The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (17 page)

But she had the support of the White House. Under pressure from above, McPherson capitulated, exempting Wilson’s group from the guidelines.

After a media uproar, Congress, then divided between a Democratic House and a Republican Senate, put an amendment in an appropriations bill reinstating informed choice. It was a small victory, but the Family of the Americas Foundation kept getting government grants. Meanwhile, USAID funded international antiabortion conferences in Paris and Caracas, where speakers from around the globe excoriated family planning, feminism, and secularism. Frank Ruddy, a Texas antiabortion activist whom Reagan made assistant USAID administrator for Africa, sent the Billingses on a taxpayer-funded speaking tour of the continent. On a Tanzania radio show they warned listeners that anyone using contraception would go “straight to hell.”
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Pro-family planning officials in Washington were systematically harassed. Richard Benedick, the State Department’s coordinator for population affairs, suspected one political appointee of stealing documents out of his secretary’s printer and leaking them to right-wing pressure groups. The personal campaign against Benedick was particularly vicious. He was a career foreign service official who considered himself a conservative in the old, antiradical sense of the word. A graduate of Harvard Business School, he’d been posted to both Iran and Pakistan, where he worked on economic policy. One day in 1984, when he was back in D.C., someone handed him a photocopied article published by the American Life Lobby, a grassroots, militant antiabortion group, headlined, “SPECIAL WARNING TO ALL ISLAMIC PRO-LIFERS:
These men are dangerous to your health!
” Benedick, it said, was probably “the single most dangerous anti-life official in the Reagan administration. . . . A career foreign service officer, he served in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran during the reign of the late Shah, whose imposition of U.S.-devised population control schemes upon the Iranian people was a major grievance in his downfall.”

“This was 1984, when people were being kidnapped in Beirut,” Benedick said. He asked for an armed escort from the State Department and spoke to a lawyer about suing for libel. He was told that as a public figure he didn’t have much of a chance.

At the time, Benedick was preparing for the 1984 International Conference on Population in Mexico City, the follow-up to the Bucharest meeting a decade earlier, where Rockefeller had spoken so eloquently about the central importance of women’s rights. The American Life Lobby article ended by warning that sending him as part of the U.S. delegation “would be like sending Adolph [sic] Eichmann to a holocaust memorial gathering.”
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It was not particularly surprising, of course, that the antiabortion movement was comparing family planning to genocide. It was surprising, though, that they singled out Benedick, an otherwise fairly obscure figure, showing just how fixated they were on even the arcane details of American population policy.

As it happened, the American Life Lobby got its wish. Ronald Reagan always met with antiabortion groups on the anniversary of
Roe v. Wade,
and in 1983 they added a new demand to their customary list: They wanted the White House to send a “pro-life” delegation to the Population Conference. Reagan was happy to comply. Benedick was kept off the delegation, and, humiliated, he left the department.
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Seeking a leader for the American team, the administration tapped James Buckley—a “distinguished Catholic layman and abortion hater,” in the words of conservative columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak.
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The ultraconservative Alan Keyes, then the American ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council, was picked to back him up. (Years later, Keyes would run a disastrous campaign for the U.S. Senate against Barack Obama, based on railing against abortion, gay rights, and “America’s moral crisis.”)
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William Draper rounded out the trio of official U.S. representatives, but, outnumbered and unsupported, he could do little to moderate it. (Ben Wattenberg, a neoconservative who would go on to write books about the perils of fertility decline, went along as an alternate.)

T
he Mexico City conference was set to occur just days before the Republican presidential convention began, adding to the pressure on the administration to deliver a victory to its restive antiabortion supporters. These conferences were worldwide media events, and for the right wing they represented the intersection of two great evils: birth control and the United Nations. With antiabortion leaders paying close attention, here was a chance for Reagan to prove that he was on their side.

The
New York Times
reported, “With anti-abortion groups warning of political consequences if the White House backs off, one Reagan aide said, ‘You don’t want major questions raised about the position the U.S. is taking a week before the convention.’ ”
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By the time the conference started, the politics that had shaped Bucharest a decade earlier were completely inverted. The developing countries, wrote scholars Jason Finkle and Barbara Crane, “no longer spoke of international population assistance as racist, genocidal, or imperialistic, or accused Western nations of advocating population control as a substitute for foreign aid. More and more, the poor nations had come to realize that problems of rapid population growth, infant and child mortality, urbanization, and migration must be addressed, with or without major transformations in the world economy.”
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China’s leaders had lurched from denying overpopulation to panicking about it, instituting the coercive one-child policy in 1979.

Meanwhile, the United States, once the champion of global family planning, adopted a mirror-image version of the old Marxist position, claiming that economic reform, not birth control, was the answer to demographic difficulties. “First and most important, population growth is, of itself, a neutral phenomenon,” said the official U.S. policy statement. “It is not necessarily good or ill. It becomes an asset or a problem only in conjunction with other factors, such as economic policy, social constraints, need for manpower, and so forth.” Government control of economies turned population growth from a potential asset into a liability; thus, the answer to overpopulation was laissez-faire capitalism.

Echoing Julian Simon, the U.S. statement also attributed concern for the environmental consequences of rapid population growth to a pessimistic “anti-intellectualism, which attacked science, technology, and the very concept of material progress.” Environmentalism, in this view, while sometimes sincere and commendable, was “more a reflection of anxiety about unsettled times and an uncertain future. In its disregard of human experience and scientific sophistication, it was not unlike other waves of cultural anxiety that have swept through western civilization during times of social stress and scientific exploration.”
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America, on the world stage, was reducing environmentalism to a kind of neurosis.

