One woman is a victim of daily defamation from the right: Susan B. Anthony. The name and image of the iconic suffragist have been used to promote the anti-woman, anti-choice campaigns of a group that calls itself the "Susan B. Anthony List." Clearly, they hope that co-opting the name of the famous woman's rights leader will camouflage their anti-woman agenda. It should then come as no surprise that the same group is now maligning and defaming (though not yet co-opting) the name of another woman's rights leader, Hillary Clinton.
The "Susan B. Anthony List" claims Clinton, as Obama's Secretary of State, will "promote abortion" around the world. According to their November 30 press release, "Clinton will join Obama in promoting taxpayer funding of international abortions through a revocation of the Mexico City Policy and restoring funding to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). The UNFPA has been implicated in supporting China's coercive one-child family planning policy that involves forced abortions and sterilizations."
Defamation is a tool of the anti-choice establishment. Its campaign against UNFPA was one of its most sinister. It was, in effect, a campaign against the most desperate women, babies and families of the world. Anti-contraception groups, like the "Susan B. Anthony List," with the help of the all-too-willing President Bush managed to freeze $161 million of U.S. funds to UNFPA. This "pro-life" victory resulted in millions of infant deaths, over a hundred thousand mothers dying during childbirth, as well as millions more unintended pregnancies and abortions worldwide. With an Obama presidency, sadly for "pro-life" groups, this trend will end. But the pro-lie movement against UNFPA will continue.
Hillary has been a big supporter of UNFPA, and for good reason. The UN is, despite press reports to the contrary, primarily a relief agency. It provides assistance to those living in the most dangerous and unstable places on earth. The role of UNFPA, one of its agencies, is to provide lifesaving interventions in the reproductive field: delivering babies, creating healthy births, ensuring that women are well enough to become mothers again, and giving families the methods to space children. (These, by the way, are goals that Susan B. Anthony certainly would have endorsed.)
UNFPA does not provide abortion. In fact, the organization states explicitly, "UNFPA...does not provide support for abortion services." Instead, UNFPA is the supplier of 41 percent of the world's total needed contraceptive (or prevention) services. It does this all on a meager budget, $500 million, provided by nations that believe in its mission. UNFPA is by many standards a model of what the UN does well. It has a tremendous impact on the people in greatest need, and it does so on a shoestring. As economist Jeffrey Sachs, author of The End of Poverty and, according to Time magazine, one of the world's one hundred most influential people, explained, "UNFPA's work is absolutely vital."
Sadly, the organization's good work providing people in poor countries the ability to plan a pregnancy put it on a collision course with the U.S. anti-family planning movement. While domestically, our anti-sex fundamentalists tend to act covertly to roll back access to birth control, they act brazenly abroad. In Kosovo they characterized UNFPA's efforts to provide emergency contraception to female refugees who had been raped and wanted to prevent pregnancy as "ethnic cleansing " and "genocide." They followed UNFPA workers into Iraq to suggest the emergency obstetric care clinics it was constructing and staffing was instead the headquarters for an "abortion jihad."
This heckling of humanitarian relief efforts is coordinated by a group based in Front Royal, Virginia, the Population Research Institute (PRI). When Bush took office, PRI saw its opportunity. The staff of six was imaginative. In 2002, they amplified their slander campaign against UNFPA claiming it was working with the Chinese government to enforce its coercive one-child policy.
The truth was the very opposite. UNFPA was working with the Chinese government to prove that voluntary family planning would lead to better outcomes for Chinese citizens as well as the Chinese government. In fact, UNFPA was having lots of success persuading the Chinese to relax their coercive and brutal one-child policy, the goal of their work there. It had even documented a dramatic decline in abortion rates in the Chinese counties it focused, from 24 percent to 10 percent. (To put this in context, the current abortion rate in the U.S. is 21 percent.) Just when UNFPA was succeeding in proving to the Chinese the one-child policy was not only inhumane but also ineffective, PRI swooped in with its claims of complicity. Bush, eager to lock lips with his fanatical base, ignored the advice of his own state department, as well as many allied nations, and opted to go with the swirly eyed lunacy of the six staffers of PRI. At their request, Bush quickly froze all U.S. funds to UNFPA, which represented 12 percent of its budget.
Since the accusations were made, over 145 diplomats have looked into the spurious claims made by PRI. Not one investigator has been able to validate PRI's accusations against UNFPA.
Nonetheless, UNFPA has not received U.S. funding since 2002, amounting to a loss of $161 million dollars. Many countries have appealed to the U.S. to restore funding to UNFPA, including UN ambassadors from more than 50 countries who explained that "The least developed countries, 34 of which are in Africa, receive the bulk of UNFPA funding and will be most affected." Thanks to our "pro-life" movement, the US holds the ignoble distinction of being the only country to ever withhold funds to UNFPA for political reasons.
