On April 28, 1998, the U.S. Senate passed — with a narrow margin of 51–49 — one of the 105th Congress’ most hotly contested articles of legislation: the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act. The vote sent the President a bill authorizing the payment of close to l billion dollars to the UN, an itemized mandate for UN reform, the reorganization of several government departments, and foreign policy directives regarding Iraq and Israel.
The bill also included conditions for spending on foreign assistance for population programs and family planning. Under this bill, US dollars could not be given to organizations that perform abortions as a means of family planning, that implement coercive programs of family planning, or work actively to undermine existing laws on abortion. Known as the “Mexico City Policy,” these provisions echo the agreements of the UN Conferences on Population in Mexico City and Cairo, and reflect part of the social policy that directed Reagan-era foreign aid.
The bill also revives a ghost that the Clinton Administration had hoped to put to rest 5 years ago, when President Clinton rescinded this Reagan and Bush Administration policy in his first days of office. On January 22, 1993, the President instructed the US Agency for International Development (USAID) that they were no longer to implement the “unwarranted” and “excessively broad” conditions that restricted US-funding not only of abortion, but of “abortion-related activities.” The policy must be abandoned because it has an adverse effect on the provision of family planning services, and therefore on efforts to stabilize world population.
Development vs. population control
The Clinton Administrations characterization of the Mexico City Policy then, and all subsequent opposition to the policy since, labels it as an “anti-family planning” and “anti-abortion” document. Proponents of the Policy are accused of linking foreign aid to the abortion issue. This rhetoric has succeeded in obscuring a now largely unremembered fact. Mexico City Policy, as dratted and implemented in the Reagan era, was a sophisticated, many faceted approached to population policy. Family planning formed only one component of a larger program, which saw economic development and social and human progress as the best way to approach contemporary population dynamics.
According to the original Mexico City Policy, population growth becomes a crisis for two reasons: “counterproductive economic policies in poor and struggling nations, and a pessimism among the more advanced.” This pessimism does not only look at unstable economic conditions and refuses to believe they can be improved. It also refuses to look at what demographic science has confirmed time and again; that “sound economic policies … create the rise in living standards historically associated with decline in fertility rates.” Recognizing this, the Policy then concludes that “population control programs alone cannot substitute for the economic reforms that put a society on the road toward growth and, as an aftereffect, toward slower population increase as well.”
Building upon this principle, the Policy then declares that the “primary objective [of US foreign aid] will be to encourage developing countries to adopt sound economic policies and, where appropriate, population policies consistent with respect for human dignity and family values.” This is the context within which family planning programs find their place in the Mexico City approach to development, and the conditions for family planning support are set. The criteria for acceptable programs of population assistance are based on the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959), on universal human rights, and the obligation to respect religious and cultural beliefs of societies and individuals. At no point does the Policy reject the concept of “family planning.”
Foreign aid upside down
The Mexico City approach to foreign aid saw population policies as an “ingredient of a comprehensive program that focuses on the root causes of development failures.” To reflect its priorities, it stated that population assistance will amount to about ten percent of total development assistance. When President Clinton rejected this approach, he did it on the basis of one factor alone: family planning, and with it access to abortion. Nearly a decade after the Mexico City Policy, the Administration, and not the Policy, made family planning and abortion an issue. The Administration also stood the US foreign assistance program on its head.
Clinton’s decision of January 22, 1993, saw the initiation of a foreign aid philosophy that subordinates economic development to family planning, and sees people — not poverty or disease — as the primary target for elimination. USAID spending priorities over the last years clearly reflect this philosophy. Looking at the funding figures for 1997, we see a marked bias in favor of population control, with population spending percentages reaching for example 31% in Indonesia, 36% in the Philippines, 60% in Tanzania, and an incredible 73% in Mexico.
Many countries do not even receive money dedicated specifically to health activities. In their assistance profiles, health activities are subsumed as a category of population assistance. These countries include Cambodia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Morocco, Nepal, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe.
Present imbalances between population and economic development spending are not as striking as the imbalance between health and population, since economic development only occasionally receives zero spending. Still, the emphasis is clear: Clinton Administration development policy takes a short-cut to population reduction that by-passes economic recovery and welfare.
Promoting human rights violations?
The present approach to foreign aid, moreover, implicates the US government and people in precisely the kinds of family planning abuses that the Mexico City Policy was attempting to prevent. The same act which struck the Mexico City Policy, for example, also renewed US funding of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). Both of these organizations are and have long been directly involved in the Chinese National Family Planning Program, and its practices of coerced abortion, sterilization, and contraception. Even if US dollars given to either do not directly pay for these coercive practices, they free up other funds to be so used. US dollars given to either of these organizations promote the program that they support.
