Introduction of Jane Roberts
by Sarah P. Burns
Thank you Dr. Tavrow. I am pleased to be here today to introduce Jane Roberts, the co-founder of the 34 Million Friends of UNFPA and a strong supporter of opportunities for women here in California and around the world.
As you heard Dr. Tavrow mention, I am the Director of Development and External Affairs at the Institute of the Environment here at UCLA. The Institute of the Environment is an inter-disciplinary research institute where we work on many aspects of some of the most complex environmental challenges facing us today: air quality and water quality issues, coastal issues, biodiversity preservation and most recently we have established an Urban Center on People and the Environment.
In fact, that is where most of the points we will touch on in today’s address lie: in the nexus between population, environment and public health. Truly, these are issues that challenge all three very broad academic disciplines and the solutions to these problems will necessarily come from all three of these areas, plus on other: public policy. I hope we have someone here from the School of Public Policy today.
But I was asked to introduce Jane Roberts to you today primarily because of the previous position I held with the United Nations in Washington, D.C., where I was the representative to the sister agency of the United Nations Population Fund: the United Nations Development Program.
Both of those agencies worked very closely together in New York, where they shared a joint administrative oversight body or Governing Council; in Washington, where we also worked with State Department officials charged with administrative oversight of the UN; and we also worked together in the developing world. In fact, my agency, UNDP, was often the home to the programs that the UN Population Fund implemented on behalf of millions of women and girls around the world.
In that capacity, I was thus very familiar with the work of the UNFPA and its goals and objectives around the world. I was an eye witness to the many and prolonged battles that were waged in Washington as some in Congress tried to curtail, eliminate, de-fund or simply control the annual contributions were made by the U.S. Government to the UN family planning and population programs.
I will point out that I left Washington, D.C. while the Supreme Court was still deliberating the results of the 2000 election and I moved here to California. So I have been witness to the changes in Administration policy toward the United Nations and UNFPA from a new and different vantage point, which was just after the Bush Administration came into power.
What we want to address today are the results of this policy on women’s reproductive health, family planning, population growth, and ultimately, on the state of the environment and our use of the planet’s natural resources.
In this country, 92% of Americans support the right to plan one’s own family. We agree that family planning is a basic health care service, and a vital part of basic health care, and we acknowledge that access to family planning can help reduce reliance on abortion and prevent deaths that are caused by unsafe abortion practices.
Yet to the dismay of reproductive health advocates and family planning supporters worldwide, when it came into office, the Bush administration announced the halt of US funding for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). That decision deprived the organization of $34 million that had been appropriated by the US Congress to support UNFPA's activities in the areas of family planning, safe motherhood, and prevention of sexually transmitted infections. Many have condemned the move, and have emphasized its potentially disastrous effects.
The denial of support to UNFPA affects millions of women and children worldwide, and without question, women and children have and will die because of this decision. It is estimated that the loss of US funds could result in 2 million unwanted pregnancies, 800,000 induced abortions, 4700 maternal deaths and 7700 infant and child deaths.
Sadly, the rationale offered by the Bush administration for the withdrawal of funds was linked to the decision of China's one-child policy and its coercive abortion programs.
In fact, Secretary of State Colin Powell maintained that, "Regardless of the modest size of UNFPA's budget in China or any benefits its programs it may provide, UNFPA's support of, and involvement in, China's population-planning activities allows the Chinese government to implement more effectively its program of coercive abortion."
That concept or pretext however, came from an ambiguously worded amendment to a law which prohibits the US government from funding any organization that "supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion."
While coercive practices have been found to occur in China, numerous investigations, including one commissioned by the Bush administration, have found no evidence that UNFPA has been in any way involved in those programs. In fact, the provinces where UNFPA operates have shown a decline in abortion rates. Furthermore, officials in those provinces have agreed to eliminate family planning quotas and targets. My colleagues in Washington worked very closely with the State Department officials who visited and monitored the UNFPA programs in China, and my colleague in Washington at the UNDP office was in fact he Director of the entire UN program in China. He knew the program well and agreed with the findings of the US Delegation that UNFPA was not involved in such coercive programs.
That decision was a surprise to many given the leadership role the US had historically assumed in international family planning assistance and the Bush administration's own comments on the importance of those programs. In May 2001, Secretary of State Powell testified before the US Congress that UNFPA "does invaluable work through its programs."
So, although ultimately the $34 million originally intended for UNFPA has been redirected towards family planning programs at the US Agency for International Development, it cannot take the place of the work of UNFPA, it is subject to much greater restrictions under current U.S. law, and USAID operates in only half as many countries as UNFPA.
Additionally, most of you are already familiar with the fact that as soon as the Clinton Administration took office in 1993 it reversed the “Mexico City Policy”, or the so-called Global Gag rule, which had been put into place under Ronald Reagan in 1984, and which denies U.S. assistance for any private family planning from being provided to foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOS) that use funding from any other source to perform abortion, to provide counseling and referral for abortion, or to lobby to make abortion legal or more available in their own countries.
It was on his second day in office, and on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, that George W. Bush reinstated the Mexico City Policy that had been rescinded by Bill Clinton, and it is that policy, plus the denial of funds for UNFPA and other related policy implications that have had serious ramifications for support for international family planning and reproductive health programs all over the world.
Finally, and ironically, it is these very policies implemented under President Bush that undermine our ability to promote democracy around the world, that interfere with the ability of health care providers in developing countries to provide appropriate medical care, that restrict open communications between women and their health care providers, and that ultimately contribute to an increase in abortion.
Faced with that knowledge and aware of the need to challenge that policy at home, Jane Roberts took action. I believe you will find Jane Roberts’ story of how she came to support funding for UNFPA from the United States public both educational and inspiring.
Jane was born here in San Diego, California, attended San Diego public schools and received her M.A. in French from the Middlebury College Graduate School of French in France. She was hired in the French Department of the University of Redlands and it was there she met her future husband Julian Roberts (Jay), who taught chemistry.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Jane worked part-time teaching French and tennis and raising Jeffrey and Annie. From 1990 to 1998 she taught French and coached both the boys' and girls' tennis teams at Eisenhower High School in Rialto, California.
Jane’s interest in women's issues, reproductive health, and international family planning goes back 30 years. In 2001, she joined the campaign to build American support for international family planning. When the U.S. Administration decided to de-fund UNFPA, she started asking Americans to show their support for UNFPA’s lifesaving work by sending in one dollar and that idea today is a work in progress.
I am happy to introduce Jane Roberts.