Edition: U.S. / Global

Birth Control 'for All People'

Published: April 2, 1993

It was a Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower, who made an especially cogent case for the importance of international family planning. "Governments must act and private citizens cooperate urgently through voluntary means to secure this right for all people," he said. "Failure would limit the expectation of future generations to abject poverty and suffering and bring down upon us history's condemnation."

A subsequent Republican President, Ronald Reagan, didn't share Eisenhower's concern and denied funding for International Planned Parenthood and the United Nations Population Fund. The result was to inhibit certain invaluable population control programs for nearly a decade. Now President Clinton's Democratic Administration proposes to restore Eisenhower's compassionate approach to an issue that ought to be above partisan politics.

The Reagan Administration, responding to its more extreme right-wing supporters, promulgated the so-called Mexico City policy in 1984, which banned Federal aid to any family planning agencies that so much as mentioned abortion.

When population experts protested that such a ban held poor countries' efforts hostage to America's abortion controversy, Mr. Reagan's advisers had a blithe answer. Population growth, they said, was a "natural phenomenon" that could stimulate economic growth. More people, they argued, meant more ideas, more productivity and more consumers. If the abortion rule constricted population programs, it would do the world a favor.

Try telling that to a woman in, say, Bangladesh, for whom childbearing often begins with puberty and ends with menopause -- assuming that she lives till menopause. At least 500,000 pregnant women, most of them in poor countries, die every year. A quarter of the deaths that occur before term are the results of illegal abortions.

Try telling it to the African women living in those 18 countries in which, because of the Mexico City policy, International Planned Parenthood had to cancel programs.

And try telling it to the Chinese, who are desperately in need of population planning. Yes, there have been reports of coerced abortions, especially in rural areas; and some Americans don't believe China's denials. Still, what better way to discourage abortion than to encourage and facilitate humane family planning? That's what the U.N. Population Fund has been doing in China for a long time, but without American aid since Mexico City.

In the time since Eisenhower spoke of "this right for all people," an extraordinary number of the world's citizens have won that right. Thirty years ago, for instance, fewer than 10 percent of couples in developing countries used some kind of birth control. Now more than half do. And in Africa, where the fertility rate is highest and contraceptive use lowest, births are starting to decline.

Even so, the rate of population expansion remains awesome, threatening to impoverish the planet. We have already seen what drought, poor land use and overpopulation did to Ethiopia. Runaway pregnancy rates are no route to progress.

In asking Congress to renew financing for International Planned Parenthood and the U.N. Population Fund, Mr. Clinton is calling on the United States to pick up the standard it dropped in Mexico City. Once more, America has a chance to make a profound impact on the future of international family planning -- and on history's judgment.