Applause seems called for, considering the swift progress of our new president. George W. Bush has branched out from his familiar territory of murder by execution in our racially-biased justice system. He has already moved our country forward into further promoting international starvation and fatalities from inadequate health care by cutting funding to family planning organizations.
With his Jan. 22 executive memorandum, Bush ended U.S. funding to family planning organizations that advocate pro-choice policy, provide abortion services, or even simply give information or referrals related to abortion. The consequences of this action are far larger than impacting people’s reproductive rights and include causing the deaths of a large number of people worldwide.
Bush’s executive memorandum will increase overpopulation and, thus, increase starvation, disease and environmental degradation. Family planning organizations, which provide and educate people about contraception, are extremely important in reducing birth rates in less wealthy, developing countries.
Most of the world’s growth is expected to occur in these countries, which already lack adequate housing, fuel sources and food. Bush’s memorandum will reduce available land and soil resources, create problems with waste disposal and increase soil, water and air pollution by contributing to overpopulation. U.S. citizens cringe at actions of other heads of nations, but the consequences of Bush’s action on the scarce resources and insufficient food and fresh water supplies of other nations barely caught mention in the U.S. media.
On top of the many deaths sure to result from the high birth rates and lack of food, more can be added from a loss of the family planning organizations’ providing of maternal health care, safe abortions and HIV/AIDS prevention efforts. The National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association reports that every year more than 500,000 women die during childbirth or pregnancy. It seems Bush would have thought about those women before he decided to cut off funding to organizations that provide maternal health care in countries where women often do not have access to affordable, quality health care.
It also seems Bush might have thought about the World Health Organization’s estimate that by the year 2000 at least 40 million people worldwide would be infected with HIV, 90 percent in developing nations in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. I suppose the lives of the women and men who contract HIV in those countries, the children born with HIV and the children orphaned because of the disease did not factor into his “moral” executive memorandum. Similarly, it is certain Bush did not concern himself with the 78,000 women worldwide that the NFPRHA reports die each year as a result of unsafe abortions.
Moreover, the Bush administration went to deceptive lengths in order to promote cutting the funding to the family planning organizations that work so hard to prevent these deaths. The Bush administration continuously touted the executive memorandum as stopping “taxpayer-financed abortion.”
However, government funding of abortion has been clearly stated as illegal by federal law since 1973. None of the money Bush has taken from the family planning organizations went toward providing abortions. Any performed must be financed with non-U.S. government money.
Bush’s executive memorandum is nothing but a petty, vindictive and highly destructive slap in the face for providing abortions or information on abortion options.
This slap in the face cannot be questioned as highly influential either. The U.S. gives between 40 and 50 percent, $425 million each year, of all international funding of family planning. The most ironic part of Bush’s action is that it will actually drastically increase the number of abortions that occur worldwide, especially unsafe ones. By limiting the ability of family planning organizations in their promotion of contraception and sexuality education, Bush is increasing the number of unwanted pregnancies.
By increasing the number of unwanted pregnancies, Bush is increasing the number of abortions. Does that seem like fuzzy math?
What seems a little fuzzy to me is that Bush could justify his executive memorandum with his supposedly devout religious convictions. Apparently, while thumping his Bible against things like reproductive choice and same-sex marriage, Bush has missed a little choice tidbit about Christianity. I believe there is some sort of commandment about killing in Dubya’s favorite book.
For some reason, the death penalty, starvation from overpopulation, deaths from unsafe abortions and enabling the spread of HIV/AIDS don’t seem to mesh well with that.
Neither does preventing health care providers from telling a woman all her options with which to make an informed decision mesh well with the concept of free speech.
Brian Emerson Jones, an interdisciplinary studies and social sciences sophomore, can be reached at jonesb20@msu.edu.
