When the United States guarantees rights for some but denies rights to others based on the mere lucky chance of their being born on U.S. soil, the hypocrisy breeds an emotion deeper than hatred. Rights should not be conditional on a person popping out of a womb in the proper place at the proper time.
One particularly heinous double standard is the Bush administration’s continued enforcement of the Mexico City policy, more popularly known as the “global gag rule.” First implemented by President Reagan, the global gag rule is the Republicans’ attempt to force their morality on the issue of abortion onto other nations.
We already have laws against federal money going to fund actual abortions or information about abortions (thank you very much, Jesse Helms). The global gag rule offers one more slap against women. Not only does the United States Agency for International Development not fund family planning, it also doesn’t fund non-governmental organizations that talk about family planning. Bush’s executive order forbids funding NGOs that encourage “a foreign government to legalize or make available abortion … (or) to continue the legality of abortion.”
The chill on free speech and free practice has been extensive. The United States is the largest contributor abroad, especially in the area of reproductive planning where USAID funds 40 percent of total donations. In other words, the Bush administration is paying for more condoms than even its amorous French counterparts. Unfortunately, the direct result of the gag rule has been slashes in the budgets and services of anyone providing reproductive aid, meaning endless obstructions for women who seek abortions.
Contraceptive care is also affected by the gag rule, because not only do NGOs lose funding if they refuse to give up the right to discuss family planning, they also lose their supplies of U.S.-donated condoms and birth control; 16 countries have lost all their contraceptive supplies, resulting in unplanned births and the spread of AIDS.
The irony is that we have no idea whether the global gag rule has been successful in reducing abortions because NGOs are so afraid to lose their funding that they’ve stopped collecting information about the subject altogether. In the few nations where accurate logs are kept, as in Peru, the number of abortions has actually increased since the global gag rule was implemented.
Lack of reliable, unbiased information hinders governments that are run by mostly upper-class men who don’t face consequences first hand. Support of anachronistic policies means that the United States is complicit in the deaths of thousands. At least one-third of abortions are illicit, and those 20 million abortions are very unsafe. Every seven minutes a woman dies because of a hazardous operation. When women are not killed by their choices, they are jailed for them. That the United States silences those who would speak out against this injustice is a travesty.
The global gag rule also furthers elitism. Rich women will always be able to seek family-planning services either by traveling to other nations or navigating legal loopholes with bevies of hired private advice. The people who have suffered most under the global gag rule are the women who are already marginalized. Rural women are most likely to die in childbirth, and rural women make up the majority of the 78,000 women dying worldwide every year because of unsafe abortions.
Decriminalizing abortion would also stop the arrest of doctors in areas where doctors are needed most. When a physician is not allowed to practice medicine because he or she chose to give an abortion, one more doctor working to prevent the spread of malaria, AIDS and other diseases is lost.
For these reasons, nearly 70 percent of Americans say they support USAID-funded family-planning efforts, but President Bush continues to fly in the face of rational thought to satisfy his right-wing constituents.
The true injustice is that such a law could not exist in America. When previous Republican administrations tried to ban all federal funding to U.S. organizations who used their own private funds to advocate for political issues, the Supreme Court stepped in to safeguard
the First Amendment. Unfortunately, the same yardstick is not applied abroad, and freedom of speech is curtailed in places where honesty is needed most. The only way to fully integrate women into political systems that have historically repressed them is to set up conditions in which they can share their stories and their experiences freely.
Without NGOs
to create safe zones, these narratives go unheard, and women continue
to suffer in silence. Above all, rich politicians spit on them and us
from their pretty ivory towers, upholding abusive policies through their ignorance and malice.

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