www.DemocraticFundamentalism.org - VOTU - Election 2002 - 7/30/2002 Implacable Force for Family Planning

	Globalization - Countries - United States Daily News in Review - Election 2002 Implacable Force for Family Planning By BARBARA CROSSETTE - New York TImes 7/30/2002



	What a moment for an American to take over the world's largest family planning organization. "We're completely at odds with Bush policy," said Dr. Steven W. Sinding, who becomes director general of the International Planned Parenthood Federation in London this month. Because the federation's agenda includes access to abortion, it receives no American money for any of its programs in more than 180 countries. Yet this is a time when millions of people in the third world are clamoring for more contraceptives and health workers are short of condoms to fight the spread of AIDS. On July 22, the administration also ended American support for the United Nations Populations Fund, citing its activities in China, where birth control has been coercive. On that issue, the White House overrode the State Department, which had sent experts to China to look at the fund's programs and found no evidence that American money had been funneled to such programs. "At a moment when in some ways the priority is shifting from birth control to disease control," Dr. Sinding said, "it's devastating that the resources are not available to these organizations that are the primary channels of service to women in the developing world." In Africa, and possibly Asia, more women than men are being infected with the virus that causes AIDS. Dr. Sinding, 58, has many credentials, including posts as former head of the population office of the United States Agency for International Development, senior population adviser to the World Bank, director of population sciences at the Rockefeller Fund and, most recently, professor at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. He learned the basics at the grass roots in Pakistan, the Philippines and Kenya. He is ready for a fight, after seeing population programs under renewed assault from Washington. He sees a chance to make noise at the international federation, which works in concert with voluntary national organizations like the Planned Parenthood Association of the United States. Dr. Sinding wants to rekindle the fire of the federation's founders in 1952, among them family-planning pioneers like Margaret Sanger. "I'm determined to move I.P.P.F. back to that brave and angry posture on issues that are today's most difficult and controversial, because I think that to some extent it's lost its pioneering spirit," Dr. Sinding said in an interview in his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as his wife, Monica Knorr, a geriatric-care expert, packed to move. "Since I.P.P.F. doesn't receive any money from the United States, there's no penalty associated with speaking out on those issues that the United States is being so recalcitrant on." In the United States, Dr. Sinding said, reproductive health and choice have become entangled in a culture war irrelevant to global realities. The Reagan-era ban on money to any organization that even counsels abortion was continued through the first Bush administration, then lifted by President Bill Clinton, only to be reinstated as the second Bush administration took office. The issue has become a partisan battleground. "The saddest thing is that this domestic political debate has such a profound impact around the world," Dr. Sinding said. "Women suffer deeply." Pregnancy is the leading cause of death among girls ages 15 to 19 in poor countries, many of them child brides forced into arranged marriages or children trafficked in the sex trade. "There will always be unwanted pregnancies, especially among women in poverty, and women so young that their pelvises are not yet formed to the point where they can safely deliver a child," he said. About girls 14, 15 or 16 forced into sex, he said, "to condemn them to bear a child that may very well cause them to die is just morally indefensible." Administration officials say the $34 million that Congress allocated for the United Nations will not be wasted but will be put to good use through A.I.D. "We program more than $400 million in family-planning right now in more than 64 countries," Dr. Anne Peterson, assistant administrator of the Bureau of Global Health, said. "The $34 million is a significant amount of money, and it could go in a number of different countries and be programmed fairly easily." Dr. Peterson said it would not be hard to find nongovernmental organizations willing to accept American restrictions on any involvement with abortion or abortion rights. "In many of these countries," she said, "that's where their own country and culture is on the abortion issue. And so they're very comfortable that we also have our funding that has that restriction on it." Before heading to London, Dr. Sinding had collected a few wounds from service on the front line of the culture war. In 1984, when the Reagan administration suddenly announced at a United Nations conference in Mexico City that it was ending family-planning aid to countries and organizations that were involved in abortions, Dr. Sinding was running population policy for A.I.D. "The Mexico City policy came out of the blue," he said. "It caught the State Department totally unawares. The senior population person at State resigned over this issue. The White House basically took control, which was most unusual." State Department and aid officials were stunned by the severity of the policy. "It basically said two things," Dr. Sinding said. "We categorically oppose abortion and we're going to defund any foreign nongovernmental organization that does it, even with its own money. And we don't think as a government that population is all that big a problem. "Until Reagan, there was a bipartisan consensus. If anything, there was more Republican support than Democratic support for population funds. It was based on a belief that there was both a national security and an international development rationale for dealing with population. That consensus was broken in the 1980's. Population became a highly partisan issue — and has remained so ever since."