With The Stroke of a Pen

In 1973 the United States Supreme Court legalized abortion, permitting that country the status of the least restrictive abortion laws in the world. A majority of Americans, some 54%, support a woman's right to control the issue of her body, under certain circumstances. A minor position, backing a total ban on abortion, is strenuously upheld by 17% of the population. And a committed 28% of Americans believe abortion should be available to women under any circumstances.

That's an overwhelming vote of confidence in women's need and ability to distinguish for themselves the manner in which they wish to conduct their lives. To have control over their destiny to a certain extent; certainly when it comes to motherhood. When all else fails, and the best laid plans go awry, with the occurrence of an unwanted pregnancy, most women, wherever they live in the world, prefer to order their lives as they wish to, not how some within society wish them to.

Under a series of Republican administrations, most notably beginning with the presidency of Ronald Reagan, women's choices were decisively narrowed by an edict of state, extending to other countries of the world whose women are far less able to take alternative routes to achieve their goals. The United States funds family planning assistance programs overseas to the extent of roughly $400-million annually.

However, President Reagan's administration in 1984 instituted a ban on funding for groups that also provided abortion services or counselling abroad. No U.S. government funding would be extended for family planing services to clinics or groups offering counselling or services that would abort a pregnancy, and that policy extended to funding from non-U.S. government sources.

The result was a shameful reduction in health care for women living in some of the poorest countries of the world. This policy was remediated by the Democratic administration of President Bill Clinton, allowing the free flow of funding for family planning, inclusive of counselling for abortion, reclaiming for women the right to make those choices for themselves, within the international community.

And it was a policy that George W. Bush swept into the dustbin, reinstating the earlier Republican ban on family planning funding that was linked to pregnancy-cessation services. The pendulum has once again swung back to the Democratic position of supporting women's right to choose. "With a stroke of a pen, President Obama has lifted the stranglehold on women's health across the globe", enthused the U.S. president of Planned Parenthood.

Women who were deprived of contraception and allied health services in undeveloped countries who were forced to resort to the painful and fearsome exigencies of back-alley abortions all too often resulting in the agony of botched operations and death, have once again been rescued. Countries like Ethiopia and Lesotho are once again free to offer comprehensive and integrated health-care services to women suffering from AIDS/HIV.

It is tellingly significant that the one issue for which the late unlamented presidency of George W. Bush has received plaudits, the massive funding of AIDS/HIV remediation throughout Africa, had its own very conservative hiccough to unalloyed success. In that a qualifier existed for access to funding; that along with the work associated with AIDS/HIV assistance, those receiving aid be counselled toward sex abstinence.

Predictably, the anti-abortion agitators like the American Life League are furious. "We've got a president who is rabidly in favour of abortion even though he says he's not. I think it's a horrible tactic to take toward Third World countries if the best we can do for them is provide organizations with the money needed to perform abortions on their children. It's an outrage", fumed the American Life League's president. So who is rabid?

Republican lawmakers mourn the reassertion of a woman's right to choose by characterizing the decision as "a divisive action". They are not acting divisively, however. Another claims to be "saddened by this decision and the lives that will be lost because of it". Mourning the loss of children born to mothers unable to adequately care for another child, yet not the loss of life occasioned by women desperately undergoing unsterile, underground operations that will end their lives.

Perception is the eye of perspective, truth and reality mangled by politics and passion.