Bush administration opens a new front in its war on women – a HIV/AIDS Global Gag Rule

The Bush administration is considering an expansion of its so-called “Mexico City policy” to cover HIV/AIDS funding and other program areas that save women’s lives. The result would be a drastic curtailment in health services to women and their families worldwide (click here to read the memo).

The existing “Mexico City policy” prohibits organizations from receiving U.S. international family planning assistance if they engage in abortion services, counseling or lobbying, even if they support such work with separate money of their own. All such groups—and all international family planning groups—have long worked to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS: halting gender-based violence and discrimination; providing condoms, counseling, reproductive health education and referrals for treatment; and reducing maternal mortality and mother-to-child HIV transmission.

Under the Bush administration change, part of its proposed new initiative against HIV/AIDS, funds would be denied to any such integrated programs. The change would require family planning groups to create separate facilities for family planning and for HIV/AIDS programs in order to receive HIV/AIDS support.

This would be a largely impossible burden for cash-strapped non-governmental organizations in the world’s poorest countries.

• It would force them to choose whether to shut down their HIV/AIDS programs or their family planning programs.
• It would require poor women to find and visit separate clinics in many areas where existing family planning centers may be the only health care of any kind for miles around.
• Where AIDS victims are stigmatized, many who now seek treatment privately would not dare to visit a labeled clinic.
• And it would curtail funding for scores of programs that fight violence and discrimination and save the lives of mothers and their infants before, during and after childbirth.

This policy is a frank and overt attack on family planning in general, a further significant broadening of the administration’s war on women, as detailed by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (click here to read their statement).

The Los Angeles Times, for example, quoted a senior White House aide as saying, “Any agency that provides treatment for AIDS will get the money as long as none of the funds are used for family planning purposes or for abortions…”

The administration sought to paint the change as a relaxation of Mexico City policy, but the delighted reaction of anti-abortion groups proves that it is anything but.

past features