Defeat for Family Planning
The religious right has won a whopping political victory that will endanger the health and lives of millions of women and children in developing nations around the world.
A “natural” family planning group called the Family of the Americas Foundation has successfully pressured the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) into reversing its longstanding “informed consent” policy, which ensures that women in developing countries who seek family planning advice from U.S.-funded groups are given information on a wide range of effective contraceptive choices.
Under the new rules, “natural” family planning groups “will no longer be required to provide information about other family planning method or to make referrals to other family planning organizations.”
The Family of the Americas Foundation has been given a $2 million AID grant to peddle its “natural” family planning advice to women in developing nations. Pushing contraceptive methods that demand sexual abstinence for half of a woman’s cycle and require careful monitoring of cervical secretions shows a cruel disregard for Third World women whose education, status and culture render such methods absurdly inappropriate and ineffective.
By bowing to extremist opponents of abortion and family planning, our government is guaranteeing that more abortions will be performed, more unwanted babies will be born, more infants born of high-risk pregnancies will die--along with their mothers--and more children and their families will suffer from the disease, famine, poverty and political instability that overpopulation breeds.
It is difficult to understand how a movement whose “victories” generate so much human suffering can call itself “pro-family” or “pro-life.” It is even more difficult to understand how a nation that stands for individual freedom and compassionate aid to desperate people can so easily trade those democratic traditions for mean-spirited demagoguery.
ELAINE STANSFIELD
Los Angeles
Stansfield is director of Zero Population Growth, Los Angeles.
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