Nancy Kipnis, NCJW Vice President, Briefing on International Family Planning Efforts in China

MARSHA ATKIND (NCJW PRESIDENT): Good morning, everybody. This is Marsha Atkind, and I want to welcome all of you to this very exciting conference briefing. NCJW has been a leading voice in this country in advocating on behalf of funding for international family planning efforts. Our concern for this issue comes from our deep-rooted desire to advance the status and well being of women and children everywhere. And in the summer of 2001 we published an entire issue of the Journal devoted to this message. The United Nations Population Fund, or the UNFPA, recently estimated that the world's population is growing at the rate of 77 million people annually. In areas where access to birth control information and health education and services are not available, mothers struggle to feed and to care for their children, the spread of AIDS goes virtually unchecked, and women have no hope of providing better lives for themselves or their children than their mothers did before them.

Opponents of US funding for the UNFPA claim that it participates in coercion in China and has successfully lobbied the Administration to cut off funds for the organization -- not only in China, but everywhere that they operate. Previous fact-finding missions from the British government and the US State Department in China have found that no evidence exists to support this claim. A mission was organized to China. Last spring, I received a call from Frances Kissling, head of Catholics For Free Choice, which is a coalition partner of NCJW. Frances told me that Catholics For Free Choice was sponsoring an all expenses paid mission to China for religious leaders to investigate this issue. When I said, "Frances, I'm not a religious leader," she said "Not in the strict sense of the word, but NCJW is so powerful on this issue that we want you there."

When the trip was scheduled and I wasn't able to go, I asked NCJW Vice President Nancy Kipnis, Chair of NCJW's Benchmark Campaign, to represent us on this mission.

NANCY KIPNIS (NCJW Vice President): At the beginning of this trip, I learned a wonderful Buddhist proverb: "Seek knowledge, even if you have to go to China to find it." I feel incredibly privileged to have traveled to China representing NCJW to seek knowledge about what I consider some of the most fundamental and personal issues of life.

As I began the journey, the first journal entry I wrote was: "I hope and pray that I have the heart and the capacity to sufficiently wrestle with the issues that we will face, and to be of value in making progress towards a more humane and compassionate resolution of these fundamental issues of life and liberty."

I now know that my Judaism gave me the heart to respond to the issues that we faced, and I know that NCJW gives me and all of us the means to respond to these issues. I want to put into context what these issues are and what I was able to glean there.

There are really three threads influencing the issues around this trip, three intertwined threads, all of which Marsha touched on briefly. The first is the population crisis going on in China and indeed around the world, but substantially in China. The second thread is the UN's role in helping to stabilize population worldwide and to support international family planning issues. The third is the US contribution to the UN's efforts to support international family planning. I said all three of these threads are intertwined. I think it helps to look at these issues as part of timeline viewed over the past thirty years, with each of these thread moving on this timeline and tangled together and to bring us to where we are now.

So I want to begin with trying to briefly understand what China is facing when it comes to population issues. It's an enormous problem in China and for the world. China has the world's largest population, about 1.3 billion people, which is one-fifth of the world population, and compared to the United States, where we have just under 300 million people. In just the twenty-three-year period from 1950 to 1973, the population in China grew by 350 million people -- more than the whole population of the United States. By the 1960's, the average Chinese had about six or more children.

So in 1979, under the communist leadership in China, the government decided that they needed to respond aggressively to the population issues of its country, and at that time instituted what is known as the "One Child Policy," which requires couples in nearly all the urban areas in China to obtain official approval to conceive a child and with most families only permitted to conceive one child. In the rural areas, depending upon the population of those areas and the ethnic group to which a family belongs, some are allowed to have two children, and some ethnic groups were allowed to have more than two children under that initial policy. For the entire country there were birth quotas established and targets established and financial incentives put in place to encourage people to limit the number of children they were having. There were also fines put in place for what were called "out of plan children," children beyond the authorized number of children per family.

At that time there were really only two methods of birth control that were supported by the government. One was a mandatory insertion of an IUD after your first child, and sterilization after your second child. This campaign to control their population explosion began to grow with urgency. By the early 1980s there was substantial documentation of coercion associated with the government's actions, including forcing women to have abortions, forcing women to be sterilized, and imposing of fines and destroying of property. This was a very draconian time in China for families.

At the same time, what was going on with the UN is that the arm of the UN referred to as the United Nations Populations Fund, or known as the UNFPA, had served as the global voice for international family planning since 1969, and has been the largest internationally funded source of population assistance to developing countries.

