The U.S. is ceasing all funding of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the State Department announced Monday.

In a letter to U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, the State Department referenced both President Donald Trump’s reinstatement of the Mexico City Policy — which prohibits funding international and foreign organizations that promote abortion — and the fund’s ties to China’s alleged forced abortion and sterilization policies.

“The U.N. Population Fund has been complicit in China’s one-child policy from the first, not merely turning a blind eye to abuses, but facilitating them in various ways.”

“This determination was made based on the fact that China’s family planning policies still involve the use of coercive abortion and involuntary sterilization, and UNFPA partners on family planning activities with the Chinese government agency responsible for these coercive policies,” the State Department letter said.

A total of $32.5 million in funds was slated for UNFPA for the 2017 financial year. That money will now be “transferred and reprogrammed to the [U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)] Global Health Programs account,” the State Department’s letter explained.

The United Nations Population Fund could be described more accurately as the United Nations Depopulation Fund, as it seems designed specifically to achieve that end. “UNFPA is the lead U.N. agency for delivering a world where every pregnancy is wanted,” the organization’s “about us” states on its website. Accordingly UNFPA spends a majority of its funds on promoting abortions and contraceptives.

According to the agency’s own “transparency portal,” a whopping 61.5 percent of its expenditures in 2015 — $477,173,266 — went towards “integrated sexual reproductive health services.” Over 40 percent of those funds — roughly $200,000,000 — was spent directly on so-called “family planning.”

UNFPA has vehemently denied the State Department’s assertion that it is complicit in Chinese practices of forced abortions and sterilizations, calling it an “erroneous claim.”

However, a 2012 investigation by the Population Research Institute, a non-profit group dedicated to exposing human rights abuses in population control programs, discovered that “the UNFPA is directly responsible for forced abortions and forced sterilizations in China,” wrote PRI’s president Steven W. Mosher for LifeNews at the time.

“The U.N. Population Fund has been complicit in China’s one-child policy from the first, not merely turning a blind eye to abuses, but facilitating them in various ways. This is nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in the U.N. Population Fund’s ‘model country program,’ where UNFPA-trained officials oversee the enforcement of the one-child policy, and where abuses are rampant,” he wrote.

[lz_related_box id=”649480″]

Who do you think would win the Presidency?

By completing the poll, you agree to receive emails from LifeZette, occasional offers from our partners and that you've read and agree to our privacy policy and legal statement.

Indeed, the cuts are not new — they are a reinstatement of cuts instituted by the Bush administration but reversed by the Obama administration.

“In 2001, the U.S. cut funding to UNFPA because an investigation, headed by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, found that UNFPA was complicit in the coercive implementation of China’s one-child policy,” explained Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, in the National Review in 2011.

“In 2008, the U.S. State Department reaffirmed that determination, and yet the Obama administration resumed funding in 2009.”