Here's something President Bush did not say during his visit to Pittsburgh yesterday:
"My fellow Americans," the president didn't say, "poor women around the world are getting entirely too much health care.
"Every day, thousands are saved from dying in pregnancy or bleeding to death in childbirth. Not only that, but women in rural villages and teeming refugee camps are learning how to avoid pregnancy, the better to extend their own lives and care for the children they already have.
"Clearly, this situation must stop. Therefore, my administration is moving decisively to withhold the $34 million that Congress approved for the United Nations Population Fund, which is responsible for so many of these lifesaving measures. And my new budget calls for zero funding in the coming year."
Presumably, Mr. Bush did not say this because it does not reflect his true motivation for the elimination of this funding. Presumably, he is very much in favor of healthy women and children in this country and elsewhere. Yet he might as well have said it, because that's going to be the effect of his decision.
Bush's real reason for squelching this funding is -- surprise -- politics at its worst. He's appeasing the far-right flank of his party in the person of Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J.
Smith is an abortion opponent who wants to punish China for its population control policies, which he says include forced abortions. The United Nations Population Fund, known as UNFPA, funds some programs in China. Therefore, Smith wants to cut off the agency as well.
Never mind that the UNFPA does not support, encourage, enable or provide abortions in China or elsewhere. And never mind that the vast majority of its work takes place outside China. Smith is determined to replace gynecology with ideology in every time zone, and Bush is letting him set the agenda at poor women's expense.
This scenario is rife with so much hypocrisy one hardly knows where to begin. Just a few months ago, Bush stood next to a female refugee from Afghanistan and pledged to help her countrywomen and their children recover from the brutal misogyny of the Taliban. Now he's slashing all aid to one of the agencies best equipped to fill that role -- and still calling himself "pro-life."
For the record, Afghan women have an average of seven children each, and as many as 17 or 18 because there's virtually no contraception. Of the 1.5 million refugees who fled the country when U.S. bombing began, 56,000 were pregnant, as are 300,000 inside the borders. In an average week in one of Kabul's best hospitals, 40 babies -- 10 percent of those born -- die.
For a nation almost devoid of infrastructure, reversing these numbers would be a titanic struggle in any case. Shouldn't the United States be supporting those in the trenches rather than cutting them off?
The agency runs a lot of other programs as well.
In Nigeria, where 45,000 women a year die in childbirth, the UNFPA spent $6.6 million over two years to equip 900 maternity clinics from cities to rural areas. The program trained 900 midwives in handling complicated deliveries like breech births, excessive bleeding and shock.
In the Philippines, a small grant of $2,250 opened a women's health clinic in a shantytown outside Manila, where no maternity care was previously available.
In 2000, $10 million went for emergency midwifery kits that hold the following controversial items: soap for the midwife to wash her hands; a clean plastic sheet that gives the birthing woman a nontoxic delivery surface; a clean razor blade and string to cut the umbilical cord and tie it off.
Punishing women in Afghanistan and Nigeria because a U.S. congressman is mad at China could only make sense in the twisted world of abortion politics. More's the pity, because if there's one cause that should unite advocates and foes of abortion rights, it ought to be preventing pregnancy-related death -- which, by the way, kills 500,000 women a year, 99 percent of them in developing countries.
A letter-writing campaign is under way, urging the president to restore funding to the UNFPA. The $34 million would prevent only a fraction of these deaths. Zero dollars, on the other hand, will prevent none of them.
Sally Kalson's e-mail address is skalson@post-gazette.com.
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