[Vision2020] Can this actually be "pro-life"?

[nickgier at roadrunner.com]

October 9, 2008 
The New York Times 
Can This Be Pro-Life? 
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF 
 
The Bush administration this month is quietly cutting off birth control supplies 
to some of the world’s poorest women in Africa. 
 
Thus the paradox of a “pro-life” administration adopting a policy whose result 
will be tens of thousands of additional abortions each year — along with more 
women dying in childbirth. 
 
The saga also spotlights a clear difference between Barack Obama and John 
McCain. Senator Obama supports U.N.-led efforts to promote family planning; 
Senator McCain stands with President Bush in opposing certain crucial efforts to 
help women reduce unwanted pregnancies in Africa and Asia. 
 
There is something about reproductive health — maybe the sex part — that makes 
some Americans froth and go crazy. We see it in the opposition to condoms to 
curb AIDS in Africa and in the insistence on abstinence-only sex education in 
American classrooms (one reason American teenage pregnancy rates are more than 
double those in Canada). And we see it in the decision of some towns — like 
Wasilla, Alaska, when Sarah Palin was mayor there — to bill rape victims for the 
kits used to gather evidence of sex crimes. In most places, police departments 
pay for rape kits, which cost hundreds of dollars, but while Ms. Palin was mayor 
of Wasilla, the town decided to save money by billing rape victims. 
 
The latest bout of reproductive-health madness came in the last couple of weeks 
when the U.S. Agency for International Development ordered six African countries 
to ensure that no U.S.-financed condoms, birth control pills, I.U.D.’s or other 
contraceptives are furnished to Marie Stopes International, a British-based aid 
group that operates clinics in poor countries. 
 
The Bush administration says it took this action because Marie Stopes 
International works with the U.N. Population Fund in China. President Bush has 
cut all financing for the population fund on the — false — basis that it 
supports China’s family-planning program. 
 
It’s true that China’s one-child policy sometimes includes forced abortion, and 
when traveling in rural China, I still come across peasants whose homes have 
been knocked down as punishment for an unauthorized child. But the U.N. fund has 
been the most powerful force in moderating China’s policy, and a State 
Department team itself found no evidence of any U.N. involvement in the 
coercion. 
 
Mr. Bush’s defunding of the U.N. Population Fund — backed by Senator McCain — 
has persisted since 2002. What is new is the extension of that policy to a 
leading private family-planning organization like Marie Stopes International. 
 
“The irony and hypocrisy of it is that this is a bone to the self-described 
‘pro-life’ movement, but it will result in deaths to women who just want to 
space their births,” said Dana Hovig, the chief executive of Marie Stopes 
International. The organization estimates that the result will be at least 
157,000 additional unwanted pregnancies per year, leading to 62,000 additional 
abortions and 660 women dying in childbirth. 
 
That may overstate the impact. Kent Hill, an official of the U.S. aid agency, 
insists that there will be no increase in pregnancies because the American 
contraceptives will simply be routed to other aid groups in Africa. 
 
That will work to some degree in big cities. But it’s a fantasy in rural Africa. 
Over the years, I’ve dropped in on a half-dozen Marie Stopes clinics, and in 
rural areas there’s typically nothing else for many miles around. Women in the 
villages simply have no other source of family planning. 
 
“This nearsighted maneuver will have direct and dire consequences,” a group of 
prominent public health experts in America declared in an open letter, adding 
that the action “will translate almost immediately into increased maternal death 
and disability.” 
 
Proponents of the cut-off are not misogynists. They are honestly outraged by 
forced abortions in China. But why take it out on the most impoverished and 
voiceless people on earth? Mr. McCain seems to have supported Mr. Bush, mostly 
out of instinct, and when a reporter asked him this spring whether American aid 
should finance contraceptives to fight AIDS in Africa, he initially said, “I 
haven’t thought about it,” and later added, “You’ve stumped me.” 
 
Retrograde decisions on reproductive health are reached in conference rooms in 
Washington, but I’ve seen how they play out in African villages. A young woman 
lies in a hut, bleeding to death or swollen by infection, as untrained midwives 
offer her water or herbs. Her husband and children wait anxiously outside the 
hut, their faces frozen and perspiring as her groans weaken. 
 
When she dies, her body is bundled in an old blanket and buried in a shallow 
hole, with brush piled on top to keep wild animals away. Her children sob and 
shriek and in the ensuing months they often endure neglect and are far more 
likely to die of hunger or disease. 
 
In some parts of Africa, a woman now has a 1-in-10 risk of dying in childbirth. 
The idea that U.S. policy may increase that toll is infuriating.