I’m not sure the IWF position is worth defending.

From my personal view, I just don’t see how “uncoercive” abortion can possibly be in a country like China with such a strong cultural bias permitting gender selection abortions. Just like an American woman doesn’t need to be kicking and screaming to be raped, the fact that a Chinese woman walks into a clinic on her own and requests an abortion of her female fetus does not make her decision “unforced” when she knows what everyone else in the family will think about her giving birth to a second daughter.

In my view, the unspoken view was probably that the funds were withheld because the UNFPA does anyabortion at all — coerced or not, and the forced abortion was just a pre-text. My point is only, why do I care? If my town has two abortion clinics run by two different companies, and one closes down based on rightwing lies, and the other opens a second clinic to replace it, why should I waste my time on the issue?

Since U.S. contributions weren’t going to China anyway, even when they were contributing to the UNFPA, the critique is essentially that the U.S. is doing lots of non-abortion family planning, and the UNFPA will be required to do more abortion family planning. It just works out to a different division of labor?

I have seen to evidence that USAIDS does a bad job of what it does. Is your concern really just an inefficient allocation of resources? If so, I can point you to a number of more egregious examples than a world with two independent family planning organizations.

With all due respect, Richard, I think your point really does nothing to defend the IWF position I was criticizing in this post.

The result was not less family planning, but merely a different allocation of those resources.