The UN provides assistance to about 156 countries, with today about a 200 million dollar annual budget. As far as the US's role in that budget, the US has historically provided about 17% of the annual UNFPA budget, with the Netherlands and Japan really providing the lion's share of that budget, or about 25% each.

Because of China's policies beginning in the early 1980s, the US funding of the UNFPA has been very uneven. The unevenness has really followed which administration was in the White House. During very conservative years -- the Reagan and the current Administration's years -- support for the UNPFA work in China has been decimated. During the more liberal administrations -- the Clinton years -- funding was put back in place, either allowing full funding with segregated accounts so that the US money did not go into China, or withholding of the portion of US funds that would have gone to China.

In 1994, the UN took a significant leadership role by organizing and brokering a historic conference that occurred in Cairo, known as the International Conference on Population Development, referred as the ICPD. This was really a milestone in population development. One hundred and seventy nine countries participated, and China, including the United States, and the Vatican also participated. All committed to creating and funding a program of family planning that focuses on human rights and people, rather than demographic targets. That was a tremendous step for China to take, to commit to that in 1994.

In 1995 the UNFPA went into China and said, "We're going to negotiate with you on how we could help you implement this program." Negotiations took two years. During that two-year period, the UN had no involvement in the family planning practices of China, and no funds were spent or staff placed in China during that period, so that they could negotiate fully with the Chinese government. Those negotiations finished in 1998, and at that point the UN went back in with a program, a pilot program. They said, "Give us 32 counties." China has 2,500 counties. They said, "Give us 32 of your counties. Let us come in. And you need to commit to removing all the targets and quotas in those counties. We will help you replace that with education, with contraceptive choice, with voluntary healthcare services. We will help you see that you can obtain the same results with voluntary measures and with education and with choice that you did with the coercive measures."

China gave that over to the UNFPA. What happened in those four years was extraordinary. It was an experiment, and it worked. Abortion rates in all 32 counties declined by about thirty percent during that four-year period and have continued to remain that way. The infant mortality rates decreased dramatically. Knowledge about contraceptive choice increased, and the birth rates stabilized or decreased. As a result, China has voluntarily expanded that UNFPA experiment to 800 counties now, with very similar results.

In 2002, China adopted -- after a several-years negotiation -- a new state law in China, a new population and family planning law, which was focused on eliminating all of the abuses that they had recognized were going on in the local family planning level, and replacing fines for "out of plan" birth with something called the "social compensation fee." The social compensation fee has now become the center for the controversy internationally around what's happening in China. The social compensation fee, as the Chinese government explains it, is the cost that's levied on parents for having out of plan children -- more children than the plan allows them to have -- because of the cost to the government and the state and the community of having more children.

One of the great issues about the social compensation fee is that although state law now permits it, each of those 30 provinces in China established their own laws about the amount and how they will collect the social compensation fee. And so the amount of the social compensation fee is varying from ten percent of a family's annual income to three to five times a family's annual income. And in those places where it's imposed at three to five times a family's annual income, it is usually collected over a period of five to seven years. We learned that a family can go before a board and have that amount mitigated, but it is largely discretionary and so that has become the heart of the controversy with the Bush Administration deciding in May of 2002 to completely de-fund all of the US contribution to the UNFPA. The 34 million dollars that we had been giving was completely de-funded on the grounds that coercive practices occurred in China in the past, and the belief is that the social compensation fee would also promote coercive practices to occur today.

NCJW has been involved in international family planning for decades now, because it's so integral to the rights of women and the health and security of women. And so we became involved in advocating for funding because this de-funding of $34 million has created a healthcare crisis for women in developing countries. It's estimated that the $34 million that the US would have provided would prevent annually two million unwanted pregnancies and nearly 800,000 induced abortions.

There have been a number of delegations from around that world that have gone into China to see what the UN is doing and what its practices are. Each seeking to access the value is of what the UN is doing in China. And, in fact, the US State Department sent a delegation to China in May of 2002 just before the President made his de-funding decision. That US State Department delegation reported that there's no evidence that the UN has supported or participated in any coercive practices with respect to coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization in China and recommended funding the UNFPA fully, just excluding the China portion of the funding.

Frances Kissling from Catholics For Free Choice thought that if we could bring together a group of ethicists and religious leaders in an interfaith mission, we could take a different and needed look at what was happening with the UN from an ethical standpoint and from a religious standpoint. We became the first delegation of religious leaders to go into China to look at these issues, and NCJW was invited as the Jewish organizational representative.

