What Now!
News for you to think about:
>
> Bush Administration "Breaks the Promise" by Expanding Global Gag Rule
to HIV Funding On Eve of World AIDS Day
>Action will further undermine HIV Prevention efforts for women and
>girls According to the Center for Health and Gender Equity
>
> Washington, D.C. - In a stealth move intended to draw little public
> notice, the Bush Administration has formally expanded the Global Gag
> Rule to U.S. global AIDS funding under the President's Emergency Plan
> for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), according to the Center for Health and
> Gender Equity (CHANGE). The restrictions appear as part of a
> five-year, $193 million request for applications (RFA) for HIV/AIDS
> prevention, treatment and care in Kenya released late Friday, November
> 18th by the United States Agency for International Development
> (USAID). The RFA, entitled, "HIV/AIDS & Tuberculosis, treatment, care and support"
> references the gag rule twice in stating eligibility criteria, stating
> that all consortium partners must "agree, to abide by the Mexico City
> Policy, the Tiahrt Amendment, and all USAID policies and regulations."
> (For a summary of the grant see www.genderhealth.org/kenyagrant.php,
> as well as to find links to the original RFA and related documents).
>
> In August 2003, President Bush released an Executive Order
> specifically exempting U.S. global AIDS funds from gag rule
> restrictions. "The theme of World AIDS Day 2005 is 'Keep the
> Promise.' In expanding the Global Gag Rule to U.S. global AIDS
> funding on the eve of World AIDS Day, the Administration has broken
> its own written commitment not to subject global AIDS funds to these
> onerous restrictions," stated Jodi Jacobson, Executive Director of CHANGE.
>
> The Gag Rule, also known as the "Mexico City Policy," denies U.S.
> international family planning funding to foreign non-governmental
> organizations that provide safe abortion services, counseling,
> referral, or information on safe abortion, advocate for changes in
> abortion law in their own country, conduct research on the effects of
> unsafe abortion, or otherwise work on safe abortion issues.[i]
>
> The Global Gag Rule undermines efforts to prevent unintended
> pregnancies in the first place by crippling family planning programs
> that do so much as collect data on unsafe abortion. It also hobbles
> efforts to address the toll taken on women's lives worldwide by
> complications of unsafe abortion, sexually transmitted infections,
> complications of labor and delivery, and other leading causes of
> illness and death among women worldwide. According to conservative
> estimates by the World Health Organization (WHO), approximately
> 600,000 women worldwide die each year from complications of pregnancy
> and childbirth, of which at least 78,000 women worldwide die as a
> result of complications of unsafe abortion in a desperate effort to
> terminate unintended pregnancies. In Kenya, where abortion is
> illegal, complications of unsafe abortion are a leading killer of
> married women in their twenties and thirties. The Kenya Family
> Planning Association lost U.S. funding because it refused to forgo the
> right to discuss the toll of unsafe abortion on the lives of women in
> Kenya. "Loss of this funding has severely undermined efforts to
> reduce unintended pregnancy in Kenya through expansion of voluntary family planning as well as to prevent HIV infections in women,"
> according to Dr. Godwin Mzenge, Executive Director of Family Planning
> Association of Kenya.
>
> Women and girls make up 60 percent of those infected by HIV in
> sub-Saharan Africa, the region hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic, and
> the rate of new infections is highest among women in their twenties
> and thirties in most countries of sub-Saharan Africa, and in other
> "hotspots" such as India. "Given these realities, this shift in
> policy goes beyond hypocrisy to sheer irresponsibility and complete
> disregard for the lives and welfare of women and girls worldwide,"
> asserted Jacobson.
>
> "More to the point, this move will further undermine the ability of
> reproductive health, family planning and material and child health
> programs to reach women and girls with life-saving information and
> technologies for the prevention of HIV infection at a time when 5
> lives are being lost to HIV/AIDS every year and when an increasingly
> disproportionate number of those deaths are among women, " stated
> Jacobson.
>
> The application of the Global Gag Rule to HIV/AIDS funding reneges on
> earlier promises by the Administration not to apply these restrictions.
> In February 2003, the Administration indicated it would expand the
> Global Gag Rule to all funding under the purview of the Department of
> State, including HIV funding. This announcement generated an
> international outcry. In a campaign led by the Center for Health and
> Gender Equity, more than 145 leading U.S. organizations from across
> the fields of public health, human rights, global AIDS and
> reproductive health were joined by over 300 leading parliamentarians,
> public health practitioners, and religious leaders from every region
> of the world protesting the policy restrictions. A letter sent to the
> President signed by both domestic and international leaders stated
> that "Rather than saving lives, this policy will have the opposite
> effect: consigning untold numbers of women and girls to infection,
> suffering and premature death that could otherwise have been
> prevented." Even Henry Hyde, Chair of the House International
> Relations Committee and a primary author of the original global AIDS
> legislation advised against applying the gag rule to HIV funding,
> saying "In negotiating [global AIDS funding] with the White House, I
> felt it was extremely important not to become bogged down in gag rule politics."
