Alithea Williams, blogpost
Over the past week, there has been rebellion in the Commons, as some MPs have been seeking to overturn cuts made to the UK’s overseas aid budget. In November last year, the government reduced aid spending from 0.7% to 0.5% of national income, citing the costs of the pandemic response to justify the £4 billion worth of cuts.
What interests us, as pro-lifers, is that these cuts include a huge reduction in the amount of money going to fund abortion overseas.
The cuts made an 85% reduction in UK aid funding to the United Nations Population Fund, one of the leading promoters of abortion worldwide which has funded China’s coercive population control policies. It has received just £23 million of taxpayers’ money this year, down sharply from the £154 million promised in 2019.
The Government has also informed MSI Reproductive Choices (as Marie Stopes International now calls itself) and the International Planned Parenthood Foundation that £70m expected in June 2021 for its flagship Women’s Integrated Sexual Health programme (WISH) will not be paid.
It is interesting that Covid led to funding cuts to these two organisations, when appalling scandals did not. In January 2019, IPPF were given £132 million in aid funding when investigations into allegations of sexual misconduct and corruption at the abortion giant were ongoing. In Africa, the Governments of Kenya, Niger and Zambia have taken action against Marie Stopes for performing illegal abortions. Despite all this, Marie Stopes’ 2018 annual report shows that DFID (the Department for International Development) was by far and away the organisation’s biggest donor, giving £49.5 million.
Not only did the Government give millions of pounds to abortion providers through DFID, it did so at the expense of genuine maternal healthcare. The Independent Commission for Aid Impact (Icai) slammed DFID for focusing on family planning at the expense of maternal health, and questioned the claims made about lives saved. Most damningly, the ICIA report says: "most maternal deaths result from intentional pregnancies, rather than accidental ones, and are therefore not prevented by access to contraception...We find that DFID did not pursue the strengthening of health systems to provide quality maternal care with the same intensity as it did for family planning, nor did it do enough to address the barriers that the poorest women face in accessing health services."
When the Department for International Development was merged with the Foreign Office, I wondered whether there might be a reassessment of where Britain spends its foreign aid budget. Does funding abortion overseas really fit in with the UK’s strategic objectives for foreign relations? Is that really where British taxpayers want their money going?
In the context of the coronavirus pandemic, these questions seem especially pertinent. There are still countries in the world who are suffering terribly from the impact of Covid-19. At our time when our Government is spending large amounts of money to prevent people dying from Covid, it’s hard to imagine a more incongruous use of aid money than for killing unborn children in other countries.
Most people are not aware just how much of the foreign aid is channelled into population control programmes. This striking graphic, produced by the Institute for International Relations, shows that more is spent on ‘Population Programmes’ (a euphemism for abortion and contraception) than health, education, or indeed anything else.
This seems especially unjustified in light of a ComRes poll, which found that 65% of the public oppose UK taxpayer money being spent on abortions overseas. I would wager that during these times, with countries in need of help to save lives from Covid, funding abortion would be even lower down the public’s priority list for foreign aid.
The MPs opposing aid cuts surely have the best intentions. But whatever the result of their rebellion, any restoration of foreign aid must not include funding so called reproductive health. It’s a matter of life or death for unborn babies overseas.