The delegation included nine different religious organizations and leaders, including representation from the Muslim, Catholic, Lutheran, United Church of Christ, and also the Chair of the Ethics Department at Dartmouth University. We spent one week in China. The first two days we spent in Beijing, meeting with the staff from the UNFPA and very high-level Chinese government officials. Also meeting with Ford Foundation recipients in China who were doing work that's incredibly similar to the work that NCJW is doing here the United States. And we also met with high-level representatives from the US Embassy.

I think one of the most interesting and surprising statements came when we met with the US Embassy official and we were told that "We [the US] believe that choice about reproductive decisions should reside with the family," which was ironic, since certainly that's what we have been working so hard to secure for women in the United States, and we haven't been able to secure that as we've wanted to in this administration.

After spending those two days in briefing sessions and laying the groundwork, we broke up into three smaller contingents that went into three very remote rural areas of China with our own independent translators and university professors and government official representatives, to look at what was happening on the ground in these rural areas and to meet independently with villagers to speak about what their experiences are and how they're viewing what's happening in China with family planning, and in those counties that had UNFPA programs how that was impacting their lives in China.

We found that the UNFPA's program in China has clearly inspired change in that country. The Chinese government welcomed the UNFPA work here. We met with a Vice Minister at the national level. He explained to us that China needs the UNFPA as well as the UNFPA needs China, with China being one-fifth of the world's population. The UN and the world can't turn its back on China, and China needs the UN to open this window of ideas. And one of the professors we met expanded on that concept. He told us that the UNFPA is China's channel into the world, introducing new concepts into China, and it is really the key to inspiring China to be able to move out of targets and coercive practices and move toward humanitarian practices to achieve the results that it must achieve for stabilizing its population.

The UN has also been very involved in training programs for family planning workers and for government family planning policy makers in China, and has introduced those programs by bringing these individuals to conferences around the world to be trained and to get a more global view of what's happening around the world, which is changing the way the government is thinking.

It is incredible how the UN has leveraged its activities. The UN only spends about three and a half million dollars in China annually on family planning issues, whereas the Chinese government is spending three billion dollars annually. In this little drop in the bucket amount, the UN has become a leader and an inspirer for the Chinese government. I think one of the best examples is to see how China has moved from allowing the UN to experiment with a model in 32 counties to China, now on their own, expanding that to 800 counties, lifting and eliminating quotas and targets and replacing that with education and with choice. The UN is now embarking on a new program, which is just beginning this year in China, where they're experimenting with 30 counties. It was a highly competitive situation to choose those 30 counties because they had applications from over 100. The focus of this new experiment, this new model, is to find ways to decrease and ultimately eliminate the social compensation fee as an incentive in China, and also to respond to the gender inequity issues in the family planning arena in China. This will go on for the next two and a half years.

I think the second big message that we received through our work and through what we saw was that the beliefs of the Chinese people about family size are changing. For many, many centuries, the belief was that the large family showed strength; that only male children were truly valued, because that was the only way to carry on the lineage. As we talk to villagers, they are thinking in the ways that we're thinking about the size of their families. So when I met a 27-year-old seamstress, in a real rural area, and went into her home, in an area where the annual income is under $3,000 a year, I spoke to her about her family planning beliefs. She had one child, and she was eligible to have a second child because she lived in a rural area. I said, "Are you going to have a second child?" She said, "No." I responded, "Why not?" She said, "Well, when I finished high school, I applied for entrance exams to college and I did not pass my entrance exams. I came from a very large family. I said to myself at that time, ‘I'm only going to have one child. I'm going to pour everything I can into that one child, and I'm going to make sure that my child has a different economic opportunity than me, a different education opportunity than me, and that I have the time to provide the quality of life for this child.'" We heard that kind of story over and over again. Interestingly, we also heard when we asked the members of the community, "So, do you have questions for us about America?" Invariably they would turn to me and say, "So, who decides how many children you have?" They really couldn't fathom a system in which the government didn't make those decisions for them.

I heard similar stories when I spoke to a father in another very remote village about the reasons that he was choosing to have one child -- it happened to be a daughter -- and why he was choosing to have one when he could have two children. He said it was a matter of the economics of raising a child, educational opportunities, and then to a lesser degree, the incentives that the government provided for staying in plan with only one child.

