The Religious Consultation
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REUTERS, April 5, 2005 Senate Defies
Bush on Foreign Family Planning Aid WASHINGTON (Reuters) - On a collision course with President Bush, the Senate voted on Tuesday to repeal the ban he imposed to prevent international family planning organizations that engage in abortion-related activities from receiving U.S. foreign aid funds. Bush threatened to veto a two-year $34 billion bill authorizing State Department and foreign aid programs if it tried to override the policy that bars U.S. funds going to nongovernmental organizations that give counseling or referrals on abortions, or lobby against other governments' restrictive abortion laws. The Republican-led Senate passed the amendment 52-46, with eight Republicans joining all the Democrats and one independent voting for it. The Senate repeatedly has rejected the policy first imposed in 1984 by then-President Ronald Reagan. It was eased by former President Bill Clinton, and reinstated by Bush when he came to office in 2001. With the House of Representatives' backing, Bush has fended off the Senate and kept the law. Disputes over the measure frequently have derailed the foreign affairs authorization bill, which has not been signed into law since the mid-1980s. Instead foreign aid policies have been set largely in appropriations bills that fund government programs. The House has not yet taken up its version of the bill. Backers of Bush's policy said taxpayers do not want their funds used to fund abortions overseas. But critics dubbed it the ``global gag rule,'' saying it kept the world's poorest women from getting all of the family planning information they needed and forced more women and girls, including victims of rape and incest, into dangerous illegal abortions. Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, said the law ``put a tape over the mouths of organizations which are trying to help women ... if they use their own funds, not U.S. funds but their own funds, for those purposes.'' A clinic in Nepal chose to forego U.S. funds, forcing it to cut staff and services, in order to lobby the Nepalese government to change its laws that imprisoned a 13-year-old for getting an abortion after being raped by her uncle, Boxer said. But supporters of the law said money is fungible, and U.S. taxpayers would be funding abortions indirectly without the restriction. ``This is taxpayers' dollars used to support organizations supporting abortion overseas. Clearly 70 plus percent of the American public would be against that,'' said Kansas Republican Sen. Sam Brownback. He said that repealing the rule would undermine public support for all U.S. foreign aid programs. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, said the White House advised him Bush would ``veto any legislation that seeks to override'' the policy. The White House endorsed much of the foreign assistance bill, which authorizes the $3 billion Bush wanted for his Millennium Challenge foreign aid program to reward countries that make political and economic reforms. The bill also creates a special office for Stabilization and Reconstruction activities, building on lessons learned from Iraq and Afghanistan. |