posted 04-21-2004 07:39 PM            

Be There
By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate

Tuesday 20 April 2004

AUSTIN -- Women of America. This Sunday, April 25. Washington, D.C. The March for Women's Lives. Be there.

This is it. It's all on the line now. Everyone who thinks she's too old, too tired and has done this too many times before, be there. Everyone who has never been to a women's march, who thought all the rights had long since been secured, who thinks feminism is old hat and has nothing to do with your life, be there. Bring your daughters, mothers, nieces, friends, husbands, sons and significant others. If you can't be there, get in touch with a local women's organization and help raise money for a "scholarship" to send someone else to represent you.

Minority women, be there. The NAACP, National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, Black Women's Health Imperative and many other minority groups are co-sponsoring the march. You know better than anyone how the lives of working mothers are being stressed and deformed by the lack of institutional response to the need for child care and health care.

The March for Women's Lives is not just about choice on abortion, but literally about life or death for women all over the globe. The 34 Million Friends organization (which has been raising money dollar-by-dollar to replace the $34 million withheld for the last two years by the Bush Administration from the United Nations Population Fund) will be there. Founders Jane Roberts, a retired schoolteacher from California (the embodiment of all the Mrs. Witherspoons of our lives) and Lois Abraham, a lawyer from New Mexico, have raised millions and enabled the United Nations to re-open clinics in Mali and Senegal that provide pre-natal care and contraception. According to the Population Fund, the loss of $34 million from the United States led to two million more unwanted pregnancies, 800,000 induced abortions, 4,700 maternal deaths and 77,000 deaths of infants and children. Bush is expected to withhold the $34 million appropriated by Congress for the coming year as well.

Anti-choice policies threaten the lives of women around the world. Kofi Annan said, "HIV infection and AIDS are spreading dramatically and disproportionately among women. Today, AIDS has a woman's face." The first official action George W. Bush took as president was to reinstate the global gag rule of the Reagan years -- no clinic that so much as mentions abortion, even to women who will die without it, can receive U.S. aid. Between 1972 and 1989, Planned Parenthood used USAID financial assistance to provide 330 million cycles of birth control pills, 1.3 million condoms, 14 million IUDs and provide $92 million in financial assistance to over 439 family planning agencies around the world. The gag rule cut all funding to Planned Parenthood. Of course more abortions were the result.

The March for Women's Lives is about our lives in another sense as well. Mountains of research show the quality of women's lives is directly connected to family planning. Our ability to get education, make money and participate as citizens depends on our ability to control the number of children we have.

Anyone who thinks the anti-choice movement is only about repealing abortion rights has not been paying attention. Their agenda includes limiting both knowledge about, and access to, safe contraception. Everything from "abstinence only" programs to the FDA's delay in approving emergency over-the-counter contraception is part of their agenda.

Republican women, be there. When George W. Bush ran in 2000, he never spoke of reversing Roe v. Wade. He spoke of "reverence for life" in the context of adoption policies and discouraging drunk driving. Many Republican women thought his anti-choice stance was largely convenient political posturing. The lengthening list of anti-choice executive orders, regulations, legal briefs, legislative maneuvers and, above all, judicial and administrative appointments can leave no doubt where we are headed. We are now going through the longest period of no change on the Supreme Court since James Madison was president. The most significant cases dealing with reproductive rights in the last decade have been decided by 5-4 majorities. President Bush has used recess appointments to put ultra-conservative judges on the bench. In a 1992 case, Clarence Thomas wrote, "We believe that Roe was wrongly decided, and that it can and should be overruled."

Barbara Bush, be there. You wrote in your book "A Memoir" that you are pro-choice. Sometimes, when a boy won't listen to his momma, she has to go outside family circles to make her point. Thousands of Texas women will be there with "Don't Mess with Texas Women" signs. Come march with us. Nancy Reagan, be there. You know President Bush's policy on stem cell research is derailing the search for a cure to Alzheimer's and other dread diseases. You have courageously spoken out on wanting to spare other families your pain. Join us.

Over 335 new state laws restricting a woman's right to choose have been passed in the last eight years. Eighty-seven percent of U.S. counties have no safe abortion provider. Twenty-four states have mandatory delays and state-prepared anti-choice propaganda. Anti-condom policies not only result in unwanted pregnancies but an increase in AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. Right-wing legislation gives fertilized eggs more rights than women. Doctors are prevented from giving accurate information about birth control and abortion rights to their patients. Anti-choice terrorists continue to murder and bomb, intimidate and harass, but the Department of Homeland Security has no time for those terrorists. This is for our lives. Be there.

