The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (28 page)

All the evidence, then, showed that PRI’s allegations were unfounded. Indeed, by supporting the UNFPA the United States could have helped work against China’s terrible abuses of reproductive rights. But instead of acting on the State Department’s report, the White House kept it under wraps for almost two months, finally releasing it on the same day that it announced its decision to permanently cut off UNFPA funding. Powell was forced to defend a decision that contradicted his own office’s findings, as well as his own evident beliefs. “Regardless of the modest size of UNFPA’s budget in China or any benefits its programs provide, UNFPA’s support of, and involvement in, China’s population-planning activities allows the Chinese government to implement more effectively its program of coercive abortion,” he wrote. “Therefore, it is not permissible to continue funding UNFPA at this time.”
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The American contribution represented more than 12 percent of the UNFPA’s budget, and its loss was a harsh blow, one that would mean
more
unwanted pregnancies and abortions all over the world. By defunding the agency the administration established a pattern that would mark everything it did in the field of reproductive and sexual health. Henceforth, expert opinion and international consensus would be no match for right-wing shibboleths. Abstinence would be promoted as the only option for young people trying to avoid HIV. Groups getting American support to fight the AIDS epidemic had to pledge not to support prostitution, stymieing efforts to provide services to sex workers. (Brazil, which has been especially successful at curbing HIV, in part by working with prostitutes’ rights groups, chose to turn down $40 million in American funding rather than cooperate with its restrictions. “We can’t control [the disease] with principles that are Manichean, theological, fundamentalist and Shiite,” said Pedro Chequer, director of Brazil’s AIDS program.)
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American delegations to United Nations conferences on women and children began to look like panels at the World Congress of Families, staffed with people like Janice Crouse, head of Concerned Women for America; Christian radio host Janet Parshall, narrator of the hagiographic documentary
George W. Bush: Faith in the White House
; and John Klink, a member of the Vatican’s team at Cairo.

“The Bush administration decided, for whatever reasons, that that was one area where they could throw social conservatives a bone,” said Carlson, the World Congress of Families organizer. “I hope it was out of principle, but I’ll settle for expediency.” Either way, he noted, “they were very consistent.”

Ellen Sauerbrey, a right-wing activist with scant experience in international affairs, became the American ambassador to the UN Commission on the Status of Women. “I always feel when I’m being introduced as a representative of the United Nations that I have to say I’m a conservative; I’m not a feminist,” she told the Mormon group United Families International. She went on to cite that great expert in international human rights, Fox News demagogue Sean Hannity: “Sean Hannity, this morning, talked about visions and the differences in visions. My perception is that this prevailing vision at the UN is one that is based on rights, but rights without responsibility. Family, whatever you want it to be. Sexual freedom, anything goes. Practically every resolution that goes before the U.N....somebody tries to figure out a way to put in ‘reproductive services.’ ” In 2006 she was promoted, via recess appointment, to become assistant secretary of state for population, refugees, and migration.
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I
t’s important to note that throughout all this the United States remained the world’s largest donor to global family planning. Funding for international reproductive health stayed stagnant during the Bush administration, in part because congressional family planning champions repeatedly thwarted administration attempts to make deep cuts. In the fiscal years 2006, 2007, and 2008, for example, the administration tried to slash more than $100 million a year from global reproductive health programs, representing almost a quarter of the total U.S. contribution. But Congress held the line, even increasing the budget slightly in 2008, from $435.6 million to $457.3 million.

Because of the global gag rule, though, none of this money could go to the two organizations, the International Planned Parenthood Federation and Marie Stopes International, that have the most extensive infrastructure in the developing world. America’s antiabortion politics thus ended up undermining all kinds of women’s health services worldwide. Both the IPPF and Marie Stopes provide abortions in countries where they are legal, but they also offer other kinds of care, including family planning, HIV counseling, STD treatment, prenatal care, management of delivery complications, and childhood immunizations. When they close, there are often no other facilities to replace them. Because of the global gag rule twelve countries—Cape Verde, Chad, Comoros, Gabon, the Gambia, Mauritius, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Tonga, Vanuatu, West Samoa, and Yemen—lost access to USAID-supplied contraceptives altogether, because in each the local IPPF affiliate was the only outlet for them.
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In other countries the gag rule forced clinic closings and led to contraceptive shortages. Kenya saw the closing of six of fifteen clinics run by the Family Planning Association of Kenya, the local IPPF affiliate—and the country’s leading provider of Pap smear tests for cervical cancer. Marie Stopes, which provides half of all family planning services in Kenya, lost two clinics, while others laid off staff and raised their prices. Ethiopia’s largest family planning organization, the Family Guidance Association—also an IPPF affiliate—lost more than a third of its funding.
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Meanwhile, agencies that accepted U.S. funds couldn’t direct their clients to providers of safe abortion, even in cases where such abortion was legal. Ethiopia, for example, liberalized its abortion law in 2005 to allow women to end their pregnancies in the case of rape, incest, and on broad health grounds. In his guidelines for implementing the new law, the health minister emphasized the severity of the problem of unsafe abortion. “[U]nsafe abortion is one of the top 10 causes of hospital admissions among women,” he wrote. “Unsafe abortion accounts for nearly 60% of all gynecologic admissions.... Due to the clandestine nature of unsafe abortion services, however, these figures represent only the tip of the iceberg and not the full magnitude of the problem.”
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But because of the gag rule, employees of American-funded NGOs in Ethiopia couldn’t tell women how or where to access abortion under the new law. The United States was undermining Ethiopia’s life-saving reforms from within.

