Saving Women's Lives

Letter to the Editor

To the Editor:

Re "U.S. Cuts Off Financing for AIDS Program, Provoking Furor" (news article, Aug. 27):

This action against a respected program because of its work with the United Nations Population Fund is part of a pattern by the administration, pushed by far-right groups, to take money away from comprehensive family-planning programs.

Three fact-finding missions, including one by the State Department, have discredited the original charge that the population fund supported coercive abortion policies in China. The charge was made by a tiny, controversial Virginia group, whose "researcher" had never before been to China and did not speak Chinese.

We must ask how extremists have been able to kidnap our policy-making and stall financing to programs that save thousands of women's lives every year. 

SUE HORNIK
New York, Aug. 27, 2003
The writer is director of media relations, International Women's Health Coalition

Originally published in the New York Times, September 2, 2003. Reprinted with permission.

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