Divider-in-Chief (15 page)

President Obama even appeared on the Kenyan Broadcasting Corporation to tell Kenyans that voting for the document was “a singular opportunity to put the government of Kenya on solid footing.” He implored Kenyans to “take advantage of the moment.”

In the run-up to the vote, American Ambassador Michael Ranneberger was quoted as saying that the U.S. had donated $2 million for “civic education” regarding the proposed constitution, which ended up passing in the August referendum.
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The administration's involvement in Kenya prompted a congressional inquiry. Republican congressmen Chris Smith of New Jersey and Darrell Issa
of California, and Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida launched an investigation to determine whether the Obama administration violated federal law by using taxpayer money to promote the new Kenyan constitution.

In May of 2011 they wrote to auditors at the State Department, USAID, and the General Accountability Office stating that the administration's advocacy in Kenya may have violated the Siljander Amendment, which prohibits foreign aid from being used to lobby for or against abortion.
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A subsequent investigation and report by the Office of the Inspector General of USAID found that the administration gave grants totaling more than $61 million to more than 200 groups working to turn out the “yes” vote in the referendum, and that $12.6 million went to efforts to directly promote the pro-abortion constitution.
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“Under no circumstances should the U.S. government take sides,” Congressman Smith said during a press conference. “Yet this is precisely what the Obama administration has done.”
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The federal probe further found that the Kenyan constitution was written partly by “U.S. funded NGOs [non-governmental organizations] working in concert with Planned Parenthood.”

A subsequent investigation by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, into the Obama administration's use of $18 million in taxpayer funds also found that the administration broke the law. It concluded that at least one Obama grantee openly pushed to expand abortion in Kenya in violation of the Siljander Amendment. The GAO report also revealed that a key Obama official stonewalled investigators and refused to cooperate with the GAO in its investigation.

The group, the International Development Law Organization (IDLO), received $400,000 from USAID to provide advice to the Kenyan government about incorporating abortion into its constitution, specifically language making it clear that the fetus lacks constitutional standing and that a woman's right to abortion should take priority.
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Little has happened since the administration's violations became public. The GAO report recommended that Congress and USAID draft clearer guidelines about how to comply with the Siljander Amendment.

“As the GAO points out, it is likely that several other countries will be amending or creating new constitutions in the foreseeable future,” Smith said in response to news of the GAO report, “and this U.S. tax-payer funded effort to change Kenya's pro-life laws raises red flags as to how U.S. monies may be used to impose legalized abortion on other countries through their constitutions.”

In June 2011, IDLO received another million-dollar USAID grant, this time to support the Kenyan Parliament as it brings its domestic laws into compliance with its pro-abortion constitution.
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The Obama administration is often referred to by pro-life advocates as the most pro-abortion administration in history. One of the main reasons is its disregard for human rights violations in China's population control program of forced abortion.

China's one-child policy limits most couples to one child. It was adopted more than thirty years ago during the height of the world overpopulation craze. Exceptions to the one-child rule are sometimes allowed for rural couples and those whose first child is a girl.

China's Communist government boasts that 400 million births have been prevented through its policy.
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Women who become pregnant with a second child face heavy fines, beatings by state police, sterilization, and, sometimes, forced abortion. Blind Chinese pro-life activist Chen Guangcheng was arrested in 2006 for exposing evidence that 130,000 forced abortions and sterilizations were performed one year in a single county in China.

Not only is China's policy galling from a human rights standpoint. It is antithetical to the liberal shibboleth of “choice.” Yet the self-described pro-choice advocates in the Obama administration have been complicit in the policy. Obama has restored funding for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the UN's main population control agency, which has helped implement China's forced abortion regime.
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When Secretary Clinton first visited China in 2009, she told Chinese government officials that the Obama administration would not let human rights issues “interfere” with other important matters between the countries, including climate change.
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Even the
Washington Post
was prompted to condemn such a cavalier approach, saying:

And indeed, the administration has rarely spoken up about human rights issues anywhere, least of all in China.

During a 2011 trip to China, Vice President Biden twice dismissed human rights issues to his Chinese counterparts. During a speech, Biden said, “Maybe the biggest difference in our respective approaches are our approaches to what we refer to as human rights. I recognize that many of you in this auditorium see our advocacy of human rights as at best an intrusion, and at worst an assault on your sovereignty.”
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Later, Biden let slip that he sympathized with China's one-child policy. In his answer to a question from a Chinese student about the causes of China's emerging demographics crisis, Biden said: “Your policy has been one which I fully understand—I'm not second-guessing—of one child per family.”
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Biden isn't the only top-tier administration official with sympathy for forced abortion. John Holdren, President Obama's “science czar,” was once
an advocate of “compulsory sterilization” and forced abortions as solutions to overpopulation.
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For all its talk of “choice,” “privacy,” “women's health,” and “women's rights,” the Obama administration is, at its foundation, informed by a totalitarian view of reproduction.

