Wall Street Opinion Journal Monday, November 7, 2005
Why Ellen Sauerbrey has become a liberal target.
Samuel Alito isn’t the only nominee under attack by liberals for his record on abortion. So is Ellen Sauerbrey, President Bush’s choice to be Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.
To be precise, Ms. Sauerbrey is under fire for supporting Mr. Bush’s priorities at the United Nations, where the former Maryland legislator and gubernatorial candidate has spent four years as U.S. envoy to the Commission on the Status of Women. Among her alleged sins is that she supports the Administration’s decision to withhold $34 million from the U.N. Population Fund because some of the agency’s contributions go to China’s appalling forced-abortion policy.
The Population Fund is one of the principal cheerleaders of China’s one-child policy, which has been enforced through fines, imprisonment, forced abortion, sterilizations and even, human-rights groups charge, infanticide. Several weeks ago Mr. Bush invoked a 20-year-old policy–known as the Kemp-Kasten Amendment–which prohibits federal funding of “any organization or program which supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.”
