state of the empire: reproductive freedom

Some Florida teens believe drinking Mountain Dew or smoking marijuana will prevent pregnancy and that swallowing a capful of bleach will prevent HIV/AIDS. Thank you, abstinence-only sex education! [sic]

When those pot-smoking, bleach-swilling Floridians get pregnant, they had better be prepared to become mommies and daddies. Their state legislature is trying to pass some of the most stringent anti-abortion laws in the US.

New laws would require any woman seeking an abortion to pay for, have, and view the results of, an ultrasound test.

The Florida state House of Representatives also passed a fetal homicide bill that would create a separate murder charge if a pregnancy is terminated by violence against a pregnant woman. The law would define a fetus from conception on as an "unborn child".

This hasn't passed the Florida state Senate yet, and may not. If it becomes law, reproductive-rights groups will go to court, as they always do, and the law would likely be found unconstitutional.

My point is not these laws in themselves, disgusting though they are. It's the laws in conjunction with abstinence-only sex "education".

The war against women is fought on many fronts. "Popline" is the world's largest database on reproductive health. It is managed by Johns Hopkins University, with money from US AID, the heavily politicized, anti-abortion, anti-woman Agency for International Development. Last week, a spokesperson for Johns Hopkins said the University had programmed its computers to ignore the word "abortion" in searches.

Librarians at the Medical Center of the University of California, San Francisco, expressed concern about the restrictions this week after they had difficulty retrieving articles from Popline.

In an e-mail response on Tuesday, Johns Hopkins told the librarians that "abortion" was no longer a valid search term.

"We recently made all abortion terms stop words," Debra L. Dickson, a Popline manager, wrote. "As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now."

As outrageous and Orwellian as that seems, the US has been making "all abortion terms stop words" in the global sense for a long time, using what's called the Global Gag Rule. Officially known as The Mexico City Policy, the Gag Rule was instituted by (who else?) Ronald Reagan in 1984, rescinded by Bill Clinton in 1993, then reinstated by the Resident on his first day in office in 2001.*

The Global Gag Rule states that no US funds can be provided to any foreign organization that uses funding from any other source to: perform abortions in cases other than a threat to the woman's life, rape or incest; provide counseling and referral for abortion; or lobby to make abortion legal or more available in their country.

Think about it. This is not just "we won't fund abortions". It's "we won't fund you at all, for anything, if you utter the word abortion or accept money from anyone else who does".

The Global Gag Rule increases the spread of HIV/AIDS, contributes to illegal and unsafe abortions, increases the world's population of unwanted babies, decreases the use of contraceptives (including HIV-preventing condoms), and in general increases human misery, suffering and death throughout the world.

For more information on how the Global Gag Rule hurts women, children and families, see Access Denied. You can search by continent and country to see the mighty reach of Empire.


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* OK, there is sometimes a difference between Republicans and Democrats.