President Obama and Congress may be wrangling still on major issues in the nationalized healthcare legislation — abortion coverage, rationing, end-of-life counseling … and how to pay for it — but the administration, nevertheless, has announced its intention to push forward with a $63 billion global ObamaCare plan.
With little media fanfare or coverage, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced on January 8 that the Obama administration had recently succeeded in supplying "more than $648 million in foreign assistance to family planning and reproductive health programs worldwide." And she said another $63 billion is on the way, courtesy of Obama’s Global Health Initiative.
Secretary Clinton’s remarks came at a State Department celebration of the "15th Anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development," the 1994 United Nations summit in Cairo, where abortion policies were the major flashpoint. Addressing supporters in the State Department’s Benjamin Franklin Room, Secretary Clinton said:
This year, the United States renewed funding of reproductive healthcare through the United Nations Population Fund, and more funding is on the way. [Applause.] The U.S. Congress recently appropriated more than $648 million in foreign assistance to family planning and reproductive health programs worldwide. That’s the largest allocation in more than a decade — since we last had a Democratic president, I might add. [Applause.]
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In addition to new funding, we’ve launched a new program that will be the centerpiece of our foreign policy, the Global Health Initiative, which commits us to spending $63 billion over six years to improve global health.
Mrs. Clinton, who has always been a staunch supporter of the right to abortion, played a key emissary role at the 1994 Cairo summit. The previous year, as First Lady, she had presided over her husband’s failed effort at nationalizing healthcare, the so-called "HillaryCare" program, which shared many features of the current ObamaCare plan. Besides holding similar ideas on government-controlled-and-directed healthcare, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama share near identical views on abortion policy, which include striking down virtually all restrictions on access to abortion, as well as ending all restrictions on U.S. foreign aid for funding abortion worldwide.
"The year 2015 is the target year," Secretary Clinton said in her January 8 remarks. "Part of the reason we wanted to have this commemoration is not only to look backwards, but to look forward. What is it we will do between now and 2015? Remember what was expected of us. All governments will make access to reproductive healthcare and family planning services a basic right."
During the wrangling over text at Cairo, Beijing, and other UN conferences, "reproductive health" and other similar code words were employed in attempts to camouflage policies that promoted abortion. At congressional hearings this past year, Secretary Clinton was specifically pinned down on this issue by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.Y.), who wanted to know if the phrases "reproductive health," "reproductive services," and "reproductive rights" include abortion. Secretary Clinton stated: "We [the current US administration] happen to think that family planning is an important part of women’s health and reproductive health includes access to abortion that I believe should be safe, legal and rare."
(A video of the Smith-Clinton exchange can be viewed here.)
The "safe, legal, and rare" statement is a verbatim response that Clinton has used many times over the years, whenever she is forced to acknowledge the reality of "reproductive" policies. As, for instance, when she addressed the Cairo Plus Five Forum at The Hague, Netherlands, in 1999. Speaking of President Bill Clinton’s efforts at the time, she stated: "We are also working to ensure that abortion is safe, legal, and rare. That is one of our top priorities."
Abortion, of course, is never safe for the aborted baby, whose life is ended, and the policies Clinton has championed for many years — as First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State — certainly have not made abortion rare. Nor can anyone credibly suggest the new Obama-Clinton policies will make abortion any more rare. As a State Senator, U.S. Senator, and now as President, Barack Obama has established one of the most pro-abortion records of any U.S. politician. One of his first acts as president was to rescind the U.S. "Mexico City Policy" that prohibited federal funding of international agencies or NGOs that provide or promote abortion as a method of family planning.
One of the principal targets of that policy was the United Nations Fund for Population Assistance (UNFPA), which became notorious for supporting Communist China’s horrific one-child policy, which included forced abortion, infanticide, and hunting down women who got pregnant without the state’s permission. UNFPA and its defenders — in the media, Congress, and the Obama administration — have been trying to rehabilitate the UN agency’s image, claiming those abuses are now a thing of the past. In fact, they say, China has largely abandoned the one-child policy, and UNFPA’s programs in China allegedly do not support the repressive one-child initiatives. Not so, say critics of UNFPA and China’s population program.
"It’s very clear that the U.N. Population Fund is a cheerleader for the Chinese family planning program, is funding the program, and turns a blind eye to forced abortion and forced sterilization," Dr. Stephen Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute (PRI), said in a February 2009 interview.
The local UNFPA officials conducted their operations out of the China Office of Family Planning, where these abhorrent practices were taking place, said Mosher, who first exposed the brutal practices in 1983, while in China pursuing doctoral studies through Stanford University. "It is inconceivable that the U.N. population official who worked in the same office did not know what was going on," he said.
In March of 2009, following President Obama’s refunding of UNFPA, Dr. Mosher’s PRI sent a team into China to investigate the alleged population reforms. "Contrary to the claims of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), China’s coercive one-child policy is alive and well in the counties in which their organization operates," reported PRI in a March 24, 2009 press statement.
The PRI statement continues:
PRI’s investigative team found that the one-child policy was not relaxed in the counties it investigated, and, in some ways, the coercive measures undertaken by the government are worse now than ever. According to PRI’s Colin Mason, who headed up the investigation, "when the actual conditions on the ground are observed, the UNFPA’s claim that it ‘played a catalytic role in introducing a voluntary reproductive health approach in China’ is patently absurd. The policy is just as coercive in these areas as anywhere else."
Even the liberal-left Huffington Post recently acknowledged ("China’s Horrid One Child Policy Continues," January 7, 2010) that claims of reform are fraudulent. China’s population control "abuses continue today, and yet there have recently been increasing calls for the world to take a look at the One Child Policy as a model for how to reduce population growth," noted Nicole Kempton in the Post column. She continues:
Women of child-bearing age are routinely subjected to monitoring of their menstrual cycle by family planning officials, and their employment is often contingent upon compliance with the policy. Unmarried women are not allowed to have children, and even married couples must apply for a birth permit before they can legally bear children. Women who violate the policy are served with fines which may be several times their annual income, or worse, subjected to forced abortions and sterilizations as punishment. If they refuse to submit, their family members may be detained and their homes destroyed.
More on the continuing one-child policy in China and its ongoing partnering with UNFPA can be seen here and here.
Nevertheless, Secretary Clinton, in her January 8 paean to the UN’s Cairo legacy, repeatedly cited UNFPA as a model program. Moreover, she pledged to continue expanding it by increasing U.S. foreign aid to the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.
"We have pledged," she declared, "new funding, new programs, and a renewed commitment to achieve Millennium Development Goal Five, namely a [three-fourths] reduction in global maternal mortality, and universal access to reproductive healthcare."
Photo: Hillary Clinton
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