>
> In response to public pressure, President Bush issued an executive
> order on August 29, 2003, stating that the Global Gag Rule "shall not
> apply to foreign assistance furnished pursuant to the United States
> Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act of 2003
> (Public Law 108-25)." This latest move breaks that promise. "In the
> face of the HIV epidemic, this policy, whether applied formally or
> informally, is indefensible, unethical, and immoral," asserted Jacobson.
>
> Application of the Global Gag Rule will further undermine effective
> prevention strategies by denying funding to those programs that are
> best poised to meet the needs of the most vulnerable. Family planning
> and maternal and child health programs are the "first responders" for
> women and girls in the global AIDS epidemic, trusted sources of
> information, education, and access to critical commodities, such as
> male and female condoms, among other things, noted Jacobson.
> Governments and leading donor institutions throughout the world
> strongly support integrated family planning and HIV prevention
> programs as the best approach to improving public health. The World
> Health Organization (WHO) Global Sector Strategy for HIV/AIDS
> underscores that existing family planning programs "provide a clear
> entry point for the delivery of HIV/AIDS interventions." USAID, the
> World Bank, the European Union and other leading donors in every
> region encourage integration as a matter of good public health practice and economic efficiency.
>
> Under severe pressure from the extreme right in the Republican Party
> and its fundamentalist Christian base in the United States, the
> Administration's global AIDS policy already includes numerous policy
> shifts and funding constraints that undermine effective prevention
> efforts. First, there is an excessive emphasis on abstinence-only
> programs to the exclusion of comprehensive approaches that integrate
> abstinence-based programming with safer sex education. Today, nearly
> 60 percent of funding for prevention of sexual transmission-the single
> greatest factor in HIV transmission-goes to abstinence programs in
> PEPFAR focus countries. Second, the Administration has dramatically
> cut funding for condom social marketing and has severely limited
> condom distribution to groups at greatest risk of infection. Finally,
> PEPFAR provides virtually no funding for female condoms, for
> increasing women's ability to negotiate safer sex, for efforts to stem
> violence and sexual coercion as a factor in transmission of HIV, or
> for other programs critical to women. "What we are doing is taking an
> already sub-par effort and making it worse," stated Jacobson.
>
> Expansion of the Global Gag Rule comes at a time when every dollar
> spent on prevention needs to be spent in the most effective way
> possible to save lives. "But expansion of the Global Gag Rule is
> intended to do one thing and one thing only: It is intended to further
> undermine effective reproductive health and family planning programs
> worldwide, a goal of the extreme right in this country for over two
> decades," stated Jacobson. "The net result will be increased rates of
> infection among women, and the responsibility for this will fall
> squarely on the Bush Administration policy," she continued.
>
> To some extent, Jacobson noted, the expansion of the gag rule to HIV
> funding represents a "formal admission" of what the Administration has
> been doing all along--excluding family planning and maternal and child
> health programs from U.S.-funded HIV prevention efforts. Field
> research by CHANGE has shown that since 2003, family planning
> organizations in Botswana, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, Tanzania, and
> Uganda have been outright denied funding under PEPFAR due to confusion
> about the application of the Global Gag Rule and due to the rush by
> this Administration to fund "faith-based" groups, shift prevention
> funding to abstinence-only programs, and otherwise undermine effective
> HIV and reproductive health programs. The deterioration of basic
> family planning services and their inability to respond effectively to
> the needs of their clients for HIV prevention was a key concern
> identified by the 22 representatives of 6 PEPFAR focus countries that
> attended a meeting held by CHANGE in Kenya in September this year.
>
> "Expansion of the Global Gag Rule to HIV funding comes at a time when
> political support for the Bush Administration is waning, and when the
> Administration is seeking to shore up its 'fundamentalist base,'"
> noted Jacobson. "It is perhaps no surprise," noted Jacobson, "but
> this decision shows just how far this Administration will go to play
> politics with women's lives."
>
> ---###---
>
> [i] The term "Global Gag Rule" derives from the fact that the
> restriction is widely seen as violation of the constitutional right to
> free speech in the United States and so, to date, has not been applied
> to U.S.-based groups. The gag rule is widely seen as a fundamental
> challenge to improving public health: Because it denies funding to
> those organizations most effective in reducing unintended
> pregnancies-and hence the need for abortion-it actually contributes to
> the problems it purports to solve.
>
> ---------------
>
> The Center for Health and Gender Equity is a U.S.-based
> non-governmental organization focused on the effects of U.S.
> international policies on the health and rights of women, girls, and
> other vulnerable populations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
>
> www.genderhealth.org.
