Guardian UK: The global war on sex education

[marmar]

The global war on sex education
In the US and abroad, the Bush administration has severely restricted women's access to contraception

Sarah Wildman
guardian.co.uk, Monday July 21, 2008


If Barack Obama's tour of Europe and the Middle East does anything, it will give the senator from Illinois a taste of just how desperate the world beyond US borders is for the very brand of change he's advocated these many months. Sure there are the obvious points: the promise to pull out of Iraq, the reinvigoration of a kind of outwardly focused global neo-liberalism and engagement with allies and foes alike on everything from climate change to countering terror. But this month's World Population Day pointed to another reason the Bushies can't leave office fast enough.

According to a new World Bank report, despite a worldwide increase in access to contraception and contraceptive technologies, some 51 million unintended pregnancies take place every year in the developing world, and an additional 25 million pregnancies are gestated by women who use faulty contraception or don't understand the methods they're using.

Of that number, according to the World Bank, some 68,000 women die from botched or unsafe abortions each year, and some 5.1 million are left permanently disabled by them. "Giving women access to modern contraception and family planning also helps to boost economic growth while reducing high birth rates so strongly linked with endemic poverty, poor education and high numbers of maternal and infant deaths," Joy Phumaphi, the World Bank's vice-president for human development, and a former health minister in Botswana, said in a statement.

How does that connect to the Bush administration? Simple. Since the moment he stepped into office, Bush's commitment to the foolish "abstinence only" training both domestically and internationally has been coupled with a slavish devotion to the restrictive, ghoulish, "global gag rule", introduced by Ronald Reagan in 1984, that cut off funding for any organisation that used USAID funds to even touch the word "abortion". That meant an organisation couldn't counsel a woman on abortion as an option, even if it received money from an entirely separate funding source to do so. Given that the 1973 Helms Amendment already banned US funds from paying for overseas abortions, Reagan's policy gagged healthcare providers and gave them a stark choice: lose crucial American funding (from the creation of USAID in 1965 to 1984, some 40% of all foreign funding to population control-oriented organisations globally came from the US), or severely limit the way they talked about reproductive choices. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/21/usa.sexeducation

[izquierdista]

1. USAID funds

How is it that lack of funding from the world's biggest debtor is holding up progress? Is Uncle Sam's IOU in the collection plate considered to be "crucial American funding"? Where I come from, the freeloaders don't get any say in what toppings go on the pizza and what brand of beer we drink. :beer: