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Memorandum submitted by the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) 1. The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) is a lobbying and educational grassroots membership organisation, founded in London in 1967 to defend human life from conception to natural death. SPUC has been invited by parliamentary committees to submit both written and oral evidence on a range of topics.
2. SPUC is concerned that abortion and population control is being promoted under the guise of international development.
3. This memorandum is related to the following key issues, among others, of the Committee's enquiry:
The appropriate scope of DFID's aid programme in China; China's relationship with multilateral development institutions; DFID's support to addressing gender issues in China.
4. SPUC has been concerned about China's coercive population control programme (the "one-child policy") since the policy's inception. Since the 1970s, the Chinese government has conducted a programme of population control through forced abortion, infanticide, forced sterilisation, forced use of abortifacient birth control, abandonment of children and deliberate killing of orphans through neglect. Coercion is exercised through stiff penalties which include extortionate fines, destruction of property, imprisonment and even torture.
5. In September 2002, the Chinese regime passed the Law on Population and Birth Planning. Article 11 of the new law calls for "detailed population control quotas" and Article 17 states that "Citizens... are also duty-bound to undergo family planning as provided for in the law." Missing from the new law is any reference to the principles of the 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD). The new law violates the ICPD principles that "[a]ll couples and individuals have the right to decide freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children."
6. DFID funds, and supports the work in China of, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). DFID funding for UNFPA and IPPF is mostly unrestricted and in turn UNFPA and IPPF funding for the Chinese State Family Planning Commission and the state-run China Family Planning Association is also mostly unrestricted.
7. UNFPA and IPPF are complicit in China's coercive population control programme.
8. UNFPA signed a "Memorandum of Understanding" with the Chinese government in the very year that the one-child policy was introduced (1979). In 2001, in a report entitled "UNFPA Praises China's Family Planning Policy," the People's Daily said that new UNFPA executive director Thoraya Obaid "praised that over the past 20 years, China has seen notable achievements made in population control by implementing the family planning policy." In 2002 China's State Family Planning Commission awarded Nafis Sadik of UNFPA a Population Award.
9. The China Family Planning Association (CFPA), the body responsible for ensuring the policy's implementation, has been an IPPF member since 1983, the year commonly regarded as the worst year for coercion. CFPA is a state-run body: none of its top leaders have been ordinary citizens unaffiliated with government or the Party.[1] CFPA's function was made clear by the dispatch announcing its founding (May 29, 1980) issued by the state news agency Xinhua: "The association will implement government population control policies." CFPA has also received funding from UNFPA. IPPF has even denied that the one-child policy is coercive. Its representative, Laura Barclay, wrote in 2001 that to "accuse the Chinese government of enforcing heinous practices officially at a national policy level" was "a gross untruth".[2]
10. At the very least, UNFPA and IPPF have worked too closely with the Chinese regime over the past two decades for anyone to have confidence that they can be relied upon to exercise independent and effective leverage on the China regime to eliminate coercion, which is the very nature of China's population programme. The late Dr John S. Aird, former senior China specialist at the US Bureau of the Census regarded as one of the world's leading experts on the one-child policy,[3] has commented:
The gentle, almost listless, remonstrances periodically put forth by foreign governments, the UNFPA, and the IPPF have never conveyed enough conviction and concern to have any appreciable deterrent effect on the Chinese programme. Their continuing support of the Chinese programme has always sent the message that they really do not take seriously violations of human rights that advance the cause of population control. That is how the Chinese government reads the message, and their reading of it is apparently correct.
11. The UK government should not support or supply funding, whether it be direct or indirect, to population control activities carried on by the Chinese Government.
12. For more detailed information related to this submission, please see SPUC's website at http://www.spuc.org.uk/lobbying/china/
24th April 2008
[1] "Orders of the State: Responsibility and Collaboration in China's Population Programme", Martin Moss & Jeffrey Bowe, Independent Tibet Network UK, 2000, p.34. [2] Letter to the Catholic Herald, London, 28 September 2001. [3] An obituary of Dr Aird's appeared in the Washington Post on 30 October http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/29/AR2005102901294.html
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