The British government last week publicly defied the United States by giving money for safe abortion services in developing countries to organisations that have been cut off from American funding.
Nearly 70 000 women and girls died last year because they went to backstreet abortionists. Thousands of others suffered serious injuries.
Critics of the US’s aid policy say some might have lived if the US had not withdrawn funding from clinics that provide safe services, or tell women where to find them.
The ”global gag” rule, as it has become known, was imposed by US President George W Bush in 2001. It requires any organisation applying for US funds to sign an undertaking not to counsel women on abortion — other than advising against it — or provide abortion services.
The United Kingdom will become the founder donor of a fund set up specifically to replace the lost dollars and increase safe abortion services.
The UK Department for International Development will contribute £3-million over two years. The department and the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) — whose clinics have suffered badly — hope that others, particularly the Scandinavians, Dutch and Canadians, will be emboldened to add money.
”I think the UK is being very brave and very progressive in making this commitment,” said Steven Sinding, director general of the IPPF. ”Tens of thousands of women who depend on our services are not able to get them. We are committed to the expansion of safe abortion because in any society there will be unplanned and unwanted pregnancies.”
The ”global gag”, he said, had increased the number of unsafe abortions by stopping funding to clinics that primarily provide contraception.
The British International Development Minister, Gareth Thomas, said the government hoped the US position would change: ”We work very closely with the Americans but we have a very different view from them on abortion. Friends can disagree. I recognise that the Americans are not going to contribute at the moment. We hope that the position will change.”
The IPPF produced a report on the scale of the damage caused by unsafe abortion. Death and Denial: Unsafe Abortion and Poverty reveals that an estimated 19-million women will risk the consequences of an unsafe abortion this year.
Reducing unsafe abortions is critical to reaching the United Nations’s millennium development goal on cutting maternal mortality, said Thomas.
Women’s low status in many countries makes them vulnerable to sexual abuse, says the report. Almost 50% of sexual assaults worldwide are against girls aged 15 or younger.
The death and injury toll is highest in countries where abortion is illegal or severely restricted, as in Kenya, where about 30% to 50% of maternal deaths are a result of unsafe abortion.
The Family Planning Association of Kenya, an IPPF member, chose to forfeit US funds rather than sign the ”global gag” clause. It was forced to close three reproductive health clinics and slash outreach programmes.
Many other organisations are affected by the ”global gag”, including Marie Stopes. The money from the new fund will be equitably shared among all those who have lost US funds. The IPPF, which has itself lost $15-million a year for the past five years, hopes the fund may eventually raise up to $35-million. — Â