Can This be Pro-Life?

[The Blue Flower]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/opinion/09kristof.html?ei=5070

The Bush administration this month is quietly cutting off birth control supplies to some of the world’s poorest women in Africa. Thus the paradox of a “pro-life” administration adopting a policy whose result will be tens of thousands of additional abortions each year — along with more women dying in childbirth.


The latest bout of reproductive-health madness came in the last couple of weeks when the U.S. Agency for International Development ordered six African countries to ensure that no U.S.-financed condoms, birth control pills, I.U.D.’s or other contraceptives are furnished to Marie Stopes International, a British-based aid group that operates clinics in poor countries.

The Bush administration says it took this action because Marie Stopes International works with the U.N. Population Fund in China. President Bush has cut all financing for the population fund on the — false — basis that it supports China’s family-planning program.

It’s true that China’s one-child policy sometimes includes forced abortion, and when traveling in rural China, I still come across peasants whose homes have been knocked down as punishment for an unauthorized child. But the U.N. fund has been the most powerful force in moderating China’s policy, and a State Department team itself found no evidence of any U.N. involvement in the coercion.

Mr. Bush’s defunding of the U.N. Population Fund — backed by Senator McCain — has persisted since 2002. What is new is the extension of that policy to a leading private family-planning organization like Marie Stopes International.

“The irony and hypocrisy of it is that this is a bone to the self-described ‘pro-life’ movement, but it will result in deaths to women who just want to space their births,” said Dana Hovig, the chief executive of Marie Stopes International. The organization estimates that the result will be at least 157,000 additional unwanted pregnancies per year, leading to 62,000 additional abortions and 660 women dying in childbirth.

(snip)

Thus the paradox of a “pro-life” administration adopting a policy whose result will be tens of thousands of additional abortions each year — along with more women dying in childbirth.

more at link...

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

1. How often do I have to say. Love the fetus, hate the child.

[gollygee]

2. The anti-choice movement isn't really about life at all

It's generally about controlling women, though in this instance I think it's just a case of not wanting to spend money on poor people. We're too busy giving money to the super-rich right now.

[CrispyQ]

4. I agree that in this case it's about not wanting to give money to poor people.

:grr:

[leftchick]

3. and the babies who make it to term

have a very low survival rate. I think the 'pro-lifers' really like to witness human suffering over a fetus.

[amdezurik]

5. it is a common pathology of the paranoid

they will often try to set-up conditions they can later decry and blame on the "other side"

[sinkingfeeling]

6. Hey, letting African children die from preventable diseases and malnutrition is what the

'pro-life' movement's way. They've ignored the deaths of post-birth children for decades.

[spanone]

7. bu$h* is pro-votes and nothing else

[LeftishBrit]

8. This is just so sickening and disgusting

And it will also result in more babies dying while being born - how is that not a form of late abortion, when it could have been prevented?