Mexico City policy reversed

Reuters reports that President Barack Obama will reverse reversed the Mexico City Policy today.

Called the Mexico City Policy because it was unveiled at a United Nations conference there in 1984 by former President Ronald Reagan, it forbidsforbade U.S. funding abroad to organizations which offer abortion services or counseling to provide legal abortion, counsel or refer for abortion, or lobby for the legalization of abortion in their country.

Catholic Culture protests:

Cardinal Francis George noted in a recent letter to the president, “The Mexico City Policy, first established in 1984, has wrongly been attacked as a restriction on foreign aid for family planning. In fact, it has not reduced such aid at all, but has ensured that family planning funds are not diverted to organizations dedicated to performing and promoting abortions instead of reducing them. Once the clear line between family planning and abortion is erased, the idea of using family planning to reduce abortions becomes meaningless, and abortion tends to replace contraception as the means for reducing family size. A shift toward promoting abortion in developing nations would also increase distrust of the United States in these nations, whose values and culture often reject abortion, at a time when we need their trust and respect.”

Whereas Marty Meehan and Gloria Feldt explained in the Boston Globe:

The “Mexico City” policy prohibits US dollars and contraceptive supplies from going to any international family planning program that provides abortions or counsels women about their reproductive health options. The policy isn’t about money going to pay for abortions. Even those groups that use only private funds for abortion services — where abortion is legal — are barred from assistance. This is money going to family planning programs.

…

[N]ot only are organizations that provide or counsel about abortion services affected; those that dare to take part in a public discussion about legalizing abortion are also affected (hence the name “global gag rule”). … This policy has nothing to do with government-sponsored abortions overseas. Ten years before the gag rule was in place the law strictly prohibited that. This policy is about disqualifying prochoice organizations from receiving US international family planning funding.

Under Bush’s policy, organizations that play a vital role in women’s health are forced to make an impossible choice. If they refuse to be “gagged,” they lose the funding that enables them to help women and families who are cut off from basic health care and family planning. But if they accept funding, they must accept restrictions that jeopardize the health of the women they serve.

The most tragic ramifications have been felt in the developing world. In Kenya, for example, two of the leading family planning organizations have been forced to shut down five clinics dispensing aid from prenatal care and vaccinations to malaria screening and AIDS prevention. Kenya’s experience is common, according to “Access Denied,” a report on the impact of the global gag rule on developing nations. Researchers found that programs for rural communities and urban slums have been scaled back by as much as 50 percent. As a result more women are turning to unsafe abortion — a leading cause of death for young women in much of Africa — because they lack access to family planning information and essential contraceptive supplies.

Legally, the eliminated order would be unconstitutional in the United States and restricts foreign organizations from engaging activities that are legal in their own countries and here.

Whether you agree with its goals or not, the rule was and always has been a use of presidential fiat to legislate action which the actual legislative process would not support. It is well discarded.

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