In Mexico, which in 1997 received 12.9 million dollars in population assistance from the United States government, women are routinely inserted with IUDs during delivery without their prior consent, and are refused assistance in removing these IUDs if they object afterwards. In Peru, thousands of women have been sterilized in the past two years in response to governmentally set sterilization quotas. It is only now becoming apparent how many of these women were sterilized against their will, or under economic or social pressure.
A USAID official recently testified in a Congressional hearing that no US funds were used to carry out these sterilizations. And yet, the USAID logo appears on a billboard advocating the family planning program only a few miles away from the place where one woman died of sterilization she was forced to undergo. USAID funds, moreover, do go to at least one organization that has trained Peruvian doctors in sterilization techniques, and there is suspicion that food donated by the US through the Title II food assistance program was used to pressure poor women to accept sterilization.
US prestige and moral support if not demonstrably its money, is being thrown behind programs that sadly violate the rights, freedoms, and physical integrity of those who most deserve our help. This foreign assistance approach moreover does not only fail to help those in need. It is as a delegate from Latin America testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — earning the United States the reputation of ‘“a ruthless population controller, unashamed of coercive measures and disrespectful” of the human rights of people, particularly women, in developing countries.
Mexico City: Recovering lost ground
This is the situation the “new” Mexico City Policy attempts to salvage. Much ado has been made about it as a “gag rule” or a “family planning” directive. On the contrary: H.R. 1757 and what is called its Mexico City component are primarily an attempt to regain ground not in the area of family planning, but in human rights and US image and integrity abroad.
The amendment for which the President is reportedly willing to give up payment of UN arrearages, reorganization of the State Department, and important foreign policy measures in the Near and Middle East has three, straightforward components. First, it forbids making US population assistance funds available to organizations that perform abortions as a means of family planning in any foreign country. Far from constituting a draconian restriction, this resolution has been reiterated time and again at UN Summits and accords. This paragraph simply reinforces commitment to policy the international community has repeatedly pledged to support.
Secondly, the bill facing the president for signature prohibits the use of US funds to organizations that “violate the laws of any foreign country concerning the circumstances under which abortion is permitted, regulated, or prohibited, or engage in any activity or effort to alter the laws or governmental polices of any foreign country concerning the circumstances under which abortion is permitted, regulated, or prohibited” (emphasis added). If as the Administration continues to insist, the bill is approached from an exclusively abortion-related perspective, this could appear as a ‘gag rule.’ Seen from an international relations perspective, it is no less a ‘gag’ than a prohibition on foreign government contributions to influence national political campaigns.
And thirdly, the bill calls for a halt on Funding the UNFPA if it continues its involvement in the Chinese Family Planning program. Opponents of this restriction argue that UNFPA involvement is directed towards ameliorating the harshness of the Chinese program, by working to implement more “democratic processes” in its implementation. UNFPA activity in China aims not at implementing its coercive measures, it is argued, but toward “promoting voluntarism,” and should therefore be supported.
What does this mean, to ‘“promote voluntarism” in the Chinese Family Planning program? Although they do not specify what they mean, proponents of US involvement most likely refer to what is being called the “Democratic Participation and Supervision” (DPS) program. A study commissioned by the British Overseas Development Agency of the Chinese family planning program characterizes the DPS method as the “use of a wide range of approaches to motivate couples to comply with the policy regulations and with the prescribed birth plans for the area.”1 The Report describes DPS advocacy as promoting the “legal rights and interests of the people” in matters of reproductive choice (emphasis added).2 Promoting voluntarism according to this model means promoting the willing acceptance of the governmentally mandated program, and nothing less. US support of such a program would mean not only involvement in human rights violations, but in their institutionalization through an ongoing program of social engineering.
Administration opposition to this bill is couched in the rhetoric of family planning and reproductive choice. The proposed Foreign Affairs and Restructuring Act, with its Mexico City component, is not formulated as a restriction on either. It is an attempt, rather, to ensure that the United States commitment to population assistance will not further human rights abuses that are continually documented as occurring within family planning and reproductive health programs abroad. It is also an attempt to ensure that US involvement in foreign countries cannot be construed as a violation of national sovereignty or cultural identity. Only after this lost ground has been recovered can we move on to bring our foreign assistance program back to its stated priorities: the provision of basic health services, of economic development and the promotion of goodwill between the United States and the international community.
