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Exportable righteousness, Expendable Women.

Article Excerpt
The "global gag rule" is stifling debate about reproductive health. It's going to force a lot of poor women in developing countries to bear children they don't want. It's likely to increase (not decrease) the number of "coat hanger" abortions. And it's probably going to get a lot of women killed, which will in turn boost death rates among the children they leave behind. So why exactly is it U.S. policy?

The desire to control fertility may be nearly as ancient and universal as sexual desire itself. Every culture, it seems, has had its contraceptives, although their efficacy has varied greatly. To prevent pregnancy, the Petrie Papyrus, an Egyptian medical text from 1850 BC, recommended vaginal suppositories made of crocodile dung. In the 4th century BC, Aristotle described women coating their cervixes with olive oil before intercourse. Women on Easter Island made suppositories from seaweed. And from the 1930s to the 1960s, Lysol, now a popular household cleaner, was marketed coyly to American women as a "certain...yet safe" disinfectant douche.

In the developing world today, neatly two-thirds of all women in their reproductive years--about 525 million of them--rely on some form of birth control, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). But there is still a great deal of unmet demand for contraceptives. More than 100 million women in these countries say they want to delay the birth of their next child or stop having children altogether, but are not currently using contraception.

Family planning has been recognized by the international community as a fundamental human right. Under the program of action adopted at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, "All couples and individuals have the basic right to decide freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children [that is, the length of time between births] and to have the information, education, and means to do so." But efforts to secure this right were dealt a serious setback last year. On his first working day and the 28th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in the United States, President George W. Bush issued an executive order that resurrected a measure known informally as the "global gag rule."

Essentially, the gag rule prohibits foreign family planning organizations from receiving U.S. government aid if they provide abortions (except in cases of rape, incest, or danger to a woman's life), or if they counsel women about abortion as an option for dealing with an unwanted pregnancy, or if they advocate less restrictive abortion laws in their own countries. The restrictions apply even if no U.S. funding is being used for the activities in question: any such activities, no matter how they are funded, render an organization ineligible for U.S. support. The gag rule, which obviously gets its common name from its sanctions against free speech, had first been imposed by Ronald Reagan in 1984. Bill Clinton lifted the policy during his first week in office. Its reinstatement by Bush has put the United States in a peculiar diplomatic position: while formally committed to the Cairo program of action, the United States is in effect using its economic power to undermine the human rights principle upon which the p rogram is built.

The U.S. government is the largest international donor to family planning programs. U.S. contributions flow through the country's foreign aid agency, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which has budgeted $425 million for family planning for the 2002 fiscal year. About half of this money will go to foreign governments and to multilateral agencies like UNFPA, to whom the gag rule does not apply. The other half will be channeled to non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which are subject to the rule.

The rule applies on a rolling basis: when a project is due for renewal, the managing organization must decide whether to comply or forgo funding.

USAID supports medical training and research on family planning, but it also funds the direct provision of services to millions of couples in over 60 countries, including many of the poorest and most densely populated on Earth. In comparison to other major international donors, USAID relies heavily on NGOs to carry out its family planning activities. And that makes U.S. programs highly vulnerable to the gag rule.

The effects of the rule are already being felt....