ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, December 23, 1996 TAG: 9612240058
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
ANTI-ABORTION activists have a hard time accepting the notion, but their efforts to stall and cut U.S. dollars for family planning in developing countries actually sets the stage for more abortions.
How can this be?
U.S. foreign aid funds clinics that provide pre- and postnatal care to women who otherwise would have no medical care throughout their pregnancies and deliveries. These clinics deliver babies, immunize children and also educate women about voluntary family planning and provide them with contraception.
Women with neither the means to avoid pregnancy nor the resources to provide for another child - or, perhaps, the strength to carry and deliver another baby - can be desperate enough to turn to illegal, unsafe abortion. In Bolivia, half of maternal deaths are caused by complications from abortions.
Abortion foes are certain that family planning education is used to encourage abortions, and that U.S. dollars for family planning in developing countries goes, at least in part, to provide abortions. But the objective of family planning is the opposite: to help women avoid unwanted pregnancies in the first place. Indeed, the federal government has long prohibited the use of U.S. aid for any overseas project that promotes abortion.
These dollars are fungible, opponents argue. Even if they are not used directly for abortions, they can be used to free up funds from other sources for that purpose. With that in mind, foreign-aid opponents in Congress slashed family-planning assistance 35 percent last year, and wrote restrictions on the funding that delayed its delivery for the first three quarters of the fiscal year.
Similar cuts and bureaucratic roadblocks appear in the current budget. Unless they are removed, anti-abortion activists can look forward to the same results they achieved last year. According to one set of estimates, the funding cuts will result in 1.6 million more abortions, more than 8,000 maternal deaths and 134,000 infant deaths in developing countries. Five population organizations agree on this analysis.
Preaching sexual abstinence will do nothing to improve these horrifying numbers. Poor women in developing countries often lack the economic and political power to make many choices in their lives, and those that have any say in the matter often lack the education to make safe choices about their own health.
Women have an urgent need for education, contraception and health care for themselves and their babies. Just among married women between 15 and 19 years of age, some 12 million young women in developing countries have no access to contraception.
This, the U.S. Census Bureau reports in its "World Population Profile: 1996," results in maternal mortality rates among adolescents in some countries that are more than double those of women in their 20s and early 30s. Infant mortality rates are as much as 80 percent higher than they are among births to women in their 20s.
Blocking family-planning assistance to developing countries is not pro-life. It is tragic.
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