President Donald Trump’s administration recently defunded the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the group responsible for ushering in China’s notorious “one-child policy” in the 1970s.
CatholicVote Director of Government Affairs Tom McClusky supported legislation defunding UNFPA. He celebrated the change, which came on Feb. 26.
“UNFPA was the largest benefactor of the grift occurring at USAID, with hundreds of millions going to bolster groups promoting abortion in countries that did not want it,” McClusky stated March 14. “America needs to stop being a country that promotes the death of children overseas, to do that we need to defund UNFPA.”
UNFPA’s website states that it does not fund or perform abortions; however, it also does not “conceal information about abortions.” They state that “in countries where abortion is legal, national health systems must make safe abortion care accessible to the full extent of the law.”
They also state that one of the “facts” regarding abortion is that “Women who are turned away from a desired abortion are more likely to experience long-term consequences like poverty and are less able to extricate from violent relationships — hardships that take a toll across generations.”
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The organization promotes and distributes birth control to women in third-world countries.
Representative Chip Roy, R-Texas, reintroduced legislation in January 2025 prohibiting tax dollars from funding the organization. Pro-life organizations, including CatholicVote, supported the legislation.
In Trump’s first term, he banned the organization from receiving U.S. tax dollars.
“The United Nations Population Fund is a globalist, Orwellian, propaganda machine that shills for the Chinese Communist Party its brutal mandatory abortion practices,” Roy stated.
Expressing support of the bill when it was introduced in January, McClusky emphasized that it would block funding to a group that funded China’s immoral population control efforts.
“For decades the U.N. Population Fund has been providing support, mainly to China, for government programs which have promoted forced abortions and coercive sterilizations,” he said. “Rep. Roy deserves praise for ensuring that U.S. taxpayers do not get further entangled in the anti-family/pro-abortion policies of the UNFPA.”
Although UNFPA denies supporting abortion and coerced sterilization, records indicate that they helped bring the “one-child policy” to China in 1979, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) reported while the policy was still in place. The policy was changed to a two-child policy in 2016.
“UNFPA provided China with $50 million in seed money and expertise in demographics and data processing that were probably indispensable,” the USCCB stated.
The policy required all married couples to practice “family planning,” and the State Family Planning Commission charted each woman’s menstrual cycle. The government issued birth permits for the first child, and after that first birth women were required to use an intrauterine device (IUD).
If a woman became pregnant again, government officials forcibly aborted her child, even if the baby was full-term. They would also sterilize one parent.
“Additional penalties for ‘out-of-plan births’ can include ‘social compensation fees,’ i.e. fines of three times the parents’ annual salary, imprisonment of the couple and their family members, and destruction of homes and property,” the USCCB stated. “Wide-scale abortion and sterilization are also carried out for eugenic reasons.”
The program resulted in 53 million forced abortions from 1979-1984, and UNFPA stopped funding the program between 1994-1998.
“But their collaboration officially resumed in 1998 in 32 counties of China where, UNFPA insisted, no quotas, permits or coercion were taking place (unlike the rest of the country),” USCCB added. “Since then, UNFPA has steadfastly maintained the voluntary nature of family planning in those 32 counties and its complete innocence or ignorance of any quotas or coercion.”
The USCCB stated that the UNFPA still poured millions of dollars into the 32 Chinese counties “for computers, data processing equipment, surgical and medical equipment and project vehicles, all of which are instrumental in enforcing China’s coercive policy.”
China is still reeling from the effects of the one-child policy, as CatholicVote has previously reported, as it faces economic crises due to a rapidly aging population and low marriage rates.
LifeNews Note: Grace Porto writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.
