I am here in the United States this week to explain to people why my organization, which has worked for 22 years for women’s rights and reproductive health, is opposed to Bush’s Global Gag Rule.

I belong to Movimiento Manuela Ramos, a Peruvian non-governmental organization with more than twenty years of experience in advocating for women’s rights and well being. We are partners with USAID on two projects, one of which is the Reproductive Health in the Community Project (known as ReproSalud), an innovative reproductive health project that seeks to empower women to exercise their right to family planning and other essential reproductive health services.

We believe in democracy, as do you, citizens of the United States. But democracy is not only for one country. The Global Gag Rule, we feel, is against democracy because it makes a distinction between the U.S. and the rest of the world. That is to say, it applies to us, Latin American, African, Asian women, and not to U.S. women. It is very discriminatory — it tells us that we in low-income countries cannot make and implement our own laws, nor make changes to them.

Furthermore, we at Manuela want to think of ourselves as partners with the U.S. government and other funders, and that we are working together on these development issues. Now that relationship has been compromised. The Global Gag Rule changed the partnership to "father-ship." It implies that except for institutions in the U.S., all the rest of the institutions are like children, so the U.S. can tell us what we can do with our money.

Women worldwide have had to work extremely hard to have the law proactively protect women, to be on their side, and the Global Gag Rule goes against this. Historically, we have had to fight for things like family planning and ending violence against women, among other things. The only way to do this is through talking, lobbying, advocacy, open debate. In our experience, good legislation protecting women’s rights is the result of this strategy. My country has the third highest maternal mortality rate in the region. I cannot even discuss this with legislators in my country due to the Global Gag Rule.

And of course I am also unable even to stand here in your country — where you so value free speech — and discuss openly the reasons that high maternal mortality and unsafe abortion rates continue to impact so many Peruvian women. I do not want to endanger funding for the thousands of women our project is serving.

But the reason that we oppose the Global Gag Rule is not because we want to advocate for or against legalizing abortion. The point is that this kind of debate, and the internal political process in our country, should not be subjected to restrictions about what we can say. The Global Gag Rule limits our ability to talk about a severe public health problem. We have a right to find our own way to deal with these problems. We are against the Global Gag Rule because it prohibits the possibility of talking about a public health problem, even if the result of the discussion and advocacy is not to legalize abortion. As the U.S. should know, democracy is nourished and strengthened with free speech.

Since the Global Gag Rule was passed, when I talk with U.S. citizens, they have apologized to me. They feel that it is imperialistic, and apologize for having this regressive policy in the year 2001. Even they cannot understand. It really made an impression on me when I heard this from them. It has given me hope.