Remove the Family Planning Gag

A House committee this week took an important step toward rejecting the pernicious global gag rule President Bush imposed on international family planning groups. The odds are still long that the full House will follow suit as it should. Yet Wednesday’s vote is still a victory for decency and compassion over narrow dogma in a game where the pawns are poor, desperate women.

Last year, on a close vote, the House restricted funding for groups that use their own money for abortions or abortion counseling abroad. Direct federal aid for these activities has long been banned. President Clinton negotiated an agreement that would have lifted the ban in February. But Bush, on his first working day in office, issued an executive order reimposing the ban, a move hailed by antiabortion groups and jeered by abortion-rights supporters.

Wednesday’s bipartisan vote by the House International Relations Committee would lift that executive order and allow U.S. funding to health care groups that provide abortions, among other services. A Senate bill to repeal the gag rule has been introduced, also with bipartisan support.

Far away from Washington’s marbled corridors of power, in the muddy villages of Southeast Asia, in rural Ghana, Albania and the small towns near Lima, Peru, the gag rule makes a real difference. The loss of U.S. funding to the struggling health care groups operating in these communities can mean that local women will no longer have a trained midwife assisting them in childbirth or a nurse to check their baby. It can mean that contraceptives, already in short supply in some parts of the world, will be harder to get, meaning more unwanted pregnancies and, possibly, more illegal and dangerous abortions.

The impact of the gag rule extends well beyond family planning. Funding constraints have the effect of sharply limiting AIDS education and treatment at a time when the disease is causing an accelerating cycle of infection and death across Africa and elsewhere.

The gag rule’s supporters insist the policy is a narrow one, aimed only at discouraging abortions. But in practice, the policy cruelly penalizes poor women and families in order to score political points here at home.