WASHINGTON, D.C.—Today, the day after the 44th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, President Trump reinstated the Mexico City Policy, which prohibits federal funds from going to international organizations that provide or promote abortion. This will in turn result in the defunding of International Planned Parenthood.
“We are elated that U.S. taxpayer dollars will stop going to International Planned Parenthood, which has been working hand in hand with the Chinese Communist Party in their brutal, coercive population control program in China that includes forced abortion and sterilization of women,” says Reggie Littlejohn, President of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers. “This is a huge victory for all those who have worked so hard to end abuses by IPPF and to relieve the suffering of women and babies in China.”
Littlejohn earlier wrote an Open Letter to President-Elect Trump to Investigate and Defund International Planned Parenthood, which you may read here: http://www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/blog/open-letter-to-pres-elect-trump-investigate-international-planned-parenthood/
In its first decade, in collaboration with IPPF, the China Family Planning Association established one million branches in China and mobilized as many as 94 million members and volunteers “all over the country.” In fact, China was the second country to become officially recognized as a qualified member of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), after CFPA met IPPF’s 65 criteria on sexual and reproductive health issues.
Nor is this collaboration on International Planned Parenthood’s part an artifact of the past.
Today IPPF is still CFPA’s main partner, and IPPF has gone on record praising China’s notoriously coercive policy.
- In 2009, IPPF director-general Gill Greer, called China’s One-Child Policy “very conducive to China’s development in various aspects,” including the realm of “health care services.”
- In a 2011 letter to the editor, former Planned Parenthood Executive Vice President Norman Fleishman called China’s One Child Policy a “start” to curbing global population. At about this time IPPF’s website affirmed that it “supports the present family planning policy of the government” and that their Chinese arm “plays a very important role in China’s family planning programme.”
China’s family planning office, in turn, has expressed the importance of international cooperation and has “offered to provide population management training and contraceptive supplies to developing countries” – thus attempting to spread its abusive system.
IPPF’s site still points to CFPA as its main operations hub in China and has recently publicized its good relationship with the Chinese government. In 2013, following a change in China’s leadership, IPPF described its meeting with new Chinese premier Li Kequiang and mutual plans to “strengthen the partnership” between China and IPPF.
If International Planned Parenthood stands for ‘choice,’ then why are they working hand in hand with the Chinese Communist Party’s coercive population control machine?