Abortion Groups Seek to Hijack Bush's AIDS Budget
Austin Ruse, C-FAM
Friday, Feb. 14, 2003
Hoping to exploit a legislative weakness, abortion providers and
population control organizations have seized upon the Bush
administration's new $15 billion AIDS program for Africa, seeking to
regain some of the federal funding that President Bush has blocked from
them since the beginning of his administration.
On his first day in office, President Bush reinstated the Mexico
City Policy, which requires that foreign nongovernmental organizations
receiving federal funds neither perform abortions nor actively promote
abortion. Because of the restoration of the Mexico City Policy,
organizations that refuse to abandon abortion, such as International
Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), have been largely ineligible for U.S.
funding.
However, the Mexico City Policy applies only to funding contracts
for population programs, not for AIDS programs, and herein lies the
opportunity for groups such as IPPF, which have already exploited this
limitation. For instance, a New York-based NGO, Population Council,
has recently received $65 million from the U.S. Agency for International
Development (USAID) for an AIDS program, even though this group advocates
for abortion, and even though it actually holds the patent for the
abortion drug RU-486.
In 2002, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) gave a $3.2
million grant to a South African abortion researcher for an AIDS project.
The researcher, Dr. James McIntyre, is the national vice chairman of
Planned Parenthood Association of South Africa (PPASA), and has been
active in promoting the spread of menstrual regulation, an early-abortion
procedure carried out with a manual vacuum aspirator.
Now that President Bush has committed the administration to about
$10 billion dollars in new funding for this AIDS initiative, there is even
more incentive for such groups to promote themselves as AIDS-prevention
experts. In a recent advertisement, Population Council claimed that it
"develops and evaluates innovative strategies to support children affected
by AIDS. The Population Council conducts biomedical, public health, and
social science research on global issues, including HIV/AIDS."
In a January press release, IPPF acknowledged the possibility for
additional funding, noting that "details on how the money would be used
are sketchy."
The Bush administration knows of concerns that AIDS money may fund
abortions, and seems willing to close all of the loopholes of the Mexico
City Policy. When the issue was raised with Secretary of State Colin
Powell, he said: "In the very near future, we'll be meeting within
the administration to examine the various new programs, but especially the
new global [AIDS] initiative, and bouncing it against other policies such
as the Mexico City Policy to make sure that we have a consistent approach
across the whole administration. We are aware of your concern and we'll be
meeting on that within the next few days."
So far, social conservatives, an important constituency for
President Bush, have voiced qualified support for the AIDS program. But
this support will likely fade if the program is destined to become a
funding engine for the international pro-abortion movement.
Copyright - C-FAM (Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute). Permission
granted for unlimited use. Credit required.
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