The effects of U.S. policy are tangible. Johns Hopkins researchers have estimated the magnitude. According to the researchers, the loss of funding to UNFPA has resulted in 1.9 million infant deaths, 135,000 maternal deaths, 60 million unintended pregnancies, 25 million abortions.
Anita Rahman, president of Americans for UNFPA, an organization formed to educate the American public about the impact this U.S. religious fundamentalist plot has had on women, babies and families worldwide, once said, "We dream of the day when the United States government will once again contribute financially to UNFPA and be part of the international community's work to promote the health and dignity of women everywhere." With Obama and Clinton guiding foreign policy, that dream will come true. Meanwhile, the "pro-life" movement plots another nightmare.
To learn more about of current anti-contraception activities visit www.birthcontrolwatch.org
Follow Cristina Page on Twitter: www.twitter.com/cristinapage
So in that alternate reality, Hillary will "promote abortion" because "everybody knows" she's an abortion-lover. The UN will promote abortion because it's the UN. Reality doesn't enter into the discussion, and it is utterly futile to attempt to introduce facts to the mind of someone indoctrinated in that culture.
It doesn't entirely work one way. I still think Hillary is a disaster because of what actually did happen with her, particularly over the Iraq War vote. Just as Karl Rove is absurd for saying, gee, if we'd only known, because the evidence was available, so too Hillary. Perhaps worse is her total life immersion in corporatism. If you want to define the opposite of "community organizer", here's the resume of the lady in the pantsuit....
How about Biden?
Every time you attack Clinton now, you are saying the One lacks the judgment to be president.
How horrible it is to have even more information now that says that we could have been helping other areas of the world out, but instead, once again more lies took away from the good that could have happened. Why is America so "superior" that they can't help areas that need more access to contraceptives to help prevent children being born from rape and other nasty situations?
All you can do is to provide a loving home for your children, a mother and a father who show their love. Raise your children to respect everyone; raise your son's to respect themselves and women and raise your daughters to respect themselves and the men they will meet, realizing of course that they are kind but understand how to say "NO".
Teach you children about sex, that it is a beautiful part of God's creation and why it needs to be saved for marriage and what can happen if they go to far. Show them the images that help them to understand that at conception there is another life not just a ball of cells.
For the most part, kids will understand. But there will always be those sadly who carry it to far and pay the price for their hormones.
With that stated, I am personally pro choice. The ability to make an informed choice is crucial to this issue. I hope we can keep the topic of abortion out of the political realm (there is no hope there) and make sure that all potential mothers (and fathers!) have the ability to make their own choice . . . based on facts.
Don’t agree? Witness the birth of a baby side by side with that of an abortion. You will choose life.
(and that's a collective 'we', meaning society - I am not an abortionist)
It's called realizing what you are doing when you have sex and you aren't married or you are a teenager or young adult.
Sadly, there is not a heck of a lot of help out there after this situation occurs.
Read Cider House Rules sometime. It depicts what life was like for poor desperate women in the days before birth control and safe legal abortions.
The impact "Cali's" birth had in the teenage community has done more for the prolife cause than you can imagine. In fact, many of her friends who have chosen to end the life of their babies now regret in unison of their decisions.
You my friend could not be further from the truth.
Thanks Christina for the informative article.
years and general practice (including army overseas duty) some years before
that. With no notes, I can stand up and give you a two hour lecture on pro-pregnancy
termination that will make your hair stand on end. People who are against the
termination of unwanted or undesirable pregnancies are either ignorant, radically
religious, stupid, uninformed, or all four. I was born in Virginia, went to U.Va., and
graduated in the top third of my class at that medical school. The pro-lifers are
people (generally religious), who are giving emotional opinions on a rather complicated subject about which they actually know nothing. You should have
walked in my shoes for thirty years, and your understanding would be the opposite.
Kindly go to the United Nations website and look at the figures for The Replacement Birth Rate, which is 2.1. You will see that most countries now have a figure BELOW this rate!
European nations are getting really scared because not enough babies are being born. Retirees are living longer and of course, everyone eventually dies and there is just not enough people to do the work. And many of these nations are not multi ethnic, in other words..they are dieing.
We here, in the United States, have a growth in population that is directly related to IMMIGRATION.
By 2050, it will catch up with us and the population will start to decrease just as it is now in Europe.
"Overpopulation" is a relative term - how does the number of people relate to the amount of resources? Look a little closer. SoL is right about the aging of both American and European populations, but this is a smaller problem to deal with: our seniors are stronger and working longer than in developing countries. Which would you rather deal with - too few babies, or a generation of angry young men who may be 50% of the population with no possibility of employment? It's also true that American population growth has been mostly due to immigration, both legal and illegal - and our population is a good deal larger than we thought. What does that do to our projections of water use, for instance? The fanatical gag rule that has denied not just abortion but medical care for millions of women throughout the world is one of the WORST policies we've ever implemented. We can't scrap