- Today, the twenty-eighth anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, President George Bush cemented his anti-abortion credentials with the religious right by announcing his intention to issue an executive order to withhold U.S. family planning funding to overseas organizations that support legal abortion. The chilling effect of the order will burden abortion rights advocates in the U.S. as well, including attorneys at the Center for Reproductive Rights, whose rights to speak freely about abortion and to support democratic reform efforts to change restrictive abortion laws will be severely limited by the reinstatement of the Global Gag Rule.
"Thousands of women will die each year from illegal abortion because President Bush, who lost the popular vote, needs to curry favor with the religious right. It is a malicious affront to women to gag advocates for their health on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade," said Janet Benshoof, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, a legal advocacy organization that works to support women's reproductive rights around the world.
Women's rights advocates in nearly every country are working to prevent the significant human suffering resulting from unsafe abortion. Over 80,000 women around the world die from unsafe, illegal abortions every year. Hundreds of thousands more suffer injuries or complications from unsafe abortions. Twenty-six percent of the world's people live in the 74 nations that either prohibit abortion altogether or permit abortion only to save a woman's life. In countries such as Nepal and Chile, women are in prison for obtaining illegal abortions.
Under the Global Gag Rule, foreign organizations that receive U.S. family planning funds cannot use their own, non-U.S. funds to provide legal abortion services or to lobby their own governments for changes in abortion laws without jeopardizing U.S. aid.
The Center for Reproductive Rights works in partnership with lawyers, doctors, professors, parliamentarians and other professionals to educate policymakers about the deadly consequences of criminalizing abortion and to encourage them to reform restrictive abortion laws. However, as illustrated by the following examples, much of the Center for Reproductive Rights' work will be sharply curtailed by Bush's global gag rule:
- In Bolivia, where maternal mortality from illegal abortions is high, the Center for Reproductive Rights provided Spanish-language legal advocacy materials to approximately 15 Bolivian women's reproductive rights and health organizations that were trying to reform Bolivia's restrictive abortion law. Last year, as a result of the global gag rule, four of these organizations dropped out of this public campaign to save women's lives.
- The Center for Reproductive Rights is working with Russian organizations to inform the Russian government and general public about the health effects of a proposed restrictive abortion law in Russia. Some of the Russian organizations critical to the success of this effort receive U.S. monies, forcing them to choose between possibly losing their funding source and working to oppose an abortion law that will harm women's health.
- In Peru, abortion is a crime. The sole exception is made for therapeutic abortions, which may be performed to save a woman's life or to prevent serious or permanent damage to her health. Peru has the second highest maternal mortality rate in South America and one of the highest in the world. When the Center for Reproductive Rights sponsored a leading advocate for women's rights from Peru to visit the U.S., she was unable to reveal to lawmakers and members of the media the full consequences of the global gag rule's harm on her work, stating "Because of the global gag rule, I don't feel at liberty to speak as freely as I might about this problem."
Janet Benshoof, Center for Reproductive Rights President, adds, "The global gag rule should have been forever relegated to the annals of misguided and abandoned U.S. foreign policy. But now, instead of encouraging efforts to preserve women's lives and wellbeing, the United States is complicit in horrendous abuse."
