U.S. Chided on Population Control Stand

A Chinese diplomat indirectly criticized the United States this week for withholding aid to U.N. population control programs on the grounds that some Chinese women are forced to undergo abortion.

“It’s impossible to imagine how a family planning policy could be carried out with so great a success by coercion in a country with a population of more than 1 billion,” said Ambassador Ding Yuanhong, China’s deputy permanent representative. He spoke at a luncheon organized here Thursday by the Population Institute, a Washington-based foundation promoting family planning.

Ding was congratulated by Werner Fornos, president of the institute, for China’s achievement in stabilizing the growth of the world’s most populous nation. The Chinese diplomat said others might not appreciate the enormity of his country’s problem.

“Our arable land represents 7% of the world total,” he said. “Taking into consideration the arable land in the United States, if their population were in proportion to ours, it would be more than 8 billion.”

Fornos denounced the Reagan Administration’s withholding of money for the U.N. Fund for Population Activities for the past three years. He traced the action to a 1985 minority report on a House foreign aid appropriations bill written by Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.), which recommended that no U.S. funds be granted to international family planning programs in which participating governments have a policy of compulsory abortion.

“AID (Agency for International Development) leaned over backwards to certify that the People’s Republic of China had a coercive policy,” Fornos asserted.

Because of the loss of U.S. funds, expansion of world family planning programs using contraceptive methods has suffered and abortions around the world will have mounted from 30 million a year to 60 million by the end of the decade, Fornos said.

Tatsuro Kunugi, deputy executive director of the U.N. Fund for Population Activities, chided the Reagan Administration in more diplomatic terms as he addressed a gathering marking World Population Awareness Week.

“Unfortunately, the fund has not received any support in 1986 and 1987 from the United States, which used to be the largest contributor and supporter of the fund, and we are not sure what the situation will be in 1988,” the Japanese official said. “We are continuing our efforts to bring the United States back to the group of major donors to the fund and to rejoin the international partnership.”

Kunugi said that despite the absence of U.S. aid, other contributors have enabled the world program to increase its budget by $175 million in the past year.