Unsuitable Punishment

The Agency for International Development has now implemented an edict of Congress that required application of the doctrine of guilt by association: The United Nations Fund for Population Activities has been denied $10 million pledged earlier by the United States.

Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.), a man very much in the running to succeed Ronald Reagan in the White House, contrived this punishment to demonstrate his disapproval of the way China is going about limiting its population. Under his amendment to the 1985 appropriations for foreign aid, funds were to be denied any organization “supporting or participating in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.” A private investigation by AID turned up evidence that those regrettable things have been happening in China. Since the U.N. fund has been helping China, it lost eligibility for U.S. funds, never mind that none of the fund’s money went for abortions or any other coercive population controls.

The Kemp amendment emulated an earlier decision of President Reagan to apply the same principle of guilt by association to another highly effective world population organization, the International Planned Parenthood Federation. The foundation lost all of its American government funding because some of its affiliates had financed abortions, although with money obtained from other sources. They had, in fact, been doing what is legal within the United States.

Those who pressured for this regulation made it a matter of principle. What a travesty. The decision is a breach of a formal United States pledge of $46 million to the U.N. fund; now the unpaid balance of $10 million is being given to others. So much for principle.

There is certainly controversy over what China has done in trying to get control over the world’s largest population. Chinese officials insist that their program is not coercive, but the evidence from independent witnesses suggests that the edict of one child per family has led to terrible abuses, including the killing of unwanted baby girls. Those outraged by the evidence of these abuses have been curiously silent in offering alternatives, however, and they rarely criticize with the same vigor those governments that have allowed famine, rather than condoms and abortions, to bring populations into balance with food supplies.

U.S. law already prohibits the use of foreign aid for abortions or coercive birth control programs. Similar restrictions are imposed by the U.N. population fund. There are more than enough restrictions on the law books. Effective programs in addressing the world population emergency already have been seriously handicapped by rules denying U.S. funds to organizations with operations in nations where there are unacceptable practices.

AID has now been taken to court by some who disagree with what it has done. That hardly seems an appropriate way to right the wrong. The best solution is for Congress to ignore the zealots who are more interested in restricting population programs than making them effective, and to make sure there are no more Kemp amendments.