A Vote for Women

A Vote for Women
St. Louis Post Dispatch- April 1999 - Editorial

When 600,000 women an over the world still die each year from pregnancy-related causes, it should be clear that this is not the time to cut back on our commitment to family planning. That's what first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton told an international meeting on population at the Hague in February .

Her words apply just as well- if not more - to our own nation. The House of Representatives should remember them as it considers a budget amendment that would restore
U.S. funding to the United Nations Population Fund. The fund provides family planning help to more than 150 countries. A similar bill has passed in the Senate.

Ironically, the United States, one of the founders of the U.N. Population Fund in 1969, stopped its support cold. (The United States does support family planning through the U.S. Agency for International Development, but far fewer countries get help.) The amendment, sponsored by Republican Tom Campbell of California and Democrat Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, would dedicate $20 million for the population fund starting in 2000. That's half of what the United States contributed in 1994.

This time around the bill enjoys solid bipartisan support. But it faces strong opposition from s anti-abortion legislators like New Jersey Republican Chris Smith. Mr. Smith objects to the e fund's presence in China, a country that forces women to have abortions as a strategy of population control. Mr. Smith ignores the facts that the fund provides absolutely no support for abortion and that access to contraception reduces abortions. This is the same sort of argument some Missouri legislators use as justification for denying state aid to Planned Parenthood, a provider of elective abortions and Women's gynecological services.

The amendment' tries to steer clear of the controversy over China by keeping U.S. contributions in a separate account and prohibiting any U.S. dollars from being spent in China. Whether that will defuse the opposition, though, is uncertain.

Lack of prenatal care, too many births too close together, unsafe abortion -these are some of the reasons more than a half a million women, mostly in poor countries, die from pregnancy or childbirth each year. In poor countries, when mothers die their youngest children often soon follow. Their families suffer emotionally as well as economically.

Family planning programs give women control over when they have children and the access to doctors or midwives to have a safe pregnancy. They also provide the means to safely and effectively control booming world population. Those are ideals the United States espouses in principle. Let us now support them in practice.