Ladies, you have no choice: how extremists took over U.S. family planning policy.

• Author: Hinrichsen, Don
• Position: Cover Story

Every Friday morning, Stirring Scruggs receives a fax that the sender, an organization called C-FAM, may or may not have intended for him to receive. C-FAM is the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, based in New York near the United Nations, a behind-the-scenes anti-abortion group that has established itself as one of the most vociferous factions in the U.S. culture wars. Scruggs, who grew up in Tennessee and looks more like a country-western singer than a man who oversees an entire UN division, doesn't at all like what he sees. It's his job, as director of the Information and External Relations Division of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), to watch out for disinformation being disseminated through the United States and abroad by a network of shadowy anti-choice organizations of which C-FAM is one. What he sees coming in today is a doozie.

The newly arrived fax alleges that the UN Population Fund was complicit in the forced sterilizations of poor, indigenous women in Peru during the presidency of Alberto Fujimori. The allegation comes from another group in the network, called the Population Research Institute (PRI), which is based in the horse-country town of Front Royal, Virginia. This assertion, says Scruggs, is "total fiction." C-FAM, he says, is passing along PRI's charges as part of an orchestrated campaign to discredit the UN in general and UNFPA in particular. He points out that PRI has included no substantiation for these charges. Wasting no time, he gets on the phone to his UNFPA colleagues in Lima, alerting them to the inevitable ruckus this story will cause, and requesting that they coordinate any response with his office.

C-FAM's use of fax rather than e-mail may seem quaint, but the group's influence is both calculated and potent. The "Friday Fax of Misinformation," as Scruggs ruefully calls it, is circulated to a network of other, likeminded, groups that will in turn do their best to provoke the rage of fellow anti-abortionists all over the world. It also goes to certain members of the U.S. Congress and selected members of the media who can be counted on to promote the group's anti-choice agenda.

That agenda, says the UN's Scruggs, is not simply to oppose abortion. Rather, the anti-abortion rhetoric is a kind of code for something more pervasive. "These groups are not just anti-abortion, they are anti-women, and oppose population policies and programs in general," says Scruggs. "They hate us because we have been very effective in promoting women's rights and providing poor communities with the information and means to voluntarily plan their families. The pity is that refuting these lies takes up valuable staff time--time we could be using to carry out our primary mandate, saying the lives of poor women, men, and adolescents."

Behind their innocuous-sounding names and claims to represent "pro-life" interests, C-FAM and its network of like-minded groups--others include the Pro-Life Action League, American Life League, Campaign Life Coalition, Concerned Women for America, and National Right to Life Committee--have lobbied heavily against women's rights to make their own decisions about having or not having children. C-FAM was established ostensibly to monitor UN activities in the population and reproductive health fields. But according to investigations carried out by other groups, including Catholics for a Free Choice, what C-FAM really does is orchestrate misinformation campaigns against the UN system, disrupt meetings, and brand all specialized agencies and NGOs engaged in reproductive health and family planning initiatives in developing countries as "anti-family."

C-FAM's president, Austin Ruse, is one of a growing number of figures who are apparently bent on undermining all aid to developing countries by organizations that even mention the words "family planning," "reproductive health," "women's rights," or "free, informed choice." He has reportedly told supporters that reproductive health is just a "cover-up for abortionists" and that efforts to achieve reproductive health and establish rights for poor women is a "feminist conspiracy" to "destroy the family."

A particular target, for Ruse, is the Beijing Platform of Action, a product of the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, China, in 1995. In the typically bland but well-meaning language of UN delegates everywhere, the Platform calls for actions "to eradicate persistent and increasing burden of poverty on women; to remove the obstacles to women's full participation in public life and decision-making; to eliminate all forms of violence against women; to ensure equal access for girl children and women to education and health services; to promote economic autonomy for women; and to encourage an equitable sharing of family responsibilities." To Ruse, this is "one of the most radical and dangerous documents you can imagine" (italics added).

It's not clear whether Ruse is one of those Montana-style militants who believe the UN storm troopers will arrive by night in black helicopters (New York is not Montana, after all), but he's by no means alone. Nor is his characterization of the Beijing Platform as "dangerous" a thing that people like Scruggs can just shrug off. C-FAM and the Population Research Institute are part of a tightly woven group of organizations bent on "dismantling 30 years of progress in population assistance," says a USAID (Agency for International Development) official who prefers anonymity. Both organizations were founded and financed by the same parent organization--Human Life International (HLI), an offspring of...