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Women hurt by Bush policies

by Jill Filipovic
Columnist

Issue date: 09.29.2004

Virginia Woolf wrote, "As a woman I have no country... As a woman, my country is the whole world."

As people privileged enough to live and vote in the most powerful nation on earth, we have an obligation -- as women, as men and as human beings -- to transcend borders and take care of our sisters and brothers worldwide.

Women in particular share narratives that cross international lines: the feminization of poverty; the manipulation of our bodies for political or financial gain; and a division of labor that places women primarily in the private sphere, denying us full access to the public.

Shared experiences, of course, do not translate into identical world views or political beliefs. But at this major juncture in American politics, all of us must look back on the past four years and see how President Bush has not only compromised our rights at home, but has launched an all-out assault on the world's women.

With our voting power, we must speak up for all the women worldwide who are systematically silenced, and tell this president that women's lives will not be negotiated.

In the 10 minutes it takes you to register to vote, 10 women will have died from pregnancy-related causes in countries where family planning resources are limited and abortion is illegal or inaccessible. When abortion is illegal or unavailable, the result is always the same: Women die and children are orphaned.

Yet in his first week in office, Bush reinstated the Global Gag Rule, which cut off U.S. funding to any organization abroad that so much as mentions abortion as an option or lobbies its own government for reproductive rights.

The results of this policy have been devastating: According to a recent United Nations Population Fund report, 350 million people in developing nations lack access to contraception, resulting in 52 million unplanned pregnancies last year alone. Half of these pregnancies ended in abortion, the exact thing Bush claimed he was trying to prevent.

Because reproductive health care clinics often provide multiple services, the gag rule has further resulted in increasing maternal mortality and cutting off access to pre-natal and well-baby care. About a third of women worldwide receive no pre-natal care, and 60 percent of births take place outside of hospitals.

In some of the poorest countries like Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia, it is estimated that up to 50 percent of maternal mortalities result from unsafe, illegal abortions. In sub-Saharan Africa, 920 women die for every 100,000 live births. The number for Europe, on the other hand, is 24.

Increasing access to contraception for all the women who want it could prevent 22 million abortions, 23 million unplanned births, and 1.4 million infant deaths. $3.9 billion dollars -- less than four days of the Pentagon's budget -- could prevent 142,000 pregnancy-related deaths annually.

Restoring funding to the United Nations Population Fund, just one of the organizations whose budgets were cut, could prevent 2 million unwanted pregnancies and 800,000 abortions this year.

Bush's policies have also exacerbated the global AIDS crisis, as many of the family planning clinics that were shut down or de-funded by the gag rule also served as HIV/AIDS education and treatment centers. The U.S. Agency for International Development, for example, provides more condoms to developing nations than any other organization, but its shipments have been scaled back or cut off completely to 29 countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East because of the gag rule.

Funding for condoms is so low that if all the condoms in Africa were evenly distributed to the men on that continent, each man would be allotted three per year.

With 14,000 people dying of HIV/AIDS every day, there simply isn't time to exploit peoples' lives to appease anti-choice groups and garner more conservative votes. Family planning and HIV/AIDS prevention are not separate issues. Harm to one does harm to the other, and Bush has compromised both.

Of course, Bush hasn't been particularly easy on American women either. From trying to outlaw an abortion procedure without offering an exception for the pregnant woman's health, to playing politics with the Food and Drug Administration to limit access to emergency contraception, to digging through women's private medical records, this administration is slowly but surely whittling away the right to privacy and bodily integrity at home.

As members of a global university community that prides itself on having a broad international perspective, we should not only be saddened and outraged by these policies. We should be inspired to act on behalf of the people who share our world.

When you go to cast your vote Nov. 2, remember women like Hillary Fyfe, whose abstinence-based HIV prevention group Family Life Movement in Zambia lost $30,000 in U.S. funding due to Bush's policies.

Fyfe has seen the results of the gag rule firsthand, as women induce abortions by "swallowing pounded glass, pushing sharp needles or other unsafe instruments through their uterus, pushing poisonous substances up their vaginas like cuttings from trees or roots, drinking bleach mixed with glass, or overdosing on malaria pills.

"All of the above end up with the death of both mother and child," Fyfe writes. "Or the child dies and the mother is crippled for life. These cases are a daily occurrence." •

Jill Filipovic is a columnist for Washington Square News. E-mail her at [e-mail].

Copyright © 2004, Washington Square News

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