The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (27 page)

Ever since it became an independent organization the Population Research Institute has been run by Steven Mosher, a man whose history gave him good reason to abhor and distrust population programs. In the early 1980s, Mosher was an aspiring China scholar whose expulsion from his Stanford Ph.D. program made headlines. The controversy started when, while doing fieldwork in his then wife’s village in southern China’s Guangdong province, Mosher convinced officials to let him attend meetings where women with unapproved pregnancies were browbeaten into having abortions. “Mosher called the sessions ‘classic brainwashing,’ including appeals to patriotism and statements that the babies’ lives could not be ‘guaranteed’ after birth,” reported the
Washington Post
. “Some women forced to have abortions, he said, were in their eighth and ninth months of pregnancy, so determined were Chinese officials to limit the country’s massive population growth.”
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After leaving China, Mosher wrote an article about coerced abortion there for the
Sunday Times Chinese Weekly,
a Taiwanese magazine. The piece included a photo he’d taken of a woman being prepared for an abortion. (Her face was unconcealed, which could have left her vulnerable to government reprisals.)

Furious about Mosher’s exposé, Chinese officials for a time banned all further field research in their country by American academics, and accused Mosher of bribing villagers and smuggling antique coins out of the country, among other offenses. The government was clearly trying to discredit a critic, but when Stanford started investigating they reportedly found damning evidence, some of it provided by the wife Mosher had recently divorced. She seconded the charges of bribery and accused her ex-husband of endangering her relatives in the village.
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A university committee eventually accused Mosher of “illegal and seriously unethical conduct,” and his department unanimously voted to expel him.

Both Mosher and the university refused to make public a forty-seven-page report on the school’s findings. In the aftermath he claimed that by throwing him out Stanford was caving to Chinese pressure. Unsurprisingly, the ordeal left Mosher militantly opposed both to population programs and the Chinese government. (Among his books are
Hegemon: China’s Plan to Dominate Asia and the World
and, with Republican California assemblyman Chuck DeVore, the political thriller
China Attacks
.) His outrage at China’s one-child policy is justified, but it’s left him intensely paranoid about the UNFPA and international family planning, which he argues is part of a “New World Order” conspiracy. “The assault on human dignity frees the proposed world government to selectively reduce the population of the world to a manageable number,” he wrote.
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Overpopulation, according to Mosher, is a myth. “In fact,” he wrote, “the entire population of the world could live in the state of Texas, in single-family dwellings with front and back yards.”
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In 2002 the Population Research Institute would play a major role in convincing the Bush administration to defund the UNFPA. Meanwhile, though, Human Life International realized that it needed another front to lobby inside the UN, which had denied Marx’s own organization NGO accreditation due to the group’s “attacks on Islam,” its “aggressive language,” and its general hostility to the “purposes of the United Nations.”
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Seeking another way in, Human Life International formed the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM) in 1997, under the auspices of its Canada branch. In order to gain access to the UN, its connection to its parent organization was kept hidden. A confidential organizational chart had a dotted line down the center, with the names below it marked “visible.” Those above the line were all employees of Human Life International-Canada.
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C-FAM’s first director was Ann Noonan, but she was soon pushed aside by her aggressive, savvy deputy, a former journalist named Austin Ruse. At the UN, Ruse would act like a right-wing Joan Dunlop, organizing a disparate international coalition of fundamentalists. Behind the scenes C-FAM worked closely with the Vatican. According to an internal document, “Though not publicized, one of C-FAM’s major mandates will be to act as a real resource and information office to the Holy See delegation.”
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But Ruse displayed far more hostility to the United Nations as an institution than the official church did, and he could play rougher.

The creation of C-FAM roughly coincided with the birth of a similar Mormon initiative, the World Family Policy Center, run out of Brigham Young University and headed by law professor Richard Wilkins. According to its Web site, the group was formed to counter pressure on the UN “to adopt legal norms that pose serious threats to family stability, parental rights and religious liberty,” and it serves as a kind of think tank for international opposition to the feminist movement.

Wilkins soon teamed up with Dr. Allan Carlson, a conservative Lutheran who headed the Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society. Located in Rockford, Illinois, the Howard Center was a spin-off of the ultraright Rockford Institute, a nationalist, isolationist outfit known for its barely concealed anti-Semitism and white supremacism.
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The Howard Center was an unlikely outpost for an emerging global interfaith network, but by the mid 1990s that’s essentially what it had become.

A historian by training, Carlson’s Ph.D. dissertation had been a damning examination of the work of Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, the social democratic progenitors of Sweden’s ultraprogressive family policies. Most of his work in the ensuing years was focused on the United States, but the UN world conferences of the 1990s—as well as the demographic situation of the former Soviet republics—grabbed his attention, and in 1997 he organized a conference in Prague to bring together religious, antifeminist conservatives from all over the globe. It was called the “World Congress of Families.” “We want to exert a counterforce to the devastation of the family that is being wrought by the forces of modernity,” John Howard, the Rockford Center’s founder and the conference’s cochair, told a Utah newspaper.
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Wilkins was at the Prague gathering, and he and Carlson soon started collaborating. Together they organized the second World Congress of Families, held in 1999 at the UN’s Palais des Nations in Geneva. It attracted over eight hundred, including a delegation of twenty-five or thirty people from Iran. C-FAM was a cosponsor.

High-profile speakers included Alfonso Cardinal López Trujillo, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family; Jehan el-Sadat, widow of Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat; Max Padilla, Nicaragua’s Opus Dei-affiliated minister for family affairs; and S. Shahid Husain, senior adviser to the Organization of the Islamic Conference mission to the United Nations. Margaret Ogola, a Kenyan pediatrician, prize-winning novelist, and Opus Dei supernumerary who runs an orphanage for HIV-positive children, donned traditional African dress to condemn the “worldwide dissemination of a culture of pleasure as the ultimate desirable good.”
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Her speech, said Carlson, was “Lincolnesque.”