Obama and his abortion-rights allies fight any attempt to limit abortion, even when it is girls who are exclusively being targeted for death. In her book
Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men
, Mara Hvistendahl estimates that at least 160 million females are “missing” in the world because of sex-selective abortion, not only in China but also in India, Malaysia, and other countries.

Because boys are prized more highly than girls in traditional Chinese culture, ultrasound image technology is often employed to detect the sex of the unborn baby and, if it's a girl, to kill her.

Sex-selective abortion is also present in the United States. Researchers at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) examined the 2000 U.S. Census and found that certain Asian-American families were significantly more likely than other Americans to have a boy if they already had a girl. “This male bias is particularly evident for third children,” researchers found. “If there was no previous son, sons outnumbered daughters by 50 percent.”
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A 2008 NAS report found similar results.

New technology could aggravate the problem. Pregnant women can now buy the Intelligender Gender Prediction Test for about $35 at their local chain pharmacy. The test boasts that it can discern the sex of a child with 82 percent accuracy, as early as ten weeks after conception and at home, with no need to visit a doctor's office.

Women who are really serious about giving birth to a child of the desired sex can undergo a procedure called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. PGD involves examining embryos resulting from in vitro fertilization, testing them for X or Y chromosomes, then implanting the desired embryos into a woman's womb.

A 2002
Fortune
magazine survey found that 25 to 35 percent of parents and prospective parents said they would use sex selection if it were available.
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Legislators concerned about sex-selective abortion in the United States advanced the Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA), which seeks to criminalize the practice of sex-selective and race-selective abortion. In May 2012, Congress considered PRENDA. It was voted down, because most Democrats voted against the bill.
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President Obama, through a spokesman, said he opposed the legislation.

Revealingly, many self-described women's groups, including Planned Parenthood and NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League) Pro-Choice America, oppose banning the systematic targeting of unborn girls and testified against the bill.

Many of these groups even have ties to China's one-child policy. When China first adopted the policy in the late 1970s, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) worked with the United Nations, devoting millions of dollars to assist its implementation. IPPF's Benjamin Viel supported the coercive population control policies, writing, “Persuasion and motivation [are] very effective in a society in which social sanctions can be applied against those who fail to cooperate in the construction of the socialist state.”
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The admiration continues. Former Planned Parenthood director Norman Fleishman, among others, has said that the one-child policy should be implemented worldwide.
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Abortion was legalized under the guise of privacy, equality, and choice for women. But far from empowering women, abortion has become the
greatest act of violence against them. By refusing to condemn sex-selective abortion, the president, his administration, and self-proclaimed women's groups help to ensure that one of the most dangerous places on earth for a baby girl is her mother's womb. There is not much “hope” in that.

While the Obama administration trumpets a fictitious war on women at home, it is abandoning a real fight for women's lives in Afghanistan, where the women-hating Taliban are preparing to regain power once American forces withdraw.

The Taliban, a Wahhabi Islam-inspired and Saudi-funded political group, ruled Afghanistan before the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. Under the Taliban, women were treated like chattel. They were forced to cover themselves from head to foot when in public, allowed in public only with a male “chaperone,” prevented from attending school, and barred from voting. They were victims of brutal rape, honor killings, and public stonings.

Not surprisingly, the Taliban couldn't govern or provide for its people. When U.S. Armed Forces invaded in 2001, they discovered a humanitarian crisis. Seventy percent of Afghanistan's people were malnourished, and 25 percent of children died before age five.
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The infrastructure was in shambles, and clean water, electricity, and other major resources were hard to come by in many places.

After the U.S. drove the Taliban from power, many American leaders were committed to assisting women in the new Afghanistan. In December 2001, President Bush signed the Afghan Women and Children Relief Act, which had been sponsored by then-New York Senator Hillary Clinton, who proclaimed, “We cannot simply drop our bombs and depart with our best wishes, lest we find ourselves returning some years down the road to root out another terrorist.”
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Not long after, Afghan girls were attending school, and women were returning to work. In the decade since, 4,000 schools have been built and
more than 100,000 new teachers have begun teaching. Today, girls make up 37 percent of the seven million Afghan students in primary and secondary schools. Women make up a quarter of the Afghan parliament. Women's life expectancy has jumped from forty-two years to sixty-four years.
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During his time in the Senate, and while he campaigned for president, Barack Obama regularly insisted that the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan was the “good war”—the conflict America should focus its resources on, the one it needed to win.

But Obama has done an about face on Afghanistan, and Afghan women are the ones who will suffer most for it. In May, at a G8 Summit in Chicago, Obama announced that the U.S. will end combat operations in 2013—whether or not Afghan forces are prepared to take over. Many experts believe that once American troops leave, the U.S.-backed Karzai government in Kabul will form an alliance with the resurgent Taliban.
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In fact, the Obama administration supports reconciliation between the Karzai government and the Taliban, because Obama views working with the Taliban as the best option for ending the war.

In January 2012 it was revealed that the State Department had obtained office space for the Taliban in Qatar and intended to start negotiations with them.
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