We focused very much, as I said, on the social compensation fee because it is truly is antithetical to Western values. It is my belief, it was the belief of this delegation that it's something that needs to be addressed and it does need to be modified in China. Mainly because of how unevenly it is enforced, and how it can be quite onerous because it can be so substantial.

We did find that in China the social compensation fee among the villagers themselves is not considered a coercive practice. There are probably a number of reasons for that. One is from where they came, the social compensation fee is a modest government practice compared to the practices of the 1980s. Another is that the individual understands a great commitment to the community, greater than to the individual. They believe they have this responsibility that to the community by having more children, that they have responsibility to pay for it.

I think another aspect of why it's not considered coercive among the people is that I think the Chinese people really haven't been given the opportunity to critically think and to take positions antithetical to their government. When I would ask the question of villagers, "We see there has been great change in family planning practices and wonderful changes, fundamental changes here in your community. But if you could change one aspect of family planning in China, what would it be?" Invariably people just drew a blank and could not even conceive of how to develop an answer to a question like that, because they just haven't ever been allowed to think like that.

The UN, in this new program that they have developed, is addressing the social compensation fee. I'm proud to tell you that we had incredibly frank and open and extensive discussions with very high-level Chinese government officials about Western concerns about the social compensation fee. We spent many, many hours on airplanes and on buses, traveling to these remote areas with these officials. After days of discussion, I do believe our concerns were heard.

The bottom line for me came down to this: It came down to a philosophical decision that needs to be made, as far as our government and as far as us as citizens influencing our government. The fundamental question to be answered is: does the United States withdraw from China because international family planning policies and programs because there exists some negative aspects, or do we engage and try to inspire change? I am now clear -- that we have a responsibility to this world; we have a responsibility to this population of one-fifth of the world to engage, and through engagement, to influence. We certainly, as Jews, have the responsibility to not remain indifferent to what happens in this world. From what we could see, it was clear to us that the UNFPA is a beacon; that it is shedding light down this path of human rights, and that China is attracted to this light, and is responding to it, and that a door of human rights has been opened and that we must continue to pursue it.

I have just some personal closing thoughts before we go into questions. I have to tell you that I felt so incredibly privileged to have come from a Western environment, to have the freedom that we have enjoyed in our lives, and the freedom to think and the freedom to respond and to question. With that freedom clearly comes a great responsibility. I also became clearly committed to the concept of engagement and how important global engagement is in this time, and how important inter-faith engagement is. This trip was so much about the inter-faith experience of going with representatives from such a variety of faiths to look at this issue.

On a very personal level I want to share with you a story. The first day we had a few hours off, as we began this trip, the first day. I jumped into a taxi with one of my fellow delegates, who is a Muslim doctor from Los Angeles, and we went out to see The Great Wall of China. We got there about 7:00 in the morning, and it was a heavy fog day. As we ascended to the wall, we could only see about fifty feet in front of us, and then we'd move a little through the fog and see another fifty feet. As we pursued the wall we discovered incredible architecture, lookouts, archways and stairways. We spoke about how this is such a metaphor of life, that we know that there is this incredible journey out there before us, and we can only see little pieces of it, and we can only begin to see more as we walk down that path. As we walked down that path together, we could see more. It was really very powerful. My new Muslim friend sent me an email, as we were getting ready for Rosh Hashanah this year. He said to me how much we enjoyed this trip together. He said, "When you're in synagogue praying, pray for me too." That was an incredibly powerful aspect of engagement that I gained from this trip.

I finally saw the common shared value of hope for our children and hope for the future. We went into the homes of families in poverty, who have lived under such a difficult regime, who are finally seeing light in this world and have such great hope for the future of their children to be better than theirs. It's a hope that we share.

In closing, I want to share with you a few words that I shared with the delegation as we were having our final dinner together. I shared with them words from Hannah G. Solomon, our founder, who I often refer to and whose thoughts resonated again with me on this trip. She spoke about how some of us are privileged to stand on a hillside and, therefore, have a wider view of this world. From that perspective, we see things that call for our sympathy. She said that she hopes when we see that call, that we are ready and that we respond. As members of that delegation, and clearly as a member of NCJW standing with you all, I feel that we do stand on this hillside, and therefore we have this larger perspective. We've had it for eleven decades, and we have been responding to that call with powerful, very effective voices. And this is a call that we must continue to respond to. The world needs us to respond to this.

It is believed that Congress will be taking up the issue again of the funding of the UNFPA this winter. I hope that NCJW continues to lead the way on this issue, and that when you receive your call, when you receive your action alert, that you will respond, that you will engage more people to respond, and that we will continue our tradition of not remaining indifferent.

