One-child policy: activist gets more jailtime

[Rink]

One-child policy: activist gets more jailtime

Beijing - Chinese authorities have added three more months to the sentence of a Shanghai woman serving one-and-a-half years in a labour camp for her campaign to abolish China's family planning policies, a human rights organisation said on Wednesday.

Mao Hengfeng's original sentence was handed down by the Shanghai Public Security Bureau in April 2003. She was informed last month of the extension, according to a statement from New York-based Human Rights in China.

More on this Story (http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=126&art_id=qw1104904080321B252)

[DeclinetoState]

I'm sure the National Organization for Women is condemning this.

Uh, what's that you say?

The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) continues to assist China's population control program. And if any American feminist groups sent representatives to Tuesday's hearings, I didn't notice them. A check conducted December 17 of the websites of the National Organization for Women (NOW), the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), and the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) found nothing on the hearings, not even a little throwaway press release deploring China's abuses. NOW's website did have something on the plight of Sudanese women on its front page, and IPPF's front page did feature a link on China, but this couldn't have had less to do with the suffering of Chinese women: "More Than 80% of MSM in China Know Little About HIV/AIDS," the IPPF proclaimed. (MSM stands for "men who have sex with men" and may be an up-and-coming fashionable term preparing to replace "gay" and "bisexual," just as those terms have largely replaced the term "homosexual," which replaced "sodomite.")


http://www.fjh-peru.org/vm/index.asp?vm_id=1&art_id=26667

But what does the NOW itself say?


UNFPA, Condemned by Bush Administration, Loses Additional $50 Million in U.S. International Family Planning Funds
With a narrow majority, the House of Representatives voted to block $50 million in international family planning funds to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), based on the unsubstantiated argument that the program supports China's coercive population control policy. The Bush administration and some GOP lawmakers disparaged UNFPA—a program which provides millions of dollars to promote contraception, as well as safe birthing and child care practices for poor women in more than 150 countries—saying that it violates U.S. law by supporting China's "one child" policy, which they claim sometimes entails coerced or forced abortions. Yet UNFPA officials assert that the program does not promote abortion, and an investigative panel convened by Bush last year reported that there was no evidence that UNFPA promotes coerced abortions or involuntary sterilizations in China. Despite the panel's findings, the Bush administration withdrew $34 million from the program in 2002 and did not request any funding for the program in Bush's 2004 budget. As a result of the House vote, it appears that UNFPA will not receive any funding this year either.
Source: Washington Post, "House Blocks Family Planning Funds," Juliet Eilperin, July 16, 2003



Source: http://www.truthaboutgeorge.com/women/

I don't know if the "Truth about George" site is a NOW site, but it is very prominently linked on NOW's homepage.