ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, September 17, 1996 TAG: 9609170059
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
CONGRESS should reverse its recent ill-considered decision to sharply cut U.S. aid for overseas family-planning programs.
Whether pro-life, pro-choice or simply pro-U.S. interests, all concerned would be best served if lawmakers would back off efforts to impose religious and political ideology on the public-health policy of developing nations that need nothing more desperately than population control.
Under GOP leadership, Congress voted in January to cut funds and add administrative spending restrictions that, together, reduced family-planning aid for fiscal year 1996 by an astonishing 87 percent from the previous year.
Congress is now taking up the fiscal year 1997 budget, and once again the House has authorized the lower funding level. It also has resurrected and tacked onto the bill the so-called Mexico City policy of the Reagan-Bush administrations, which would deny U.S. aid to nongovernmental family-planning programs if they also provide privately funded abortion services or even take part in public debate about abortion laws.
The Senate, meanwhile, has had an epiphany and voted to reject extending the aid cuts into the next fiscal year. Its foreign operations appropriations bill also rejects the "Mexico City policy."
The Senate version would benefit not just the world community but U.S. interests - even, ironically, the interests of the pro-life movement. Why? Because denying funding to family-planning agencies that support legal abortion, and make contraception available, would ensure an estimated 4 million additional unintended pregnancies.
Population-stabilization advocacy organizations, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and the United Nations Population Fund, project that those 4 million pregnancies will lead not only to 1.9 million unplanned births, but also to 1.6 million additional abortions. That's not to mention 8,000 women who'll die as a result of pregnancy or while giving birth.
Congress can't fix all the world's wrongs, but it should not add to them.
LENGTH: Short : 41 linesby CNB