Submitted by admin on Wed, 2005-10-19 08:00. ::
"Educated girls are more likely to know what HIV is and how to avoid it," first lady Laura Bush told members of the Organization of African First Ladies Against HIV/AIDS a few weeks ago.
She'd be more effective delivering that speech to her husband than to her African counterparts. For the fourth year in a row, President Bush is withholding $34 million appropriated by Congress for United Nations family-planning programs in 146 countries and territories. That $34 million could prevent as many as 2 million unwanted pregnancies and 4,700 maternal deaths and expand maternal health and HIV-prevention efforts — the very education effort that Laura Bush recognizes as essential to combating AIDS.
Bush says he is canceling the funds, now totaling $127 million, because the United Nations Population Fund supports coerced abortions in China, where the government encourages a one-child-per-family policy.
That is simply untrue. Two independent review panels and Bush's own team of investigators found no credible evidence that the United Nations underwrote abortions or involuntary sterilizations in China. "We recognize that United Nations Fund for Population Activities does invaluable work through its programs in maternal and child health care, voluntary family planning, screening for reproductive tract cancers, breast-feeding promotion and HIV/AIDS prevention," then Secretary of State Colin Powell told a Senate committee in 2001.
Because it's a sop to the extremists in his party, for whom the United Nations represents a cesspool of liberalism and for whom sex education can be summarized in a single word: abstinence.
Not content with seeing their abstinence-only policies fail in the United States, these fanatics want to export them to places such as sub-Saharan Africa, where women and girls are 60 percent of the HIV-infected population.
"I hope the United States will rejoin the family of nations that support our multilateral work," United Nations Population Fund executive director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid said in response to the Bush announcement. "Our task is made more urgent by the fact that more than 300 million poor women in the world suffer from illnesses related to pregnancy or childbirth, with more than half a million of them dying each year."
At the end of her own speech on AIDS, Laura Bush claimed that " . . . the United States is playing a key role in bringing an end to the tragedy of HIV/AIDS." The United States could play an even larger role if her husband would stop holding vital funds hostage to politics. She should tell him that.
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