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Bush Ideology Hurts Women Worldwide - Groups?
By Marty Logan
Inter Press Service

Tuesday 20 April 2004

MONTREAL - U.S. President George W Bush can talk a good line on women's issues but his performance is a flop, said U.S. groups Monday in a preview of this weekend's March for Women's Lives in Washington.

Grading the Bush administration in four areas -- its emergency plan for HIV/AIDS, global women's rights, international family planning and support for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) -- the organisations argued that the president sometimes makes all the right noises but rarely follows up by taking the correct steps.

The groups -- Feminist Majority, Women's Environment and Development Organisation (WEDO) and the Centre for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE) -- said ideology, not evidence, is driving Bush's performance in these areas, and predicted that hundreds of thousands would turn out at the march Sunday to protest his approach.

For the first time since the marches began in the 1970s, this year's event will focus on international issues, said Ellie Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority.

"U.S. policies are now not only adversely affecting women domestically, but they're probably having their greatest negative impact worldwide," Smeal said.

"We used to say, 'if we lose (abortion rights) women will die'. You will not hear that at this march. You will hear, 'women are dying, are being injured, because it is now driven home how devastating these policies are'," she added in a telephone press conference from Washington.

Quoting U.N. figures, Smeal told reporters that 80,000 women die annually worldwide from unsafe or botched abortions, while 500,000 die because of a shortfall in funding for family planning programmes.

While the Bush administration cannot be blamed for all of those incidents, "many of them could be averted with decent reproductive health care," she added.

Instead, Washington has politicised family planning to the extent that some organisations working in the developing world are refusing to accept U.S. money because it means they must promise to not provide or even mention abortion services, Smeal argued.

"One of the sad stories we hear is that some agencies (won't) treat women who are very ill or dying from botched abortions for fear" of retaliation from U.S. funders. "They cannot afford to lose any of the money they have."

The administration will spend most of its money on anti-AIDS activities overseas this year on abstinence-only programmes, despite the fact that married women and adolescents are the fastest growing segment of the population in the developing world to be infected with the disease, said Jodi Jacobson, executive director of CHANGE.

"The primary factor in the spread of HIV/AIDS among these populations is unprotected heterosexual sex, which is also the primary factor in unintended pregnancy and unsafe abortion," Jacobson added.

"Really what we're talking about here is the critical issue of whether women have the choice and the ability to practise safe sex and to enable themselves to be protected from unintended pregnancy and infection," she said.

The administration "says it is going to address HIV from a compassionate perspective. But when one looks at the issue of choices, and one looks at the issue of what's happening to women with respect to HIV/AIDS worldwide, you can immediately see the links between the funding stream actually being directed in ways that undermine women's choices," Jacobson added.

In the area of women's rights, the administration is making some sure steps -- backwards, according to June Zeitlin, WEDO executive director.

In March, a U.S. State Department official told a U.N. meeting the administration would not reaffirm its commitment to the Beijing Platform for Action -- the concrete proposals that issued from the 1995 World Conference on Women and cover topics ranging from health to human rights -- because it contains items "that could be interpreted to support, promote or endorse abortion".

According to Zeitlin, that retreat followed another one weeks earlier, when the international community was revisiting the commitments it made at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo. The United States, which supported the original measures, opposed their reaffirmation.

"We know that President Bush and his administration are opposed to abortion. What we didn't know is that they would read abortion into all kinds of provisions in international documents that refer to family planning or to women's rights," said Zeitlin.

She also lamented that immediately after taking office, Bush asked the Senate to delay a vote on ratifying the Convention on All Forms of Elimination Against Women (CEDAW), which has been adopted by 177 nations, including, lastly, Afghanistan. That vote has still not taken place.

"This unilateral and erroneous interpretation of global commitments is a real step back for women worldwide," added Zeitlin.

One glimmer of hope concerns the UNFPA, the world's most important provider of family-planning assistance, to which Congress had allotted 34 million U.S. dollars for 2004. In the previous two years Bush has withheld such funding, arguing that the agency finances abortion activities in China, a charge that UNFPA denies.

Its denials have been backed up by a number of independent investigations, including by a delegation of Muslim, Roman Catholic and Jewish experts and ethicists who travelled to China in 2003.

Smeal said Bush is expected to announce his decision on UNFPA funding within a few weeks.

Meanwhile, women will continue to die because of U.S. policies, stressed Jacobson.

"In many of the countries we're speaking about -- India, many of the countries of sub-Saharan Africa like Zimbabwe, Kenya -- in these countries deaths from unsafe abortion and pregnancy-related complications are the leading cause of death among women ages 15 to 35."

Added Jacobson: "So, really it's not this sort of abstraction, but the leading killers of women in that age group, their most productive age group, the age group in which they're most likely to have small children that they're raising."

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GO SISTAHS!