![]() Women who desperately do not want to bear another child will get abortions, whether they are legal or not, dangerous or not. The researchers could come to no definite conclusions about what explained this correlation, but they suggested, reasonably, that when N.G.O.s promoting contraception lost their funding (because they also talked about abortion) and curtailed their services, more women got pregnant without wanting to. A 2011 paper by a group of Stanford researchers examined the policy’s impact in sub-Saharan Africa, and found that it was associated with an increase in abortions. This is a whole new policy.”Įven without the expansion, the global gag rule appears to have had deleterious effects-ones that even its proponents could not have intended. But this is not the global gag rule we know. “There have been no official guidelines issued. “The government agencies are still scrambling to figure out what this means,” Sneha Barot, a policy analyst with the Guttmacher Institute, told me. But Trump’s version offers no exceptions. Bush broadened the rule to cover State Department aid, he made a point of exempting global H.I.V./ AIDS programs. and many other infectious diseases, and promoting maternal and child nutrition. It could potentially affect an enormous range of health activities that the United States government engages in around the world, including work combatting H.I.V. This is both sweeping and, in the Trumpian way, very confusing to the people trying to do their jobs in the federal government. But Trump’s version extends the requirement to global aid furnished by all U.S. In the past, foreign N.G.O.s had to accept the conditions set out by the Mexico City Policy in order to get funds from two stipulated sources: U.S.A.I.D. Trump’s version is a radically expanded one, as reporters have begun to notice. On Monday, in one of his first executive actions, Donald Trump reinstated the global gag rule-but with a twist. As Will Harris, a spokesman for Marie Stopes International, told me, “All the medical evidence, as well as everything we know from our daily interaction with women, is unequivocal: if you take safe abortion services out of the reproductive-health-care package, it exposes women to risk. Under such circumstances, a ban on talking to women about how pregnancies can be safely terminated is something that many reproductive-health organizations, including Marie Stopes International and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, cannot agree to abide by. They may live in countries like India or Cambodia, where the procedure is legal, but difficult to access for women who are poor or who live in rural villages, and where birth-control information may also be hard to come by. Sixty-eight thousand women die annually from such attempts. ![]() In the developing world, nearly seven million women are treated each year for complications from trying to end a pregnancy unsafely-with herbs or sticks or turpentine or bleach, or punches to the stomach, or in unsterile procedures carried out by incompetent practitioners. One of the policy’s requirements is that the United States not contribute to nongovernmental organizations that “perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations.” To receive American funding for any of their family-planning work, in other words, groups would have to promise that they wouldn’t even speak of abortion-hence the nickname that the policy’s exasperated critics soon coined: the global gag rule. The Administration declared that “the United States does not consider abortion an acceptable element of family planning programs and will no longer contribute to those of which it is a part.” The so-called Mexico City Policy has been in effect for seventeen of the past thirty-two years-espoused by every Republican Administration, renounced under every Democratic one, including that of President Barack Obama. ![]() In 1984, at a population conference in Mexico City, the Reagan Administration brought domestic abortion politics into the arena of international aid for the first time. ![]()
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