San Francisco Chronicle - Sunday, May 26, 2002
Joan Ryan

Women in Nepal seeking an abortion risk not only death, they risk life in prison if they are caught. It doesn't matter if a girl has been raped or is a victim of incest. She is locked up for life with every other woman who tries to end her pregnancy.

What does this have to do with us? Our government is making the situation worse. And not just in Nepal.

Since the beginning of the Bush administration, the U.S. government has steadfastly undermined the rights of women and families in the poorest countries of the world.

It began on Bush's first day in office. He reinstated the so-called global gag rule, which disqualifies foreign groups from receiving U.S. funds if they provide counseling and referrals for legal abortions, lobby to change abortion laws or perform legal abortions even if they use their own money to do so.

This means that reproductive-health providers, notwithstanding the laws of their own countries, must comply with the Bush administration's anti-abortion policies. So in Nepal and elsewhere, some of the staunchest advocates for victims of unsafe abortions must be silent lest they lose crucial resources for family planning, safer childbirths and HIV-AIDS prevention. In Uganda alone, 17 family-planning centers have closed since the global gag rule.

In December, Bush struck again. He froze the $34 million Congress had just appropriated for the United Nations Population Fund, claiming it promoted forced abortions in China. But this issue had already been resolved three years earlier. When Congress raised the same concerns in 1998, the U.N. group assured Congress its work in China was limited to counties where the one-child policy is no longer enforced. To appease doubters, the group agreed not to spend any U.S. money in China.

Then, along came Republican Rep. Christopher Smith, an outspoken abortion opponent from New Jersey. He wrote to Bush in December with renewed charges against the U.N. group. The accusation, it turns out, came from a single source: the Population Research Institute, which is funded by an anti-abortion group.

Now, the U.N. Population Fund is forced to cut staff and shelve contraception and family-planning programs that, indeed, reduce the abortion rate among poor women.

Last month, the Bush administration continued its campaign at the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. It successfully fought against including the term "reproductive health services" in the convention's final document, saying it connoted abortion. The Bush folks also fought to ban abortion for teenagers and make abstinence the centerpiece of sex education.

"We witnessed the stunning alliance among the Vatican, fundamentalist Islamic states -- including so called 'axis of evil' members Iran and Iraq -- and the U.S. administration refusing adolescents the right to reproductive health services," said Kavita Ramdas, executive director of the Global Fund for Women. "Since President Bush first imposed the global gag rule in January 2001, there has been a steady erosion of the United States' commitment to reproductive rights worldwide."

So nonprofits such as the MacArthur Foundation are more committed than ever to funding reproductive health programs in poor countries. "Our mission is to improve the human condition," said Anna Louisa Ligouri of the MacArthur Foundation. "Without empowering women with rights and choice, you can't fulfill that mission."

The aim of Bush's global doctrine, laid out clearly in his first 17 months in office, is to thwart free speech and to undermine in other countries a right that is protected in our own. It values conservative politics over the health of the world's poorest girls and women. It tramples our most cherished principles to serve a personal ideology.

How can a person love this country and yet export to the rest of the world such a twisted, fraudulent picture of America?

E-mail Joan Ryan at joanryan@sfchronicle.com.

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