Many of my friends' Blogs are concerned with world and local news (i.e. Scott and Brooke, Erin...) and their thoughts on the issues at hand, as opposed to being centered on just their daily lives, and I thought I might take a shot at some issues that concern me every so often. While I don't have a personally set policy on everything under the sun, there are a few things I can discuss at length with a definitive opinion. So let me get ranting now, with my dogmatic self:
I read this article on the BBC today:
US exports anti-abortion policy
by Nadene Ghouri, Social Affairs Specialist, BBC Radio 5
Wendy Wright is a genuinely concerned woman. Concerned Women of America is the name of the political lobby group she works for. Fiercely anti-abortion, their aim is to bring biblical values to US policy.
"It's funny how the moral positions are usually the healthier, safer and politically sensible positions," she says, speaking at her home in Washington.
On his first business day in office, with the support of voters like Wendy, President George W Bush started a war few people have heard about - his war on abortion.
He reinstated an old policy from the Reagan days called the Mexico City policy or "gag rule". The rule states that the United States will not allow its overseas aid money to be used to fund groups that carry out or provide any kind of advice or information about abortion.
Hundreds of women's health organisations in the poorest nations of the world - places where maternal mortality and infant death are high - faced a tough choice. Either sign the gag rule and be silenced on abortion, or refuse and lose millions of dollars in US aid.
Most refused to sign. As a result, thousands of family planning clinics across the developing world have closed their doors, making access to vital contraceptives hard to come by.
The US aim was to cut abortion worldwide, but has it worked?
Back-street abortions
I travelled to Ethiopia - a country where abortion is illegal but where a
recent study at Addis Ababa hospital found half of all female deaths there
were caused by botched back-street abortions. Here the cost of silence can
be high.
If they are forced to give birth they throw the children into latrines or abandon them for the hyenas to eat them
Amare Badada, Ethiopian Family Guidance Association
One of the most upsetting moments was standing outside a one-room tin hut where Asmara, a prostitute, had bled to death just hours earlier.
Aged 22, she received condoms from the local Marie Stopes clinic. It closed when
the US cut its cash after it failed to sign. She got pregnant and died.
"She had no money to go to hospital, so became too weak to move, then she died," her friend told me.
On the other side of Addis Ababa is Molu, living with nine children in one room. She has been told one more baby will kill her.
But the clinic that gives her the pill for free is shutting. There is no other clinic.
Molu says if she gets pregnant again, she will carry out her own abortion with wire. "Either way I will die," she says with chilling fatality.
'Hypocritical'
In the region of Nazareth in Ethiopia's highland plains, I met Amare Badada of the Ethiopian Family Guidance Association.
Mr Badada lists rape, forced marriage and genital mutilation as part of daily life for women.
"These women will always find a way to abort somehow," he said. "If they are forced to give birth they throw the children into latrines or abandon them for the hyenas to eat them."
Mr Badada refused to sign the gag rule, and has since watched his organisation's family planning clinics close down one after the other. In the region of Nazareth, there were 54 clinics last year. Next year there will be just 10.
Each clinic serves approximately 500 women who walk an average of 10
kilometres (six miles) to get there. The impact of the closures is immense.
"Under the gag rule, I can treat a woman who comes bleeding after an illegal abortion but I am not allowed to warn her of the dangers before she goes," Mr Badada said. "We should not be told what to think and say.
"It is hypocritical to allow US taxpayers' money to be used to fund abortion in the States but not here.
"The US is driving women into the hands of back-street abortionists."
Getachew Bekele, Ethiopian director of Marie Stopes International, who also refused, says: "It hasn't worked to cut abortion. All it has done is deprive women of condoms."
Abstinence
A key aim of the American anti-abortion lobby is to silence Marie Stopes, which is
lobbying to overturn the abortion laws in Ethiopia and other places where it is illegal.
Under President Bush, the anti-abortion movement is stronger than ever.
Supporters believe every woman has the right to have as many babies as God plans. They also believe the high death-rate of mothers in labour, and the numbers of unwanted babies can be tackled with an alternative solution - abstinence.
Mr Bush has won plaudits for his promise to spend $15bn to fight Aids, but few people know that one-third of the money set aside for prevention is to go to faith-based, abstinence-only programmes.
But not all Americans agree. Wendy Turnbull works for Population Action International - a pro-choice lobby group.
"How can we look Africa in the eye and say here you go - here's the money, but we tell you how to spend it. How arrogant is that?"
But Wendy Wright remains convinced America knows best.
