Obama's move to restore family planning aid lauded

Women rights advocates in the country hailed yesterday US President Barack Obama’s move to restore US funding for organizations that promote safe and legal abortion and provide life-saving abortion services.

Clara Rita Padilla, executive director of EnGendeRights, praised Obama for rescinding the Global Gag Rule on Abortion.

Under the policy, organizations that received funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) were prohibited from using their funds to support safe and legal abortion and services, Padilla said.

“The rescission works towards the advancement of free speech and puts a strong message forward that access to safe and legal abortion is a human right,” Padilla said in a statement.

“As Obama mentioned in his statement, this will also work to promote safe motherhood, reduce maternal and infant mortality rates and increase educational and economic opportunities for women and girls,” she said.

Padilla said Obama’s action “would spell the difference between life and death for almost half a million Filipino women who are driven to induce abortion every year with 79,000 admitted to hospitals for complications from unsafe abortion and 800 women who die.”

Earlier, the Vatican criticized Obama’s plan to restore funding for family planning clinics outside of the US that provide advice on or carry out abortions.

“The Vatican’s position on access to safe and legal abortion is contrary to international human rights law,” she said.

She said during the August 2006 review of the Philippines, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) urged the government to consider the problem of unsafe abortion as a matter of high priority and review the laws relating to abortion.

She said CEDAW has noted that the lack of access to contraceptive methods and family planning services, as well as restrictive abortion laws, tend to coincide with the prevalence of unsafe abortions that contributes to high rates of maternal mortality.

Padilla said that figures around the world reveal that criminalizing abortion does not eliminate the practice, but only makes it dangerous for women who undergo clandestine and unsafe abortion.

“The social justice implications of restrictive abortion laws have been recognized in many predominantly Catholic countries around the world, including Spain, Belgium, France, Italy, Poland and Hungary,” Padilla said.

Recent abortion liberalizations occurred in Colombia, Mexico City (legalized abortion in the first trimester without restriction in April 2007) and Portugal (allows abortion up to 10 weeks of pregnancy), she said.

“All the above-mentioned predominantly Catholic countries belie the claim that restricting access to contraception and even safe and legal abortion in the Philippines is a matter of practice of the Catholic religion. It is simply fundamentalism and non-adherence to standards of medicine, science and law and clinging to our colonial past that detrimentally impacts women’s health and lives,” Padilla stressed.

“Furthermore, in the Philippines the full range of contraceptive methods is unavailable, which directly contributed to the high rate of unwanted pregnancy and pushes women to resort to unsafe abortions that in many cases result in death.        –Helen Flores