Letter to Barack Obama, President of the United States - Supporting the United Nations Population Fund

Letter

Dear Mr. President:

Thank you for your longstanding commitment to reproductive health and family planning programs for women across the globe. We write today to ask for your continued leadership to ensure the United States remains a strong supporter of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

As you know, UNFPA is the largest multilateral provider of family planning and reproductive health services--providing life-saving care for men, women, children and families in more than 150 countries that are home to approximately 80 percent of the world's population.

U.S. funding for UNFPA supports a range of global activities including the provision of voluntary family planning information, education and services, training and deployment of skilled birth attendants and midwives, and work to help end the harmful practices of female genital mutilation and child marriage. For example, Niger has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world with approximately 75 percent of girls married by the age of 18. UNFPA, in coordination with the government of Niger, has implemented a program to empower young women and girls by providing education, mentoring, and other support services to help them understand their rights and create community dialogues to combat the practice of child marriage.

Additionally, U.S. funding helps sustain UNFPA's increasingly vital role in the world's most delicate humanitarian settings. As the lead agency in charge of contact tracing in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, UNFPA is directly involved in helping stop Ebola at its source. UNFPA is also working to provide protective equipment like gloves, face masks, aprons, and disinfectant to frontline workers who are at the greatest risk in Ebola-affected areas.

UNFPA is also active on the ground in Syria and in neighboring countries--assisting refugees by providing safe havens for women and girls to escape gender-based violence, providing activities for young people to reduce their vulnerability to recruitment by extremist groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and delivering "dignity kits" comprised of basic health and hygiene provisions like soap, headscarves, and undergarments. In fact, for much of 2014, UNFPA was the only agency providing normal childbirth delivery services in Za'atri camp for Syrian refugees in Jordan, where there have been no maternal deaths in more than 2,000 deliveries.

We are disappointed that despite UNFPA's critical work around the world, a number of misperceptions about the organization persist. That is why we believe it is important to underscore that UNFPA does not promote abortion as a method of family planning and does not condone coercion in family planning, coercive abortion or forced sterilizations.

U.S. support for UNFPA is cost-effective, saves lives and supports our broader diplomatic, development and national security priorities. As such, we urge you to continue strong U.S. support for UNFPA in fiscal year 2016.

Thank you for your leadership on this important issue.

Sincerely