to gain access to safe and effective contraception and reproductive health services – and lead to more unintended pregnancies and unsafe abortions.

The UN program works directly with governments in more than 150 countries “to improve health care and strengthen health systems,” Planned Parenthood said in a release last week. The money the Obama administration wants to contribute to the fund has been estimated to prevent 7,000 maternal and newborn deaths, allow 10,000 women afflicted by a fistula to have a surgical repair and provide modern methods of contraception to about 1 million couples, Planned Parenthood said, citing UN numbers.

The program does not perform or pay for abortions, and is working to expand voluntary family planning programs in China and to reform China’s human rights standards, Planned Parenthood said.

“Efforts to defund UNFPA are clearly ideological attacks that put politics before the health and well-being of millions of women and children around the world,” said Latanya Mapp Frett, a Planned Parenthood Federation of America vice president, in a statement.

Barletta and Marino also back a 2012 health and human services spending bill unveiled last week by Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Montana, the chairman of the House Appropriation Committee’s labor, health and human services and education subcommittee.

The bill includes a fresh GOP effort to strip federal funding from Planned Parenthood, eliminates funding for a national family planning program, cuts funding to a teen pregnancy prevention initiative and directs part of the remaining funding be used for abstinence education programs and bans insurance coverage for abortion by plans that individuals will be able to subscribe to under the health plan exchanges created by the health care overhaul approved last year.

Planned Parenthood of Northeast and Mid-Pennsylvania criticized “Republican leaders” for releasing the bill, though the group did not single out Marino or Barletta.

“At a time when Americans desperately want and need Congress to focus on fixing our economy and creating jobs, House Republican leaders are instead continuing their campaign to take away preventive health care and affordable birth control from millions of women,” said Kim Custer, the head of Planned Parenthood of Northeast and Mid-Penn, in a statement.

The spending bill would face a decidedly uphill climb in the Democratic-controlled Senate, and also would face presidential opposition and a potential veto threat.