D
iplomatically, the Bush administration moved to undo the progress that had been made under Clinton at Cairo and Beijing. In December 2002, at a UN conference held in Bangkok to discuss ways of implementing the Cairo program of action, the Bush administration shocked much of the world when it implied that it was withdrawing America’s support for the historic agreement. The United States, declared Assistant Secretary of State Arthur E. Dewey, “supports the sanctity of life from conception to natural death.... [T]here has been a concerted effort to create a gulf by pushing the United States to violate its principles and accept language that promotes abortion. We have been asked to reaffirm the entirety of the ICPD [International Conference on Population and Development] principles and recommendations, even though we have repeatedly stated that to do so would constitute endorsement of abortion.”

Arguing that terms like “reproductive rights and reproductive health” were code for abortion, the U.S. team tried to strong-arm other countries into jettisoning them, essentially amending Cairo. It also attempted to strike a reference to “consistent condom use” as an AIDS-fighting strategy.
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“Our Philippine delegation received extreme pressure from back home, as well as inside the negotiation room, to come to the side of the U.S. delegation,” said Filipino activist Gladys Malayang.
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But it didn’t work. With discussions deadlocked, the United States forced a vote, a highly unusual move in the consensus-driven world of UN confabs. Except for two abstentions, every country present voted against America. It was a striking rebuke. “Given the way the U.S. participated during the negotiations, it was clear they were determined to influence us,” said one South Asian delegate. “I don’t think they expected to come up against this unified Asian position.”
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U
nable to make common cause with Asian countries to fight reproductive rights, the United States, like the Vatican before it, found support in the more repressive quarters of the Middle East and North Africa. Even as the United States purported to fight a war against radical Islamism—a war it sometimes justified by the abuses Muslim fundamentalists inflict on women—American delegates joined hands with their colleagues from Iran and Sudan to undermine international agreements on women’s rights. The country that once led the Western world in Cairo became the most powerful member of the fundamentalist alliance at the UN.

The right-wing Christian-Muslim coalition suffered a severe setback on 9/11, with hostility on both sides making it ever harder to work together. Before the attacks Carlson and Wilkins had been planning simultaneous World Congress of Families conferences in Mexico City and Dubai, with funding, Carlson said, from major evangelical organizations. After 9/11, that all fell apart. There were still contacts, “just at a much more careful level,” he said. “We continued working with the Organization of the Islamic Conference up until 9/11. After that we had to be much more informal.”

Eventually, however, Wilkins succeeded in partnering with the government of Qatar to organize a conference in that country’s capital. Held in November 2004, the Doha International Conference for the Family brought together American groups like C-FAM and the Family Research Council with Muslim speakers, including Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, former prime minister of Malaysia, and Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, dean of the College of Shariah and Islamic Studies in Qatar. Qaradawi had earlier caused an uproar during a visit to Britain because of his support for wife beating and the execution of sodomites, though his apologists pointed out that he believes men should beat their wives lightly, and only as a last resort.
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Representing the Bush administration was Allan Carlson’s close friend Wade Horn, then the assistant secretary for children and families in the Department of Health and Human Services.

The Doha gathering imitated the form and language of big UN meetings, replete with preparatory conferences, a declaration, and a call for action. There was an official conference report written in perfect UN bureaucratese: “The purpose of the Doha International Conference for the Family was to reaffirm international norms, and establish proposals for action, that can inform an agenda for cooperative research, discussion, and policy development related to family life for the next decade.” Following the conference the government of Qatar put forward a resolution at the United Nations acknowledging the event and welcoming its findings, which was approved without a vote. Organizers then used this perfunctory UN approbation to claim, absurdly, that as a result “the Doha Declaration takes its place in the formal canon of legal documents comprising the growing body of international law.”
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Wilkins has since moved to Qatar to build a pan-fundamentalist think tank, the Doha International Institute for Family Studies and Development. According to its Web site, part of its writ is to combat mass media-engendered “moral globalization” that has “adversely altered long-standing societal norms and encouraged the disintegration of the family.”

Carlson, meanwhile, remains convinced that conservative Christians have more in common with conservative Muslims than they do with Western liberals. “They share a common foe, which is a radical secular individualism that has turned against a common value system resting on the Abrahamic traditions, which involves a recognition of marriage and family as parts of the created order, as expectations,” he said.

Such views might be dismissed as marginal, at least in American politics, but when it came to international women’s issues the Bush team appeared to share them. In June 2002 the
Washington Post
ran a story headlined “Islamic Bloc, Christian Right Team Up to Lobby U.N.” “Conservative U.S. Christian organizations have joined forces with Islamic governments to halt the expansion of sexual and political protections and rights for gays, women and children at United Nations conferences,” Colum Lynch reported. “The new alliance, which coalesced during the past year, has received a major boost from the Bush administration, which appointed antiabortion activists to key positions on U.S. delegations to U.N. conferences on global economic and social policy.” Lynch described American and Iranian officials huddled together during coffee breaks at the UN Children’s Summit that May, and quoted Austin Ruse saying, “We have realized that without countries like Sudan, abortion would have been recognized as a universal human right in a U.N. document.”
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(Since Sudan boycotted the Cairo conference it was unclear which document Ruse meant.)

T
he abdication of American leadership on reproductive rights served to rally some in Europe. Increasing budgets for international women’s health programs became a way for countries to defy the world’s ever more unpopular superpower. In July 2002 the European Union stepped in to replace the withdrawn U.S. funding for the UNFPA, filling what EU development commissioner Poul Nielson called “the decency gap.” Meanwhile, in 2004 Britain increased funding of the International Planned Parenthood Federation by £1.5 million, in recognition, Parliament Undersecretary of State Gareth Thomas said, of “the difficulties that our friends in America have caused for those who operate in this area.”
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Two years later the British government became the founding donor of an IPPF fund to increase safe abortion services around the world, contributing £3 million.