Beth Cogswell - December 21, 2005
Planned Parenthood
Global Gag Rule
On January 22, 2001, newly inaugurated President George W. Bush issued an executive memorandum reinstating the global gag rule on international family planning assistance. The global gag rule prohibits US funds to go toward family planning in foreign countries if the clinic or organization receiving US funds perform abortions, provide counseling and referral for abortion or lobbies to make abortion legal or more available in their own country. Assistance is defined to include not only money but technical assistance, customized training and commodities including contraceptive supplies.
While the global gag rule is billed as a way to assure that US funds don’t pay for abortions, this is misleading. In 1973 the Hyde Amendment banned the use of US funds for this purpose. The global gag rule is really a political statement designed to appease President Bush’s anti-choice supporters. Essentially the global gag rule drastically reduces access to contraception and education for the world’s poorest people. Across Africa clinics have been forced to close and access to contraception has greatly decreased. As an example, The Family Planning Association of Kenya, which received an average of $580,000 a year in US assistance had to close three urban clinics serving 56,000 patients. The Family Guidance Association of Ethiopia operates 18 clinics, 24 youth service centers, 671 community-based reproductive health care sites and hundreds of other health care facilities. The global gag rule has cost this organization more than $500,000 even though abortion is illegal in Ethiopia and the Family Guidance Association doesn’t provide abortion services. What it does do is educates local policymakers about the role that unsafe abortion plays in Ethiopia’s staggering maternal mortality rate. The result is a loss of services for more than half a million men and women.
The global gag rule not only affects people’s ability to access contraception, it is having a detrimental impact on the fight against HIV/AIDS in Africa. Africa is facing an unprecedented AIDS crisis. In sub-Saharan Africa over three million people were newly infected with HIV in 2005—that’s 64% of all new infections globally. Young people make up half of these new infections and the vast majority of new infections are transmitted through heterosexual sex. Nearly half of all people living with HIV/AIDS are women. But the global gag rule has closed clinics that were on the frontlines of HIV prevention. These are clinics that provided testing and treatment for HIV, as well as condoms and lifesaving information on how to avoid the HIV infection. Some communities have been left with no health care provider at all. Because of the gag rule, many family planning organizations have been cut off from supplies of USAID including condoms. In Kenya, Marie Stopes International was forced to close a reproductive health clinic in the province with the highest rate of HIV/AIDS in the country. In Ethiopia and Zambia, HIV/AIDS organizations also have lost funding, forcing them to reduce services.
The Bush Administration has been praised by many including most recently the rock star Bono for it’s commitment to fighting the AIDs epidemic worldwide. The administration’s 2003 Global AIDS bill marked the first comprehensive expression of U.S. policy toward addressing the HIV/AIDS pandemic by significantly increasing U.S. spending to stop the spread of the deadly infection. But as the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard says “everything is political,” the Global AIDS bill comes with conservative ideological strings that create tangible barriers to effectively fighting the spread of HIV in the world’s poorest countries.
For example, the Global AIDS bill requires that at least 1/3 of all HIV/AIDS prevention funds must be channeled into unproven abstinence-only-until marriage programs and condoms are deemed appropriate only for high-risk groups such as commercial sex workers or truck drivers. But in countries where there is there is a generalized HIV/AIDS epidemic, everyone is at risk and therefore condom promotion must be a key part of a comprehensive prevention strategy. In America, federally funded abstinence only education teaches young people that condoms have a high rate of failure, which is absolutely untrue. In reality condoms are the only known way for sexually active people to protect themselves against HIV. Does it seem right that American right wing political ideology and misguided prevention policies are spreading to the poorest nations in the world where the rates of HIV transmission are staggering? Keep in mind that according to the World Health Organization, 40.3 million people worldwide are living with HIV, and 2.3 million of them are children under the age of 15. In 2005, 3.1 million people died of AIDS. But to receive Global US AIDS funds, groups must first attest to having a policy that explicitly opposes prostitution and sex trafficking. This policy forces health care providers to stigmatize and thus alienate some of the most vulnerable populations and the people most in need of HIV/AIDS prevention education.
The United States must work to integrate family planning services with HIV/AIDS services in a global context. Integrated projects will necessarily involve funding from both Global AIDS and USAID population assistance. Hopefully someday the two programs can effectively work together to save lives without a global gag rule in place and harmful restrictions mandated by American right wing ideology.
For Planned Parenthood of Montana, I’m Beth Cogswell. Thank you for listening.
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