Good news from the House of Representatives: They recently voted to donate contraceptives to international family planning organizations, even when those organizations engage in abortion-related activity. Unsurprisingly, this has angered anti-choice politicians, for whom the idea of preventing abortion is apparently abhorrent.
Let’s be clear that the House did not vote to fund abortions abroad. U.S. funding of abortion has been barred for the past 30 years, and that isn’t changing anytime soon. The issue is that the current rule — instituted by Reagan, repealed under Clinton and re-instated by W — bars any U.S. funding from going to any family planning organization abroad that so much as mentions abortion as an option, pays for abortions with their own non-U.S. money, or lobbies their own governments for reproductive rights. It’s hugely problematic, and has had an incredibly negative impact on women’s health, well-baby care, and HIV/AIDS clinics — in rural areas of developing nations, all of these services are often offered in once place, and de-funding it because it provides women’s health care means that the whole thing loses money.
The legislation passed by the House would make a dent in reversing that policy.
The Global Gag Rule limits contraception access, and increases the abortion rate. Getting rid of the Gag Rule and widening contraceptive access could prevent tens of millions of abortions and more than a million infant deaths. From an article I wrote a few years ago:
The results of this policy have been devastating: According to a recent United Nations Population Fund report, 350 million people in developing nations lack access to contraception, resulting in 52 million unplanned pregnancies last year alone. Half of these pregnancies ended in abortion, the exact thing Bush claimed he was trying to prevent.
Because reproductive health care clinics often provide multiple services, the gag rule has further resulted in increasing maternal mortality and cutting off access to pre-natal and well-baby care. About a third of women worldwide receive no pre-natal care, and 60 percent of births take place outside of hospitals.
In some of the poorest countries like Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia, it is estimated that up to 50 percent of maternal mortalities result from unsafe, illegal abortions. In sub-Saharan Africa, 920 women die for every 100,000 live births. The number for Europe, on the other hand, is 24.
Increasing access to contraception for all the women who want it could prevent 22 million abortions, 23 million unplanned births, and 1.4 million infant deaths. $3.9 billion dollars — less than four days of the Pentagon’s budget — could prevent 142,000 pregnancy-related deaths annually.
Restoring funding to the United Nations Population Fund, just one of the organizations whose budgets were cut, could prevent 2 million unwanted pregnancies and 800,000 abortions this year.
The gag rule, which is enabling millions of abortions (not to mention millions of infant and maternal deaths) is backed by “pro-life” organizations. And Bush is threatening to veto the latest contraceptive legislation:
Most Republicans were not convinced, saying the donated condoms and other contraceptives would free up funds for groups operating abroad to encourage or perform abortions.
“The violence of abortion will increase” with this initiative, said Rep. Christopher Smith. The New Jersey Republican, a leading abortion opponent, failed to remove the contraceptives language from the bill.
A White House statement issued on Tuesday said Bush would veto a bill that “weakens current federal policies and laws on abortion.”
In other words, the current situation forces family planning organizations to spend a disproportionate part of their already-limited resources on basics like condoms and birth control, and we should keep it that way. And the term “already-limited resources” is a generous way of describing the situation:
Bush’s policies have also exacerbated the global AIDS crisis, as many of the family planning clinics that were shut down or de-funded by the gag rule also served as HIV/AIDS education and treatment centers. The U.S. Agency for International Development, for example, provides more condoms to developing nations than any other organization, but its shipments have been scaled back or cut off completely to 29 countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East because of the gag rule.
Funding for condoms is so low that if all the condoms in Africa were evenly distributed to the men on that continent, each man would be allotted three per year.
Since it’s apparently my daily duty to repeat this message, I’ll write it again: “Pro-life” politicians and organizations do not care about life, fetal or otherwise. They care about control and punishment. They promote policies that increase the abortion rate, make abortion more dangerous, compromise infant health, and harm women. There is nothing life-affirming about their position. I imagine the response to this legislation will just be example #428534 of their thoroughly backwards, plainly life-threatening ideology.
Regardless, I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that it gets through. Because I’m an optimist like that.
Thanks to Fauzia for the link.
So basically, they voted to repeal the Mexico City Policy (aka the Global Gag Rule)? Or is that something different?
Sort of. The Mexico City Policy (which, yes, is the same thing as the Global Gag Rule) bars U.S. funding to any organization that has anything to do with abortion in any sense. This legislation would allow the U.S. government to send contraceptives to organizations that the Gag rule blocks funding for. General financial funding, as I understand it, would remain blocked, but direct shipments of condoms, birth control pills and devices, etc would be allowed.
Quoted for truth