The Trump admin has cut off nearly all funds to the United Nations Population Fund, the biggest cheerleader of China's one-child policy which for decades saw women forced into aborting their babies and undergoing sterilization.
(LifeSiteNews) — On February 26, 2025, the Trump administration cut off nearly all funding to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) – the UN’s notorious population control agency. In all, some 41 different grants from USAID (the United States Agency for International Development) and the State Department, totaling some $290 million, were terminated.
It’s about time. The population controllers at the UNFPA have been grifting off the U.S. taxpayer for decades.
These were the same population controllers who were instrumental in helping to set up China’s “one-child policy” in 1979. As I reported at the time, they provided a $50 million grant to China’s population police, bought the computers that enabled them to set up and enforce quotas for births throughout China, and even established factories producing IUDs that young women were forced to have inserted.
Thus encouraged by the UNFPA, the Chinese Communist Party went all out, rounding up pregnant women, charging them with the crime of being “pregnant,” and forcibly aborting and sterilizing them. I wrote about these crimes extensively in my first book, Broken Earth: The Rural China, published in 1983.
Those young mothers who managed to evade the population police suffered other punishments, including imprisonment of the couple and their family members, the destruction of their homes, and crushing “social compensation fees” equivalent to several times the family’s annual income.
Despite these crimes against humanity, the leaders of the UNFPA were not deterred: not only did they not draw back from supporting China’s one-child policy, they became its biggest cheerleaders.
These are the same population controllers at the UN who picked 1983, a year of unusually severe coercion inside of China, to present the very first “United Nations Population Award” to the People’s Republic of China. As a family planning “high tide” ripped through the Chinese countryside, UN officials in solemn ceremony lauded China “for the most outstanding contribution to the awareness of population questions.” One wonders what the 15 million young Chinese mothers who were coerced into abortions that year thought about such accolades?
My first-person reports were instrumental in the passage of the U.S. Congress’s Kemp-Kasten Amendment in the mid-Eighties, which barred funding to any country or organization that engaged in forced abortion or forced sterilization. The Reagan administration immediately shut down funding to the UNFPA and the first Bush administration followed suit a few years later.
The population controllers at the UNFPA did not back down, however, they doubled down. In the face of overwhelming evidence of China’s brutal tactics including the forced abortion of women in the last trimester of pregnancy by caesarean section – the rogue agency continued to pour money into China.
Even more importantly, from China’s point of view, the UNFPA provided political cover for their crimes. The then-head of the UNFPA, Nafis Sadik, made headlines in 1989 when she falsely claimed that the one-child policy was “purely voluntary” and that “there was no such thing as a license to give birth.”
The UNFPA grew even bolder under Bill Clinton, who once again allowed U.S. taxpayer dollars to flow to the agency. Continuing to shill for China, Sadik announced that China’s one-child policy had been so successful that her agency was going to hire some of China’s population police “to work in other countries and popularize China’s experiences in population growth control.”
One of the results of the UNFPA’s efforts to export the China model was Peru’s infamous sterilization program, in which 300,000 women were coerced into tubal ligations in the mid-nineties.
It wasn’t just China, of course, the UNFPA supported population control programs, and pushed for the legalization of abortion, in dozens of countries around the world. They were heavily involved in setting up Vietnam’s two-child policy of a few years ago, in which women were required to be sterilized after the birth of their second child.
The U.S. Congress pulled the plug on UNFPA funding in 1994, and the agency in turn pulled out of China for lack of funds. But only temporarily. By 1998 it was back in the country, having announced that it had been invited by the Chinese government to set up “model family planning programs” in 32 counties. The “one-child policy” would be suspended in these counties, Nafis Sadik claimed, and childbearing would be entirely voluntary, with no quotas for births, no birth permits, no promotion of abortion, and no coercion.
This in itself was a remarkable statement, since Sadik was admitting what any reasonable person knew already: that China’s one-child policy was everywhere enforced by quotas, permits, and coercion.
For myself, I simply did not believe Sadik’s claim to have de-fanged China’s population police, even in a mere 32 out of China’s nearly 3,000 counties. The idea that China’s brutal Communist dictatorship would let a UN agency control part of its territory and its people in this way was totally implausible.
We at Population Research Institute (PRI) organized a team of investigators to visit several of these counties, where we found that not a single one of Sadik’s claims was true. In fact, the local UNFPA employees were working hand-in-glove with the population police to ensure that no “illegal” births occurred, using the same kinds of threats and punishments, up to and including forced abortion, that were being used in the rest of China.
The entire set-up was a fraud, we reported to the second Bush administration, and to the U.S. Congress at congressional hearings. The funding to the UN population control fanatics was cut off again.
The see-saw battle over UNFPA funding has continued in the years since. It was restored under Obama, cut off again by Trump 45, then restored again by Biden – or whoever was actually in charge of the White House during his term of office.
This latest funding cut-off by the Trump administration is the most far-reaching of all, and it could not have come at a more appropriate time. Birth rates are in freefall around the globe. Even China, having abandoned its one-child policy in 2016, is now desperate for more children as it faces an economic crisis caused by a rapidly aging population.
We no longer need a UN agency with population control fanatics promoting coercive one-child policies. We never did.
Steven W. Mosher
President, Population Research Institute
