White House to pull support for conference

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By

The Bush administration is scrapping plans to sponsor a major global health and reproductive rights conference that features liberal advocacy groups, including several pro-choice organizations and MoveOn.org, which is spending millions of dollars on negative ads to defeat President Bush.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) will withdraw its support today, according to a senior government official.

"We expect they will be notified officially" today, a senior government official said of USAID's decision to withdraw from the June gathering in Washington.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which said it never formally agreed to help fund "Youth and Health: Generation on the Edge," denounced the conference organizers late Friday for including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) -- both divisions of HHS -- in a recent promotional brochure.

The Global Health Council, which is organizing the four-day conference, included USAID, the CDC and HRSA as "platinum" or top-level financial sponsors in the brochure that the council distributed last week.

News of the funding angered many on Capitol Hill, especially conservatives who don't think the government should help promote pro-choice groups such as the International Planned Parenthood Organization and the U.N. International Family Planning Fund.

Both groups, along with the fiercely anti-Bush MoveOn.org, will participate in the conference.

"The conference has increasingly moved from a teaching forum to a platform for expressing partisan political views, and that's evidenced by the inclusion of the political organization MoveOn.org," a senior government official said.

Among the speakers at the event -- set for June 1 to 4 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel -- are Doortje Braeken of Planned Parenthood and Thorya Ahmed Obaid of the U.N. Population Fund.

Both organizations are strongly critical of the Bush administration's pro-life stance, and both have been denied U.S. government funding for their family-planning efforts, which include support for abortion.