Thank you, Marsha, for this great privilege.



QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

MARSHA ATKIND: What's next? Is there going to be follow-up from this delegation? What's going to happen now?

NANCY KIPNIS: We're actually in the midst of drafting a very comprehensive report with an executive summary and a huge appendix that we should have out by the end of this month. And we will be giving it to all members of Congress and to influential leaders within each of our movements. Then we will be holding more press conferences. We actually had a phenomenal press conference as we were leaving Beijing. Reuters was there, Time Magazine, New York Times, and AP. And we will continue to do that. Actually, the Catholics for Free Choice have established a fund that we will all have access to, to be able to travel to Washington, to be able to testify, to go to conferences, and to keep a spotlight on this issue.

The follow-up to this issue is if we can finally get through the funding of UNFPA and get to that issue of what's happening in China, then the next issue that we have to confront is an issue that NCJW has confronted many times, and it's the issue of the global gag rule and the Mexico City language, which is another conference call, and will be the next issue that will need to be addressed in order to really provide the kind of international family planning support that we know is needed. 

BARBARA HERMAN (Honorary Vice President): I read a report about Africa and how the United States' cutting back its funding was affecting women's healthcare and children's healthcare in all the other places in the world that the UN Population Fund funds. I wondered if you address that at all in terms of getting Congress to see that it's a much broader issue than just the policies in China.

NANCY KIPNIS: Yes. Just a little portion of the statistic I was quoting before about the 200 million unwanted pregnancies and the 800,000 unnecessary induced abortions that are caused as a result of the U.S. de-funding. It relates with exactly what's happening worldwide. And certainly, it's affecting tremendously the work that's going on in Africa. The AIDS work, the HIV work, and with the US. What the US is doing now under this administration is it is finding that any organization that is in any way now connected with the UN's work in China is being considered a tainted organization and they're withholding funds. So they're now withholding funds from Marie Stopes, which is a great organization that is doing exceptional work in Africa on family planning and on AIDS and on HIV prevention. And they're withholding those funds because of the connection to that organization's working with the UN in China. And so it's becoming… The issue is growing, is mushrooming, and becoming a greater crisis. Certainly our report will reflect that.

SANDY GARRETT (NCJW Executive Director): Could you go back for a moment and tell us a little bit more about the gender policies in China, and what the changes are that might have come about recently?

NANCY KIPNIS: As I indicated, as I think everybody knows, there's been a huge preference in China for male babies, and there have been practices at the family level and at the local level with respect to that, where there have been abortions to abort female babies. There's been abandonment of female children, and there have been a lot of deaths among female babies. And from what we were able to understand, it very much has to do with the ethnic population of specific cultural regions in China. The three rural regions that we focused on, that we attended to, did not have that as a significant issue. We were not able to address the gender issue. We were not able to really view the gender issue as deeply as we were able to view the other issues we looked at. But we do know that the UNFPA is working on that issue, and is in those counties, and that those counties are big portions of this next model that the UN is working on. It will be addressed. It's a diminishing issue, but it still needs a lot of focus in China, because of the cultural norms around it.

SANDY GARRETT: You said that the people that you met welcomed the UN, and the work that the UN was doing. How did they react to you as Americans on a more personal and national level? How did they react?

NANCY KIPNIS: There's such graciousness in the Chinese culture that we were received with excitement, because they'd never seen Americans before, and with warmth. Every home whose door we knocked on we were invited into. We had no government officials with us. We had independent translators that were not associated with a government with us, and we told them that. People, by all indications, seemed incredibly comfortable talking to us, and excited to talk to us. It was almost as if you were going to see extended family that you had never met before. This one extraordinary experience, when we were in a very poor home of a three-generation family, kept insisting that we stay for lunch and we said, "We can't stay for lunch." We didn't want to eat their food. We didn't want to impose like that. We couldn't stay. They kept insisting. Finally, they brought this big basket of what looked like muffins and they insisted that we eat this. We decided that we would share one among us. We tore it apart. I took one bite of it and looked at my translator, and said, "You have to translate something for me." I told him, "This tastes just like a popover that my Jewish grandmother used to make. Let me tell you the recipe." I gave them the recipe and they said, "Yes, yes, yes. That's the recipe." It was so warm and gracious. They were just thrilled to see Americans and to have that contact and hope that comes from Americans.