>
> Bush Administration "Breaks the Promise" by Expanding Global Gag Rule
to HIV Funding On Eve of World AIDS Day
>Action will further undermine HIV Prevention efforts for women and
>girls According to the Center for Health and Gender Equity
>
> Washington, D.C. - In a stealth move intended to draw little public
> notice, the Bush Administration has formally expanded the Global Gag
> Rule to U.S. global AIDS funding under the President's Emergency Plan
> for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), according to the Center for Health and
> Gender Equity (CHANGE). The restrictions appear as part of a
> five-year, $193 million request for applications (RFA) for HIV/AIDS
> prevention, treatment and care in Kenya released late Friday, November
> 18th by the United States Agency for International Development
> (USAID). The RFA, entitled, "HIV/AIDS & Tuberculosis, treatment, care and support"
> references the gag rule twice in stating eligibility criteria, stating
> that all consortium partners must "agree, to abide by the Mexico City
> Policy, the Tiahrt Amendment, and all USAID policies and regulations."
> (For a summary of the grant see www.genderhealth.org/kenyagrant.php,
> as well as to find links to the original RFA and related documents).
>
> In August 2003, President Bush released an Executive Order
> specifically exempting U.S. global AIDS funds from gag rule
> restrictions. "The theme of World AIDS Day 2005 is 'Keep the
> Promise.' In expanding the Global Gag Rule to U.S. global AIDS
> funding on the eve of World AIDS Day, the Administration has broken
> its own written commitment not to subject global AIDS funds to these
> onerous restrictions," stated Jodi Jacobson, Executive Director of CHANGE.
>
> The Gag Rule, also known as the "Mexico City Policy," denies U.S.
> international family planning funding to foreign non-governmental
> organizations that provide safe abortion services, counseling,
> referral, or information on safe abortion, advocate for changes in
> abortion law in their own country, conduct research on the effects of
> unsafe abortion, or otherwise work on safe abortion issues.[i]
>
> The Global Gag Rule undermines efforts to prevent unintended
> pregnancies in the first place by crippling family planning programs
> that do so much as collect data on unsafe abortion. It also hobbles
> efforts to address the toll taken on women's lives worldwide by
> complications of unsafe abortion, sexually transmitted infections,
> complications of labor and delivery, and other leading causes of
> illness and death among women worldwide. According to conservative
> estimates by the World Health Organization (WHO), approximately
> 600,000 women worldwide die each year from complications of pregnancy
> and childbirth, of which at least 78,000 women worldwide die as a
> result of complications of unsafe abortion in a desperate effort to
> terminate unintended pregnancies. In Kenya, where abortion is
> illegal, complications of unsafe abortion are a leading killer of
> married women in their twenties and thirties. The Kenya Family
> Planning Association lost U.S. funding because it refused to forgo the
> right to discuss the toll of unsafe abortion on the lives of women in
> Kenya. "Loss of this funding has severely undermined efforts to
> reduce unintended pregnancy in Kenya through expansion of voluntary family planning as well as to prevent HIV infections in women,"
> according to Dr. Godwin Mzenge, Executive Director of Family Planning
> Association of Kenya.
>
> Women and girls make up 60 percent of those infected by HIV in
> sub-Saharan Africa, the region hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic, and
> the rate of new infections is highest among women in their twenties
> and thirties in most countries of sub-Saharan Africa, and in other
> "hotspots" such as India. "Given these realities, this shift in
> policy goes beyond hypocrisy to sheer irresponsibility and complete
> disregard for the lives and welfare of women and girls worldwide,"
> asserted Jacobson.
>
> "More to the point, this move will further undermine the ability of
> reproductive health, family planning and material and child health
> programs to reach women and girls with life-saving information and
> technologies for the prevention of HIV infection at a time when 5
> lives are being lost to HIV/AIDS every year and when an increasingly
> disproportionate number of those deaths are among women, " stated
> Jacobson.
>
> The application of the Global Gag Rule to HIV/AIDS funding reneges on
> earlier promises by the Administration not to apply these restrictions.
> In February 2003, the Administration indicated it would expand the
> Global Gag Rule to all funding under the purview of the Department of
> State, including HIV funding. This announcement generated an
> international outcry. In a campaign led by the Center for Health and
> Gender Equity, more than 145 leading U.S. organizations from across
> the fields of public health, human rights, global AIDS and
> reproductive health were joined by over 300 leading parliamentarians,
> public health practitioners, and religious leaders from every region
> of the world protesting the policy restrictions. A letter sent to the
> President signed by both domestic and international leaders stated
> that "Rather than saving lives, this policy will have the opposite
> effect: consigning untold numbers of women and girls to infection,
> suffering and premature death that could otherwise have been
> prevented." Even Henry Hyde, Chair of the House International
> Relations Committee and a primary author of the original global AIDS
> legislation advised against applying the gag rule to HIV funding,
> saying "In negotiating [global AIDS funding] with the White House, I
> felt it was extremely important not to become bogged down in gag rule politics."
