Those Clintons certainly have a way with words. Which is another way of saying that you can never take what they say at face value. Consider Hillary Clinton’s speech at the recent Hague Forum, in which she vigorously attacked, to reportedly thunderous applause, “forced family planning.”
Now most of us would understand this as a criticism of countries like China, which engages in forced abortions and sterilizations, or which, like Peru, have national quotas for sterilizations or targets for contraceptive use. But Hillary, like her husband, defines her terms somewhat differently than the rest of us. In the end, it all depends on what the meaning of the word “forced” is.
For Hillary Clinton, “forced family planning” occurs when governments outlaw some or all abortions, limit some or all family planning services, or fail to pay for these procedures with tax dollars. Hillary also opposes, as she delicately put it, government-imposed “limits on family size.”
Now Population Research Institute believes that governments, which by definition have a monopoly on the use of force in the territory they control, should not coerce men or women into limiting their family size. We suppose that Mrs. Clinton would agree with us that China’s one-child policy is wrong, although she has never explicitly said so, not even when she spoke at the 1995 Women’s Conference in Beijing.
But it stretches the meaning of the word “forced” beyond recognition to suggest that governments which afford legal protection to the unborn are, in any sense, “forcing” women into having children. Or that governments, including many popularly elected ones, which choose to limit sterilizations or other procedures which their people find immoral are engaging in “forced family planning.” After all, there are other ways to plan one’s family than through abortion or sterilization, among them abstinence and Natural Family Planning.
The entire episode reminds me of a comment made by a colleague of mine at Stanford University. I had just told him about the forced abortions, some in the third trimester, I had witnessed in China. He allowed that forced abortion was a violation of human rights, “but no more so than the Reagan administration’s refusal to pay for abortions for poor women.”
Feminist “rhetoric”
His statement struck me as nonsense, and I told him so. “How can the taking of a human life be equated with the principled refusal to subsidize such an act,” I retorted. “How can forcing a women to undergo a potentially dangerous medical procedure be equated with refusing to pay for it.” Hillary’s radical feminist rhetoric is equally illogical.
We understand that the delegates at The Hague conference also applauded Mrs. Clinton’s statement that “women should have access to family planning programs including safe abortion.”
We don’t applaud. Family planning, as practiced in U.S.-funded population control programs, is coercion, by its very nature. When you enlist the power of the state to “control” the fertility of its population, you have embarked on a course which can only result in coercion, sometimes blatant, sometimes subtle.
And just what is a “safe abortion,” anyway? Safe for a young woman in China who is pregnant with her second child?
It all depends on what the meaning of the word “safe” is, Mrs. Clinton.