The new U.S. position, dismissive of demographic issues, contemptuous of conservation, shocked technocrats, old-school Republicans, and liberals alike, and in the run-up to the conference it was widely lambasted. The lavishly credentialed Michael Teitelbaum—former staff director of the U.S. House Select Committee on Population and professor of demography at Princeton and Oxford—told Congress, “To put it bluntly, the paper would receive a failing grade in any undergraduate demography course in the country.” Former Republican senator Robert Taft Jr. joined his Democratic colleague Joseph Tydings in a letter decrying the “adoption of a fundamentalist, know-nothing political philosophy with respect to population and development in the less-developed nations.”
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Retired general William Westmoreland wrote a personal note to White House chief of staff James Baker urging him “carefully to consider the long-range implications of a policy that will set back an important program that is beginning to show results in the interest of the countries involved and in our long-range interest.”
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The new U.S. position also contradicted the CIA’s findings. A then classified report issued early in 1984 warned, “Most Third World nations are overpopulated, and demographic pressures exacerbate economic and social problems, even if they do not yet present a direct threat to political stability.”
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Yet this position, which once led members of the GOP establishment like vice president George H. W. Bush to champion population control, no longer had much of a constituency in an increasingly pious, populist Republican party. Debates over third world family planning would from then on be proxy skirmishes in the American abortion wars.

A
bortion, of course, was the reason for the most significant U.S. policy shift announced at Mexico City, a new rule that the United States would not support organizations “which perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning,” even if they did so with separate funding. Pro-choicers would come to call the policy the “global gag rule,” since it prevented groups that were getting family planning money from USAID from referring their clients for safe abortions or from advocating for abortion law liberalization. “In dozens of aid-dependent countries around the world family planning providers, demographers and medical researchers are being forced to pretend that abortion does not exist,” said a report from the Population Crisis Committee. “They are not permitted to talk about it or write about it or study it or try to make it safer.”
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The most immediate victim of the new U.S. policy was the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which received more than $11 million a year, a quarter of its budget, from the United States.
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But all kinds of smaller operations were affected as well. At the Kenyatta national hospital in Nairobi there was a ward devoted to septic abortions, which cared for between fifty and seventy patients a day. “Doctors were understandably appalled to hear that a 1988 professional management study of the hospital funded by AID would specifically exclude the septic abortion ward—one of hundreds of examples of the chilling effect of US policy debates,” the Population Crisis Committee reported.
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The United States was still the largest donor to international family planning programs, spending $290 million in the 1985 fiscal year.
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Family planning organizations were faced with an unsolvable moral dilemma. To turn down American money would jeopardize their ability to help women who needed birth control, but to take it required ignoring desperate women with unplanned pregnancies.

In addition to damaging women’s health care all over the world, the global gag rule would deform the political debate over abortion in several foreign legislatures. Because of the gag rule people working with women’s health NGOs—precisely the people witnessing the staggering toll taken by unsafe abortion—couldn’t participate in debates about liberalization without risking support for their other work. For American presidents since Reagan, either imposing or rescinding the Mexico City ban has become a kind of ritual to mark the arrival of a new political party in the White House. One of the first things Bill Clinton did was overturn it; on his first day in power, George W. Bush reinstated it. By the time this book is published, Barack Obama will almost certainly have repealed it once again.

T
he Mexico City statement also set a precedent by threatening to freeze contributions to the UNFPA if it was found to be engaged in “abortion or coercive family planning programs.” Two years later Reagan did just that, claiming that the UNFPA was supporting forced abortions in China, a recurring right-wing allegation. Again, the policy was upheld by the first president Bush, reversed by Clinton, and reinstituted by Bush number two.

If the charge has stuck, it was partly because there was a grain of truth at the center. Despite important shifts in thinking, the Malthusian ethos remained ingrained in the major population organizations throughout the 1980s, and many were thrilled that the world’s most populous country had become a convert. China conceived and carried out the one-child policy on its own, without anything like the kind of outside assistance India received. Even as it did so, though, the UNFPA—pressured by Japan, a major donor enormously concerned about population-related instability in Asia—gave China a $50 million grant for equipment and training in both demography and family planning.

The UNFPA did not support the one-child policy. It brought a famous American demographer to China to warn officials that the policy would eventually create a country where too few young people would be supporting too many elderly, precisely what is happening today. Nevertheless, as the historian Matthew Connelly argues, UNFPA funds helped pay for computers that were crucial in calculating birth quotas.
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And, rather than speak out for the women being targeted by a campaign of reproductive totalitarianism, the organization was silent, or worse.

Indeed, in 1983, the UNFPA did something shocking both for its immorality and its political stupidity: It gave the first United Nations Population Awards, worth $12,500 each, to Qian Xinzhong, the architect of the one-child policy, and Indira Gandhi, who had since been reelected prime minister. In an official statement Bangladeshi ambassador Anwarul Karim Chowdhury, chairman of the award committee, said, “It is a matter of great honor and satisfaction for me and the members of the Committee, as well as for the United Nations, that the very first Population Award is being given to these very distinguished leaders of the two most populous countries in the world.”