Obama Day One

What most needs repairing

Before my innate cynicism kicks in (as I'm sure it will), still going to bask in the glow of the good things about having a Democrat--and most specifically this Democrat--in the White House. Today, the Washington Post pointed to a series of things that even the most jaded progressive has to admit are steps in the right direction:

Transition advisers to President-elect Barack Obama have compiled a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse White House policies on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues, according to congressional Democrats, campaign aides and experts working with the transition team.

Now that's some hope I can believe in.

The entire article here.

More snippets below the fold.



From the Nov. 9, 2008 edition of the Washington Post:

Obama himself has signaled, for example, that he intends to reverse Bush's controversial limit on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, a decision that scientists say has restrained research into some of the most promising avenues for defeating a wide array of diseases, such as Parkinson's.

The new president is also expected to lift a so-called global gag rule barring international family planning groups that receive U.S. aid from counseling women about the availability of abortion, even in countries where the procedure is legal, said Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he rescinded the Reagan-era regulation, known as the Mexico City policy, but Bush reimposed it.

The president-elect has said, for example, that he intends to quickly reverse the Bush administration's decision last December to deny California the authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles. "Effectively tackling global warming demands bold and innovative solutions, and given the failure of this administration to act, California should be allowed to pioneer," Obama said in January.

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Simple and Important Victories

In all the celebrating and the shock… I'd forgotten about the many simple but crucially important victories this election would mean. And then I went to The Nation, and read this peice by Barbara Crosette:

In the Senate, Obama and Joe Biden have been supportive of programs for women--Biden co-authored the Violence Against Women legislation--and the ban on UNFPA is expected to be lifted early, along with what is known as the "global gag rule" introduced at a population conference in Mexico City in the Reagan administration that prevents US aid to any organization worldwide that condones abortion.

Just this past April, I wrote a blog about the Global Gag Rule, how it is leading to maiming and death, and what a change away from right wing reactionary politics in the White House could mean to millions of poor women worldwide. Nope, Obama ain't perfect. And there'll be a lot of pushing to get him on the progressive track, but the repealing of the GGR is a definite victory.

And for that alone, we can be thankful.

Below the fold, Barabra Crossette takes a look at a few more.



UN: Hope that America Rejoins the World

The World Reacts

By Barbara Crossette
November 5, 2008

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081117/crossette3

Jubilation should be the order of the day at the United Nations when an American who is also a son of Kenya and a child of Indonesia is elected president of the most powerful country in a world in need of healing. But while there is quiet joy and relief at the victory of Barack Obama, there is also a strong undercurrent of caution. Is the end of an unfriendly Republican era enough in itself to bring the United States back? Or have the Democrats, the heirs of the UN's founders, drifted too far from internationalism?

Much has been written in recent years about America "rejoining the world." Nowhere more than at the UN have Washington's bullying tactics and stunted, provincial vision of global challenges cast such a pall over international cooperation. Here, the United States is close-up and personal. After the naming in Washington of a new secretary of state, the appointment most eagerly awaited at the UN is that of the next American ambassador.

Peter Maurer, Switzerland's ambassador to the UN, says that what he hears among his diplomatic colleagues is a plea for trust to be restored between the US and the UN. There are the wounds of the Iraq war, and there is skepticism about the motives of Washington when politicians talk about UN reform. "The new administration will find a kind of window of opportunity because there is enormous goodwill around the UN to see and to hear some new voices" Maurer said. But the UN as well as the US will have to work on closing the rift, he added.

The world of the United Nations is divided into two distinct camps. The people of the headquarters Secretariat and the various agencies are recruited or appointed international civil servants who are expected to leave their nationalities behind and work for a global constituency. Many of them fail to meet that test, but that's another story. Separate from them are the diplomats who represent the 192 member nations. Their missions are in essence embassies to the UN and their views, at least formally, would reflect those of their governments.

To the foreign diplomats based in New York, perhaps surprisingly, the ambassadors sent to the UN by the Bush administration have generally been respected and liked, from John Negroponte and John Danforth to Zalmay Khalilzad, the first Muslim to represent the US in New York. John Bolton was the exception, but his period as ambassador was relatively brief and he was regarded as competent even by some who found him undiplomatically abrasive and driven blindly by his distrust of internationalism and rigid defense of American sovereignty.

Samir Sanbar, a former UN under secretary general for communications who now publishes a gossipy newsletter, unforum.com, describes the mood in the Secretariat this week as "caught between hope and apprehension." He says that the organization remembers the Clinton years, when the White House backed away from some important international commitments and crudely dumped a secretary general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, out of what appeared to be domestic political skittishness.

Middle Easterners (Sanbar is from Lebanon) also see no real possibility of change in regional policy in the Mideast, he said. Not long ago, before the election, a Brazilian diplomat remarked that there is concern about the Democrats' aversion to free trade. A lot of Indians liked the Republicans because they gave New Delhi a nuclear supply deal that may have killed the nonproliferation treaty.

