international groups who use other monies to promote family planning but it
IS ok to fund domestic religious groups regardless of the constitutionality??
I see...
Bill.
http://www.herald.com/content/today/opinion/digdocs/108940.htm
Published Friday, February 2, 2001, in the Miami Herald
PETER H. KOSTMAYER
ON INTERNATIONAL FAMILY PLANNING:
Gag rule may cut-off vital services to women
The number of unsafe abortions in the world will increase.
The first major announcement out of the new administration was to reinstate
the Global Gag Rule. The Bush administration claimed that it wants to block
`taxpayer funding'' of abortion overseas and that it wants to make abortion
more rare. The gag rule will do nothing about either.
The fact is, and the administration knows it, that no U.S. funds are used to
provide abortions anywhere in the world. A 1973 federal law already prohibits
such funding, and when this policy was in effect from 1984 to 1993, it made
no difference in the number of abortions.
Especially distressing has been the deliberate effort to mislead the American
people and press about family planning and the extreme policy Bush has just
imposed. The gag rule bars U.S. funding for any organization that uses its
own non-U.S. money to provide legal abortion, talks to their patients about
the availability of legal abortion or even talks about its own country's
abortion law. It coerces family-planning clinics, doctors and organizations
into sacrificing their right to counsel patients or even to participate in
democratic debate to receive U.S. funding for voluntary family-planning
services.
In other words, the gag rule is not about abortion; it is a ban on providing
women with complete reproductive health-care counseling in the developing
world. It will stop much-needed family-planning funding from going to the
organizations that provide the very services that prevent untold numbers of
abortions every year. It forces providers to make a terrible choice to give
up desperately needed funding for family-planning services, or sacrifice
their rights and responsibilities. Either choice hurts women and will only
increase the number of unsafe abortions in the world.
We know that complete, voluntary, confidential family planning reduces
abortion by allowing women the power to choose when to have children and how
many children to have. These new restrictions on family-planning funds will
do nothing to reduce abortion around the world and will likely cause more
abortions.
If the president really favors international family planning as one of the
``best ways to prevent abortion,'' why did he reimpose a policy that in
practice may cut-off vital services to the women who desperately want them?
The president campaigned on his ``compassionate conservatism'' philosophy.
Now he appears to have squandered an opportunity to conserve the compassion
of international family planning.
Peter H. Kostmayer, a former U.S. representative from Pennsylvania, is
president of Zero Population Growth.
