Don't fund forced population control

To the editor:

Please urge President Bush to preserve the Kemp-Kasten bill. This bill, passed in 1985, forbids the use of our tax dollars to fund any program or country that participates in forced sterilization or abortions.

If funding is restored to the United Nations' population-control program, it will not win the United States any friends overseas. Thirty-eight countries have filed human-rights complaints because this program uses financial aid as a method of coercion to get them to legalize birth control, sterilizations and abortions.

Workers go to villages urging impoverished and semi-literate women to have abortions or be sterilized in order to be eligible for food distribution or enrollment in nutritional health programs. Quotas are set, and poorly education clinic workers distribute the birth-control pills and devices or perform abortions. Women are dying or are maimed in the process.

These countries have health systems that are collapsing as thousands are dying from easily treatable diseases. Clinics are stocked to overflowing with everything to control the population but nothing to treat diseases.

We must not fund any program that uses forced sterilizations, abortions or birth control in order to control population. We must seek ways to help these countries to overcome poverty through legitimate methods of aid.

MARCUS R. SCHAEFER

Benton, Mo.