Bush birth control policies helped fuel Africa's baby boom

[babylonsister]

Bush birth control policies helped fuel Africa's baby boom

Africa's population explosion may trap a generation of children in poverty.

By Shashank Bengali | McClatchy Newspapers


SIRAKANO, Uganda — At age 45, after giving birth to 13 children in her village of thatch roofs and bare feet, Beatrice Adongo made a discovery that startled her: birth control.

"I delivered all these children because I didn't know there was another way," said Adongo, who started on a free quarterly contraceptive injection last year. Surrounded by her weary-faced brood, her 21-month-old boy clutching at her faded blue dress, she added glumly: "I fear we are already too many in this family."

On a continent where fewer than one in five married women use modern contraception, an explosion of unplanned pregnancies is threatening to bury Adongo's family and a generation of Africans under a mountain of poverty.

Promoting birth control in Africa faces a host of obstacles — patriarchal customs, religious taboos, ill-equipped public health systems — but experts also blame a powerful, more distant force: the U.S. government.

Under President George W. Bush, the United States withdrew from its decades-long role as a global leader in supporting family planning, driven by a conservative ideology that favored abstinence and shied away from providing contraceptive devices in developing countries, even to married women.

Bush's mammoth global anti-AIDS initiative, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, poured billions of dollars into Africa but prohibited groups from spending any of it on family planning services or counseling programs, whose budgets flat-lined.

The restrictions flew in the face of research by international aid agencies, the U.N. World Health Organization and the U.S. government's own experts, all of whom touted contraception as a crucial method of preventing births of babies being infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

more...

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/80331.html

[niyad]

1. the harm and evil of bushco will pollute generations.

[kirby]

2. Yet....

Not a single other country in the entire world could have provided the contraceptives during the Bush years? The entire African baby boom is traceable to just us under Bush?

[timeforpeace]

3. Apparently so.

[babylonsister]

4. We were the global leader and, under idiot son, the ball

was dropped. I imagine other countries did what they could, but we had the resources, just not the desire or intelligence at the helm to think of the long-term consequences.

[KT2000]

5. Nice how they use

Africa as the place to practice their horrendous social policies. Bet not much thought was given to the suffering of the women there so they could appease their ignorant base.

[alp227]

6. Wow...Bush and blacks, both there and here

Notice a similarity? You have blacks in Africa having too many kids and in poverty...and the same conditions to blacks in AMERICA! What has the government come to, succumbing to "abstinence" education and "pro-life" ideology?

[applegrove]

7. I hope this story goes viral.