Bush gang is bad for women’s health

The Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) in a report filed with the UN Human Rights Committee in July blew the whistle on the Bush administration’s many attacks on women’s health and lives both in the U.S. and around the world.

In a comprehensive 44-page document, CRR catalogued the many ways over the past six years the Bush government has consistently restricted reproductive health care, including family planning and safe, legal, accessible abortion, promoted inaccurate sexual health education and increased inequality in reproductive health care for women of color. (The complete report can be downloaded from www.crlp.org.)

“African Americans, Latinas, Native Americans and other nonwhite ethnic groups in the United States feel the brunt of government-imposed reproductive health restrictions because they are much more likely than whites to be poor, to lack health insurance, or to be subject to government-imposed restrictions on reproductive health coverage,” stated the report.

“As a result, they fare worse than whites on every measure of reproductive health, including the following indicators: maternal and infant mortality, unintended pregnancy, abortion, sexually transmitted infections and contraception.”

Young women also face formidable barriers because of restrictive laws regarding abortion. “Mandatory parental notification or consent laws [in 26 states] expose many young women to violence, anger, coercion and expulsion from the home by disapproving parents,” said the report.

In testimony before the UNHRC on July 10, Kim S. Buchanan, CRR senior fellow, noted that the government has funded a multi-million-dollar campaign replacing comprehensive sex education with “abstinence-only-until-marriage” programs that distort and suppress information about contraception and condoms and promote harmful gender stereotypes.

Buchanan cited studies showing that not only do such programs fail to prevent premarital sex, but youth who only receive such misinformation are more likely to have unprotected sex, leading to higher risk of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) that go untreated and are transmitted to others.

While the Bush administration is guilty of crimes against women in this country, it’s also guilty of exporting its false and dangerous policies under the guise of providing aid. For instance, in developing countries with high rates of HIV infection, such as Uganda and Botswana, U.S. officials have forced AIDS-prevention services to adopt its ineffective abstinence-only program.

“Since late 2002, when Uganda’s prior, comprehensive HIV-prevention strategy was replaced by a U.S.-funded abstinence promotion strategy, the yearly incidence of new HIV infections has doubled,” testified Buchanan.

The Bush administration’s “Global Gag Rule,” which forbids any recipient of U.S. aid to provide information about or referrals for abortion, is another international attack on women’s rights. Studies link implementation of the gag rule in foreign countries with increased transmission of STIs, including HIV, and death of women who undergo illegal abortions. The estimated rate is 200,000 such deaths a year.

While Bush will surely dismiss this report like a slap on the hand, those in the movement for social and economic justice need to heed it. CRR’s report is really an indictment of Bush’s many crimes against women in the United States and around the globe. And that’s yet another reason to forge a united movement to fight to put an end to these crimes.