President Donald Trump’s administration has eliminated the United States’ funding for the United Nations population fund, after the State Department issued a letter saying the U.N. agency supports or participates in “a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization” in China.

The population fund is the largest supplier of contraceptives in the world, according to The Guardian. The U.S. in 2015 was the agency’s fourth largest donor globally, per Reuters, after providing $75 million in funds to the U.N. agency.

“(The population fund) refutes this claim, as all of its work promotes the human rights of individuals and couples to make their own decisions, free of coercion or discrimination,” the population fund said in a statement.

The U.N. population fund is an agency that provides information about family planning, baby spacing, pregnancy prevention and contraception. The population fund provides reproductive health care to citizens from more than 150 countries, according to the agency’s website. It also works to promote gender equality and provides assistance during humanitarian crises, such as those created by conflict in Yemen, Iraq and Syria.

The population fund does not provide funding for abortions, said Catherine Bertini, the vice chair of public administration and international affairs at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Therefore, she said, a decrease in unsafe abortions cannot be a direct result of the Trump administration’s cut in funding.

A spokesman for the U.N. in a press release said that the Trump administration’s action could “have devastating effects on the health of vulnerable women and girls and their families around the world.”

This latest funding elimination is another example of the “global gag rule,” an American policy instituted by some presidents that was recently reinstated by Trump, according to The Guardian. The gag rule terminates funding to non-governmental organizations abroad whose services are related to abortion in some way, per The Guardian. Former President Ronald Reagan first implemented an example of this policy in 1984. After Reagan’s action, Democratic and Republican presidents have switched back and forth, abolishing the policy and reinstating it, respectively.

The George W. Bush administration, for example, also halted funding for the population fund, but the agency ended up receiving funds from other countries, which helped account for some of the funding loss from the U.S., said Bertini, who is also a professor of practice at Maxwell.

Bertini added that during the time the George W. Bush administration halted funding for the agency, some American women created a fundraising campaign for the population fund using donations from individual Americans.

After the Trump administration’s latest elimination of the U.S.’s funding of the agency, people might already be mobilizing against his action, Bertini said.

Bertini added that she does not think this controversy will have an impact on U.S.-China relations because these accusation regarding the population fund have been “around for a very long time.”

A review on the U.N. agency was completed during the George W. Bush administration, but people remain unconvinced that the population fund does not perform forced abortions, she said. The population fund will argue that they don’t provide assistance to people in China, but some individuals — particularly those involved in the anti-abortion movement — will continue to believe otherwise, Bertini said.

Previously, Bertini worked with the World Food Programme, a food assistance branch of the U.N. Through that organization, she said she had the opportunity to interact with the population fund. She visited a clinic in Ethiopia run by the agency, where food was available for women who visited. The clinic offered training and information on healthy eating for pregnant women.

The UNFPA supports pregnancies and how to avoid getting pregnant, but they do not support actual abortions, she said.

Published on April 10, 2017 at 9:36 pm

Contact Sandhya: ssiyer@syr.edu