Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, shared an open letter to President-elect Donald Trump in an email today, urging Trump to “call[] for a full-scale investigation of International Planned Parenthood [IPPF] to determine the exact nature of its operations in China.” Littlejohn strongly believes that the organization is “complicit with coercive population control in China,” and should be defunded if her suspicions are confirmed.
Littlejohn writes that while IPPF has been “posturing as a champion of choice… forced abortion is not a choice.”
In April of this year, Littlejohn noted that a recent State Department report confirmed that the reported 13 million abortions taking place in China annually were underreported by about 10 million, bringing the annual estimate to around 23 million abortions per year. This number, she wrote at the time, is “staggering”:
13 million abortions a year was already an incomprehensible statistic. But to add another 10 million is truly staggering, incomprehensibly tragic. 23 million abortions a year comes to 63,013 abortions a day, 2625 abortions an hour, 43 per minute.
In comparison, abortions in the U.S. total approximately one million annually. Therefore, Littlejohn wrote at the time, “[W]ith four times the population of the United States, China has 23 times the number of abortions.”
“Transparency” regarding Planned Parenthood’s part in China’s family planning, Littlejohn writes in her email, “is demanded by the fact that IPPF receives taxpayer dollars from the United States and other nations as well.” Indeed, Planned Parenthood receives more than $500 million annually in taxpayer dollars from the United States alone. And as their taxpayer funding has increased in the U.S., so have the number of abortions provided by the organization — while its non-abortion health care services continue to decline.
But why, exactly, is Littlejohn so certain that Planned Parenthood is involved with China’s coercive population control policies? Because Planned Parenthood has been partnered with the China Family Planning Association (CFPA) for decades. She writes:
The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) partnered with the CFPA as its main access to China beginning in 1983, when abuses under the then-new One-Child Policy were at their height….
Today IPPF is still CFPA’s main partner, and IPPF has gone on record praising China’s notoriously coercive policy….
IPPF’s site still points to CFPA as its main operations hub in China and has recently publicized its good relationship with the Chinese government.
“I believe it is impossible to partner so closely” with China’s forced family planning organization “without being complicit in its atrocities,” Littlejohn writes. Hopefully the incoming presidential administration will investigate IPPF, for the sake of China’s families. After all, as Littlejohn says, if we are funding Planned Parenthood, then we are funding oppression and atrocities, and “the blood of Chinese women and babies is on our hands.”
