http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-01-08/hillarys-new-health-crusade/full/Hillary's New Health Crusade
by Michelle Goldberg
In a major speech yesterday, the Secretary of State declared women’s reproductive rights a priority abroad. Michelle Goldberg on why the Obama administration is feminist after all.
For weeks, pro-choicers have been despairing over the way abortion rights are being sold out in health care reform. But the speech Hillary Clinton gave on Friday at the State Department, to an audience full of international women’s health advocates, was a reminder of the fact that if this administration hasn’t done much for choice at home, it’s done quite a bit for reproductive rights abroad.
Over the last few decades, American elections have had an even more profound effect on reproductive rights outside the United States than inside it. Unconstrained by Roe v. Wade and a deadlocked Congress, presidential administrations can make radical foreign policy changes affecting access to contraception and safe abortion in poor countries. In fact, perhaps nowhere else is the difference between recent Democratic and Republican administrations quite so stark.
Yesterday, after years in which the United States spread its anti-abortion ideology worldwide, Clinton declared that the United States will once again become a leader in promoting reproductive rights globally. “There’s a direct connection between a woman’s ability to plan her family, space her pregnancies and give birth safely, and her ability to get an education, work outside the home, support her family and participate fully in the life of her community,” she said.
The purpose of the speech was to recommit the United States to a goal we abandoned during the Bush years--upholding The Cairo Programme of Action, a 15-year old agreement that declares reproductive rights to be universal. Cairo calls on governments to make family planning and reproductive health services available to all their citizens. All governments, it says, need “to deal with the health impact of unsafe abortion as a major public health concern.” Adolescents, it says, should be given comprehensive sex education and reproductive health services. Female circumcision should be banned, and coercive population control jettisoned.snip//
During the Bush years, the United States went from being a major force for women’s rights worldwide to the most powerful member of the fundamentalist alliance. Indeed, at a time when the United States was excoriating Iran as part of the axis of evil, it was grimly ironic to watch American diplomats collaborate with that regime against women’s rights at various UN gatherings.
That’s why it was such a joy to hear Clinton enthusiastically reaffirm Cairo’s goals. “When I think about {Cairo}, and the thousands of people who were part of it, who came together to declare with one voice that reproductive health care is critical to the health of women, and that women’s health is essential to the prosperity and opportunity of all, to the stability of families and communities and the substantiality and development of nations, it makes me nostalgic for conferences that are held that actually produce results,” said Clinton. She continued, “There is no doubt in my mind that the work that was done and the commitments that were made in Cairo are still really the bulwark of what we intend to be doing and are expected to do on behalf of women and girls.”
There’s an enormous amount of work to be done just to repair the last decade’s damage. The administration will have to follow up Clinton’s words with funding and diplomatic pressure. But if it acts on these priorities, it will save the lives of women all over the world.
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