"It's not that I know what is right for other women," she says. "It's that I know what is right."
You can hear Nadene Ghouri's report Bush's Other War on Radio 5 Live at 1030 on Sunday 29 June.
Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr//2/hi/americas/3028820.stm
Published: 2003/06/28 17:01:13 GMT© BBC MMV
Yesterday there was some equally horrific article about our present administration's policy in regards to the UN declaration on women's rights. Has our President ever studied history, or even attempted to follow his own party's chronology? In 1960, even the Republican Presidential hopeful, Senator Barry Goldwater of Alabama, said, "You can't legislate morality."
That thought still holds true today. When we have tried to "legislate morality" in the past, perhaps most notably with Prohibition in the 1920's and even in the past few decades with our "War on Drugs," it has been an abject failure. In a free and democratic society, you cannot tell anyone how they are to think on any particular issue. Even the party lines of Democrat and Republican blur when it comes to the so-called "moral" issues.
I came across this argument, from a 20th century sociologist while I was whiling away my time on the web that illustrates a beautiful point:
What then is the relation of law to morality? Law cannot prescribe morality, it can prescribe only external actions and therefore it should prescribe only those actions whose mere fulfillment, from whatever motive, the state adjudges to be conducive to welfare. What actions are these? Obviously such actions as promote the physical and social conditions requisite for the expression and development of free—or moral—personality.... Law does not and cannot cover all the ground of morality. To turn all moral obligations into legal obligations would be to destroy morality. Happily it is impossible. No code of law can envisage the myriad changing situations that determine moral obligations. Moreover, there must be one legal code for all, but moral codes vary as much as the individual characters of which they are the expression. To legislate against the moral
codes of one’s fellows is a very grave act, requiring for its justification the most indubitable and universally admitted of social gains, for it is to steal their moral codes, to suppress their characters.
by: R.M. MacIver (1882–1970), Scottish sociologist, educator. The Modern State, ch. 5, Oxford University Press (1926).
Chillingly, a large number of Americans decided to vote in the November elections based on "moral issues." While the 527's administering these broad-based exit polls never clearly defined the meaning of such a broad category as "moral issues," it seems to me that morality was fairly well defined during the debates and in my own contact with the general public through my job with a political watchdog in Philadelphia as dealing with abortion, gay rights, religion and the War on Iraq issues.
Today, however, I am dealing with the abortion issue. While I personally have never had to make such a difficult decision, nor can I completely understand all the emotions and consequences due to such an action, I don't understand why people can't agree to disagree. Why can't abortion be a legal procedure without the church and other such advocates deciding that for their devotees it is not an option? In other words, why are so many people hell-bent on making decisions for other people?
I do not feel the need to consult the President of the United States when faced with the choice of boyfriends, cars, careers, and other external forces, so why should I be shackled by laws that aim to regulate religious thought and what I do with my own body? As a woman faced with so many other degradations on a daily basis because of the simple fact that I was born without a penis, why would I want to give up what little control I have in my own life?
While many Bush supporters claim that the current administration does NOT violate our historical separation of church and state ideal, it is clear to me that he is pushing his Christianity onto all of us, even with something so simple as cutting back all foreign aid to country programs that support abortion measures (i.e. cutting off your nose despite your face) and putting 1/3 of U.S. funding for international AIDS programmes into faith-based initiatives that preach abstinence only. Does he not realize that in certain countries this is not a choice for women? Incidence of rape, molestation, and genital mutilation are common practices in other parts of the world.
In fact, there are many instances of rape and molestation in the United States which need to be addressed as well. Science has thus far determined that human life does not exist until at least the third trimester of pregnancy. Prior to that, I see no real problem for women to make an educated choice on what is best for them (morally, financially and spiritually). If that woman is a devoted Catholic, then maybe she will side with the Pope. If that woman was raped, or is in physical danger due to the pregnancy, then maybe she will decide to go through with the procedure.
What it seems to really come down to is one's choice of faith, and that, my friends, is EXACTLY why we cannot legislate against performing or receiving abortions. With the separation of church and state that we hold so dear in this country, it is not only illegal but it is downright silly to start creating laws based on a religious faith, whether it's a commonly held religion or not.
As Americans, we cherish the idea of living our lives in "pursuit of happiness," free from the religious and social persecution of others. I don't make any bones about greatly disliking the Bush administration, and abortion is only one more issue that makes me feel like a persecuted minority in this country. I can't wait until 2008, when we can get this religious and thought-challenged zealot out of office for good.
