The state department has announced it is ending US funding for the United Nation Population Fund (UNFPA), the international body’s agency focused on family planning as well as maternal and child health in more than 150 countries.
The state department said it was withholding $32.5 in funding for the fiscal year of 2017 because the UNFPA “supports, or participates in the management of, a programme of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilisation”.
The cut marks US President Donald Trump’s first move to curtail funding for the United Nations and is likely to raise further questions about how deep those cuts will eventually go throughout the organisation, where the United States is the top donor. Quoted from (Aljazeera).
In a statement, UNFPA said it regrets the US decision to end funding, which it said is based on an “erroneous claim” that the agency supports coercive abortion or involuntary sterilisation in China.
“The support we received over the years from the government and people of the United States has saved tens of thousands of mothers from preventable deaths and disabilities, and especially now in the rapidly developing global humanitarian crises,” the statement said.
Donald Trump had raised the issue of reducing the funding of the United Nations and other international institutions, before and during election campaigns.
American president vowed last month again, that he will cut off 28 percent, America’s foreign aid budget.
