"The President's Overseas Reproductive Health Policy: Think Locally, Act Globally"

Read Susan Cohen's essay in the August 2002 online issue of the Guttmacher Report on Public Policy.

"In first announcing and then defending his first-day-in-office decision to reimpose the "global gag rule" that had been instituted by President Reagan in 1984 and revoked by President Clinton in 1993, President Bush and members of his administration took pains to couple their antiabortion statements with protestations of support for international family planning. Eighteen months later, however, the administration's record has begun to speak for itself.

"Barely one year after he reinstated the gag rule, the president froze the funds Congress had just appropriated for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) for FY 2002. A few weeks later, in his FY 2003 budget proposal to Congress, he asked that funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development's family planning and reproductive health program be cut from the FY 2002 level and that no funds be allocated to UNFPA ("Congress and Reproductive Health: Major Actions in 2001 and a Look Ahead," TGR, February 2002). Shortly thereafter, the administration began using the opportunities presented by various United Nations (UN)-sponsored global meetings to aggressively export its domestic "abstinence-only" campaign as well as its antiabortion views. Further, the administration began using these meetings more generally to distance itself from the worldwide consensus on reproductive and sexual health issues that the United States itself was instrumental in forging at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo and the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing."