Update: The women in these photos will give you hope…
Happy International Women’s Day. I wish there was more to celebrate.
At today’s White House International Women’s Day ‘celebration,’ Laura Bush said, “There are encouraging signs for progress for women in many parts of the world, and I’m proud to be married to a man whose policies promote this success.”
The lies are becoming unbearable.
It’s time to stop mincing words. Right-wing policies are KILLING women.
While the right-wing is on a rampage to overturn Roe v. Wade, their anti-choice, anti-women policies have been literally killing women overseas for years and it’s time to make the connection:
“Because of the constitutional guarantees embedded in the Roe v. Wade decision, Republican administrations have been unable to completely defund abortion groups in the United States, so they’ve taken it out on poor women in developing countries, but those policies are coming home,” says Steven Sinding, an American who serves as director-general of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), a London-based organization that supports the poor, underserved and marginalized in 180 countries.
The United States has funded international family planning programs since the 1960s, but in 1984, the Reagan Administration passed the Global Gag Rule, which denies U.S. Agency for International Development funding to overseas organizations that perform legal abortions with exceptions for rape and incest or to save a woman’s life; provide counseling and referrals for abortion; engage in abortion-related public policy debates; or lobby to make abortion legal or more available in their own country.
“Americans have the right to say where their funding is going, but we find it completely unfair to be asking others not to talk about certain topics which are not liked by the American establishment,” says Tewodros Melesse, director of the IPPF’s Africa Region Office. “We believe the American Constitution and virtue of the American democracy exists on individual choices, on freedom and on democracy and to deny that right to others sends the wrong message.”
The Clinton administration ended the Global Gag Rule in 1993 by executive order; President Bush reinstated it on his first day in office in January 2001, halting an estimated $15 million per year in funding to the IPPF after it refused to sign the rule.
“If American women understood what the actions of our government means to the lives of women around the world, particularly poor women in poor countries, they couldn’t in good conscience support this administration for any reason,” says Sinding. “The fact is, what the Bush administration is doing to women in the developing world hasn’t really penetrated the consciousness of the American electorate.”
The funding cuts have caused many clinics to close.
This year alone, 19 million women will face serious injury, illness or death as a consequence of abortions performed by unskilled people under unsanitary conditions. Nearly 70,000 will die.
I just posted a few of the interviews I did for the AlterNet article.
How Do Bush’s Anti-Choice Policies Affect African Women?
“While the current [American] administration and anti-choice groups says abortion kills life, the very precise intervention to prevent abortion is leading millions of women to abortion and killing so many babies and so many mothers. Over 50 percent of the maternal deaths in Africa are linked to complications due to abortion, which are preventable.”
-Tewodros Melesse, director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation’s Africa Region Office
http://storiesinamerica.blogspot.com/2006/03/how-do-bushs-anti-choice-policies.html
Q&A with Kenyan Doctor About Reproductive Rights
“We used to have 17 clinics; now we have nine. We’ve been closing them one after another; we were hoping that someone would come to our rescue, but it never happened. After the clinics closed, fetuses were thrown in the streets. We feel the rate of abortion has gone up because women have no access to family planning.”
-Dr Joachim Osur with Family Health Options Kenya
http://storiesinamerica.blogspot.com/2006/03/qa-with-kenyan-doctor-about.html