>
> In response to public pressure, President Bush issued an executive
> order on August 29, 2003, stating that the Global Gag Rule "shall not
> apply to foreign assistance furnished pursuant to the United States
> Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act of 2003
> (Public Law 108-25)." This latest move breaks that promise. "In the
> face of the HIV epidemic, this policy, whether applied formally or
> informally, is indefensible, unethical, and immoral," asserted Jacobson.
>
> Application of the Global Gag Rule will further undermine effective
> prevention strategies by denying funding to those programs that are
> best poised to meet the needs of the most vulnerable. Family planning
> and maternal and child health programs are the "first responders" for
> women and girls in the global AIDS epidemic, trusted sources of
> information, education, and access to critical commodities, such as
> male and female condoms, among other things, noted Jacobson.
> Governments and leading donor institutions throughout the world
> strongly support integrated family planning and HIV prevention
> programs as the best approach to improving public health. The World
> Health Organization (WHO) Global Sector Strategy for HIV/AIDS
> underscores that existing family planning programs "provide a clear
> entry point for the delivery of HIV/AIDS interventions." USAID, the
> World Bank, the European Union and other leading donors in every
> region encourage integration as a matter of good public health practice and economic efficiency.
>
> Under severe pressure from the extreme right in the Republican Party
> and its fundamentalist Christian base in the United States, the
> Administration's global AIDS policy already includes numerous policy
> shifts and funding constraints that undermine effective prevention
> efforts. First, there is an excessive emphasis on abstinence-only
> programs to the exclusion of comprehensive approaches that integrate
> abstinence-based programming with safer sex education. Today, nearly
> 60 percent of funding for prevention of sexual transmission-the single
> greatest factor in HIV transmission-goes to abstinence programs in
> PEPFAR focus countries. Second, the Administration has dramatically
> cut funding for condom social marketing and has severely limited
> condom distribution to groups at greatest risk of infection. Finally,
> PEPFAR provides virtually no funding for female condoms, for
> increasing women's ability to negotiate safer sex, for efforts to stem
> violence and sexual coercion as a factor in transmission of HIV, or
> for other programs critical to women. "What we are doing is taking an
> already sub-par effort and making it worse," stated Jacobson.
>
> Expansion of the Global Gag Rule comes at a time when every dollar
> spent on prevention needs to be spent in the most effective way
> possible to save lives. "But expansion of the Global Gag Rule is
> intended to do one thing and one thing only: It is intended to further
> undermine effective reproductive health and family planning programs
> worldwide, a goal of the extreme right in this country for over two
> decades," stated Jacobson. "The net result will be increased rates of
> infection among women, and the responsibility for this will fall
> squarely on the Bush Administration policy," she continued.
>
> To some extent, Jacobson noted, the expansion of the gag rule to HIV
> funding represents a "formal admission" of what the Administration has
> been doing all along--excluding family planning and maternal and child
> health programs from U.S.-funded HIV prevention efforts. Field
> research by CHANGE has shown that since 2003, family planning
> organizations in Botswana, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, Tanzania, and
> Uganda have been outright denied funding under PEPFAR due to confusion
> about the application of the Global Gag Rule and due to the rush by
> this Administration to fund "faith-based" groups, shift prevention
> funding to abstinence-only programs, and otherwise undermine effective
> HIV and reproductive health programs. The deterioration of basic
> family planning services and their inability to respond effectively to
> the needs of their clients for HIV prevention was a key concern
> identified by the 22 representatives of 6 PEPFAR focus countries that
> attended a meeting held by CHANGE in Kenya in September this year.
>
> "Expansion of the Global Gag Rule to HIV funding comes at a time when
> political support for the Bush Administration is waning, and when the
> Administration is seeking to shore up its 'fundamentalist base,'"
> noted Jacobson. "It is perhaps no surprise," noted Jacobson, "but
> this decision shows just how far this Administration will go to play
> politics with women's lives."
>
> ---###---
>
> [i] The term "Global Gag Rule" derives from the fact that the
> restriction is widely seen as violation of the constitutional right to
> free speech in the United States and so, to date, has not been applied
> to U.S.-based groups. The gag rule is widely seen as a fundamental
> challenge to improving public health: Because it denies funding to
> those organizations most effective in reducing unintended
> pregnancies-and hence the need for abortion-it actually contributes to
> the problems it purports to solve.
>
> ---------------
>
> The Center for Health and Gender Equity is a U.S.-based
> non-governmental organization focused on the effects of U.S.
> international policies on the health and rights of women, girls, and
> other vulnerable populations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
>
> www.genderhealth.org.