Bush’s Other War

By Roy Brown <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

While the world’s attention has been focused on global terrorism, the War on Terror, and the struggles in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US President and Congress have been quietly waging what amounts to another war with deadly consequences for millions of the world’s poorest people. This war was not a response to any attack on America but started on the very day George W. Bush took office. It is the War on Women.

Over the past four decades, great strides have been made in providing for the social needs of the world’s poorest people. Central to this effort has been the provision of reproductive health care, which has saved the lives of millions of women and their babies. At a UN conference in Cairo in 1994, there was widespread agreement on the importance of reproductive health care and the need for funding for it from donor countries. The USA was one of the major donor nations.

On 22 January, 2001, President George W. Bush reintroduced by presidential decree the so-called Global Gag Rule, which denies US reproductive health care funds to foreign non-governmental organizations that use other, non-US funds to counsel, perform, or even advocate the legalization of abortion. This is a rule that would be unconstitutional if applied to any organization within the US. The effect of this rule on developing countries has been dramatic. Over the past 21/2 years dozens of organizations have lost funding for their reproductive health care programmes. A study recently published by Population Action International has shown that as a result of this restriction, clinics have closed, staff have been cut and services seriously curtailed. Hundreds of thousands of women in Kenya, Zambia and Ethiopia can no longer obtain contraceptive supplies. The story is repeated in Eastern Europe and South Asia where reproductive health care organizations have had to choose between American dollars and the best interests of their clients.

If the Global Gag Rule were the only impediment to US funding for reproductive health care it would be bad enough, but the Gag Rule has been coupled with a total withdrawal of funding from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) for its alleged support for coercion in China. During his recent trip to Africa, President Bush announced with much fanfare a $15 billion, five-year HIV/AIDS prevention programme (recently cut by Congress to $2 billion in the first year). But the programme has been hobbled before it has begun by an insistence that at least one third of the funds be allocated to totally impractical and ineffective ‘Abstinence-Only’ programmes. And the President has appointed to his presidential advisory panel on AIDS ‘experts’ who question the international scientific consensus that condoms are highly effective in preventing HIV infection.

The rationale for the War Against Women lies in American domestic politics, and the political influence of two groups: the so-called Religious Right, composed largely of fundamentalist Protestant Christians, and those Catholics who support the Vatican’s position on both contraception and abortion. Abortion is a defining and dominant issue for the Religious Right, and their ‘Pro- Life’ stance has been exploited by the Vatican apologists. A number of well-funded and highly effective American advocacy organizations have used vicious smear tactics, distortion and misinformation in support of the Vatican line on contraception with the back up of some wellplaced ultra-conservatives close to the administration. In July this year in a debate on a motion to restore funding to UNFPA, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) told the House of Representatives that:

“The UNFPA has funded, provided crucial technical support and, most importantly, provided cover for, massive crimes of forced abortion and involuntary sterilization.”

Rep. Joseph Pitts (R-PA) told the House:

“UNFPA actively and passively supports the policy of forcing women to kill their unborn children...” and “If we fund UNFPA, we only encourage the [Chinese] regime’s strategy of exterminating the babies they do not want.”

These statements are totally false. As Mr Smith and Mr Pitts well know, the UN programmes in China have been doing exactly the opposite to what they claim. A special White House commission sent to China to investigate alleged abuses not only gave UNFPA a clean bill of health but also reported on the importance of the UN programme in helping eliminate coercive practices in China. But Mr Smith revealed his real agenda a few years ago when he referred to modern contraceptives as ‘baby pesticides’. As Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) pointed out in the debate, restoring funding to UNFPA would actually result in 800,000 fewer abortions per year worldwide. Tragically, at the end of the debate the House voted by 216 to 211 to continue to deny funding to UNFPA.

Another chilling example of the ultra-conservatives’ influence on the US administration came on 27 August when the State Department announced that it would withhold funding to the HIV/AIDS prevention programme for African and Asian refugees run by the Reproductive Health for Refugees Consortium. The reason given was that one of the seven members of the Consortium, Marie Stopes International, is a partner of UNFPA in China. No evidence whatsoever was presented that Marie Stopes was involved in coercive practices, but clearly none was needed; Marie Stopes was sufficiently tainted merely by association with UNFPA.

The real target is of course UNFPA itself. UNFPA is an effective organization providing reproductive health care in more than 140 countries, more than any other donor agency. This is anathema to the Vatican and its wellplaced allies in Washington. UNFPA has played a key role in countries where few other donors provide population assistance: Vietnam, for example, and a number of small African countries. UNFPA priorities include preventing teenage pregnancy and HIV/AIDS, promoting safe pregnancy and delivery, and expanding access to reproductive health care for the poor and other hard-to-reach groups.

How important the loss of US support has been to UNFPA can be judged by the fact that UNFPA finances programmes in over 80 countries not supported directly by the US, and that until 1985 the US was UNFPA’s largest donor, providing nearly one-third of its total annual funding. The loss of that funding has been hugely damaging to the UN agency’s programmes.

The tragedy is that much of the decision making in Congress is based on false and misleading information provided by extremist lobby groups. The virus of misinformation has deeply infected the body politic in the US and is severely damaging its ability to play an effective role in the elimination of world poverty. What is more, the infection is spreading rapidly to Europe.

A number of American ‘Pro-Life’ groups have set up in Brussels and are assiduously lobbying members of the European Parliament with misinformation. One of the more virulent of these is the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute (C-FAM). It recently published a ‘White Paper’ that allegedly exposed ‘massive accounting and program tracking irregularities at UNFPA’.

These allegations were strongly refuted by UNFPA, but not before copies of the paper had been distributed to every member of the European Parliament.

The European Commission was quick to defend UNFPA, and is sufficiently concerned about the activities of these groups that it has set up an office to monitor their activities. Nevertheless the message of extreme ‘Pro-Life’ groups does not always fall on deaf ears.

The stakes in this war could not be higher. At risk are the lives of millions of women, and any possibility of achieving the Millennium Development Goals set out by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan three years ago. Central to the achievement of these goals, which include halving the number of people in the world living in utter poverty by 2015 and winning the war against AIDS, is the provision of reproductive health care, including a stable supply of modern contraceptives to help ensure that women everywhere can prevent infection and can choose when – and when not – to become pregnant.

The lies and distortions of the Vatican-inspired lobbyists must not be allowed to infect European decision-making on these key issues. It is important that the lies and distortions be exposed for what they are.