For many attendees this was exhilarating stuff. In the past it was liberals who had always claimed to speak for the downtrodden representatives of poor nations, but now Western conservatives were basking in anti-imperialist righteousness. “It is absolutely necessary for the South to join forces with religious groups around the world and global anti-abortion movements to bring pressure to bear on pro-abortionists and perpetrators of global population control through artificial methods,” declared Cameroon’s Maria Morfaw, who had led her country’s NGO delegation to Beijing. Proclaimed Austin Ruse, “Our friends in the developing world have been coerced long enough. It is time for us to come to their defense on a very broad scale.”

These newly organized cadres had their first confrontation with the women’s movement in March 2000, at a United Nations meeting in New York held to review the progress that had been made since the Beijing conference. Reverend Jennifer Butler, who represented the liberal Presbyterian Church (USA) at the UN, recalled the scene. She was sitting in the balcony of a UN conference hall listening to a speech when “a crowd of men from Mormon and Catholic groups suddenly began streaming through the backdoors of the conference hall as if on cue....They wore professional business suits like the ones bankers and lawyers prefer. Their hair was short and clean-cut. The few women among them wore power suits and perfectly coifed hair. All of them wore bright campaign buttons emblazoned with a single word: ‘motherhood.’ ”
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Groups of robed monks, bearded and stern-faced, encircled women from feminist organizations and started praying for their souls.
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Others “blocked the entrances to discussion rooms, booed statements they disagreed with and surrounded delegates they saw as proponents of the Pill and of abortion,” reported Deutsche Presse-Agentur, the German press agency.
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All this was small scale, though, compared to what Human Life International’s fronts could accomplish once they got George W. Bush onboard. “[T]he prospects for our movement at the UN rest chiefly on the outcome of the next US presidential election,” Ruse wrote in 2000. “If the next US administration is pro-life, everything will change.”
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O
ne of the very first things that George W. Bush did upon taking office was to reinstate the global gag rule, resulting in clinic closures and contraceptive shortages worldwide. Still, early on it wasn’t entirely clear just how much damage the new president would do to sexual health internationally. Colin Powell, the secretary of state, was a big supporter of the UNFPA, and, probably at his behest, Bush’s first budget proposal asked for a $25 million appropriation to the agency, the same amount the United States had given the year before. In written testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Powell said, “We recognize that UNFPA does invaluable work through its programs in maternal and child health care, voluntary family planning, screening for reproductive tract cancers, breast-feeding promotion and HIV/AIDS prevention.... We look forward to working with you and your colleagues to secure the funding necessary for UNFPA to continue these activities.” Congress responded, exceeding the administration’s request by appropriating $34 million for the fund.

Days later, though, Congressman Chris Smith joined with fifty-four other members of Congress to urge the president to freeze the money, citing the Population Research Institute’s charges about UNFPA complicity in forced abortion in China.
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Smith is easily the Population Research Institute’s closest ally in Congress, and he made sure the organization had a voice in government debates. In October 2001 he convened a House panel to look at the group’s allegations, calling Mosher and his colleagues to testify, and on January 31, 2002, he wrote to Bush imploring him not to fund the organization. The UNFPA, he wrote, “clearly supports a program of coercive abortion and involuntary sterilization.” He cited evidence from an “an undercover fact finding team” sent to Sihui, one of thirty-two counties where the UNFPA operates in China. “The investigators were told that family planning is not voluntary in Sihui, and coercive family planning policies in Sihui include: age requirements for pregnancy; birth permits; mandatory use of IUDs; mandatory sterilization; crippling fines for non-compliance; imprisonment for non-compliance; destruction of homes and property for non-compliance; forced abortion and forced sterilization,” he wrote. The UNFPA, Smith charged, was complicit in these outrages.

That was the big lie. Early on, the UNFPA had failed to loudly and consistently condemn China’s population-control abuses, but as a range of investigators would soon find, it was now working hard on the ground to combat them. The UNFPA had changed under Sadik’s leadership and the mandate of the Cairo conference, and was now the only group able to work inside China to try to push the Chinese
away
from the compulsions of the one-child policy. When Bush took office, the UNFPA was working on a project in thirty-two Chinese counties that was meant to demonstrate how the state could move from coercive to voluntary programs. Suspending work in China would have meant giving up whatever influence the UNFPA had.

In his letter to Bush, Congressman Smith neglected to mention that the “investigators” who ostensibly uncovered UNFPA misdeeds were a Population Research Institute team. Based on their findings, Smith urged Bush to exercise a prerogative given presidents in the Kemp-Kasten Amendment, a Reagan-era law that orders money to be withheld from any organization or program that “as determined by the President of the United States, supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or sterilization.”

Bush decided to freeze the money temporarily, pending a State Department investigation. Even before that team left for China, a three-person British delegation, chaired by Edward Leigh, an antiabortion Tory MP, embarked on its own fact-finding mission. Upon returning, Leigh told the
Washington Times
that “there was evidence UNFPA is trying to persuade China away from the program of strict targets and assessments. My personal line is British or U.S. funds should not be used for coercive family planning, and I found no evidence of such practices in China.”
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The State Department mission concluded exactly the same thing. “We find no evidence that UNFPA has knowingly supported or participated in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization in the PRC,” it said in a post-trip report. “We therefore recommend that [the] $34 million which has already been appropriated be released to UNFPA.”
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