Maurer, an expert in international law, said that a hoped-for thaw in US-UN relations would need to translate into action. "We all know what some of the concrete issues are, where many delegations would hope that a new administration would eventually set some priorities," he said. "This goes from climate change to engagement on a balanced nuclear disarmament, nonproliferation, policy. It goes to a new engagement for multilateral human rights, approaches which we certainly missed. New ideas, new approaches might be extremely welcome."

A list of international agreements rebuffed by the US awaits the Obama-Biden administration, beginning with the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty against nuclear weapons development, which the Clinton Administration shrank from sending to a hostile Congress. Also under Clinton, the US signed but never ratified the 1998 treaty creating the International Criminal Court, the first permanent tribunal designed to deal with perpetrators of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. In 2001, the Bush administration rescinded even the US signature and set out to undermine the court. Now, without standing in the court, Washington is in the awkward position of wanting the president of Sudan to be tried there for the horrors of Darfur.

The United States also opted out of joining the Human Rights Council, created in 2006 to replace the discredited Human Rights Commission. An early decision will have to be made on whether to vie for a seat in the new year.

On climate change, the US has not joined the Kyoto Protocol, which sets binding targets for reducing greenhouse gases in industrialized countries. The agreement, due to expire in 2012, is scheduled to be renegotiated next year at a global conference in Copenhagen. Strong leadership and active American participation will be needed to draw in major developing nations that have so far refused to be bound by internationally agreed limits.

The UN seems to have been a bone thrown by Washington to the ideological right. After the Security Council refused to endorse the American invasion of Iraq, Republicans excoriated the UN and Secretary General Kofi Annan for his opposition to the war and on whom, with more than a hint of revenge, they tried to pin responsibility for corruption in the Iraqi "oil for food" program a few years later. That the secretary general had no authority over the Security Council and that almost all the corruption turned out to have been found in corporations operating outside the formal system, whose rules Council members failed to enforce, were conveniently overlooked.

Sanbar says that the current secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, whom the US (and particularly Bolton) propelled into office in 2007, may be wondering what will happen when and if he seeks a second five-year term. He will have to open channels to the Democrats.

The UN Population Fund may have the most to gain in the short term from the Democratic victory. Since 2002, the Bush administration has barred American contributions to the fund, known as UNFPA, on specious claims that it was involved in programs in China that included forced abortions--claims the State Department argued were not true. The cumulative loss to UNFPA neared $300 million this year, at a time when maternal mortality remains high and family planning programs, in great demand in poor nations, are falling well behind funding campaigns for fighting HIV-AIDS.
In the Senate, Obama and Joe Biden have been supportive of programs for women--Biden co-authored the Violence Against Women legislation--and the ban on UNFPA is expected to be lifted early, along with what is known as the "global gag rule" introduced at a population conference in Mexico City in the Reagan administration that prevents US aid to any organization worldwide that condones abortion.

With the new administration, the broader American opposition to social programs in the UN system may end or be greatly diminished. The US has been in league with the Vatican and conservative Islamic countries on women's reproductive rights. It has failed to ratify the 1979 Convention on All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (along with nations such as North Korea and Iran) and is only one of two countries (Somalia is the other) not to have ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Maurer said diplomats who watched the presidential debates this year with great interest noticed that the UN did not figure in the candidates' foreign policy messages. Ignoring the UN has become bipartisan. Reluctance to make commitments "went far beyond the President Bush administration," he said. "There has to be something in the American political fabric which produces these opinions."

Advances in universal human rights, international criminal law and accountability in the UN system all depend on American involvement, Maurer said. "There is no doubt that if you want to have functioning multilateralism you have to have the United States engaged and on board. If this is not happening, you are immediately in the vicious circle because then the results of negotiations will always be weaker if the US is not pushing within the institution, at the table."

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The Global Gag Rule- A Matter of Life and Death

The Global Gag Rule (or the Mexico City Policy as it is best known) which restricts the use of funds on abortion and other related aspects of reproductive medicine, is having a detrimental effect on the health of women--specifically poor women of color--around the world. Chances are high that ending the GGR will hinge on who is in the White House. And for many women in developing countries, that choice will be a matter of life and death.



The Global Gag Rule came about as a backlash to Roe v. Wade. First formulated by Sen. Jesse Helms, it restricted access to abortions to women in developing countries where America was providing aid. It's most extreme implementation came in 1984, under President Ronald Reagan, in the form of the so-called Mexico City Policy. As a USAID states on their site, "The Mexico City Policy requires foreign nongovernmental organizations to certify that they will not perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning as a condition for receiving USAID assistance for family planning." Thus not only was American health aid not allowed to go towards such endeavors, but poor countries were themselves restricted from using their own public funding for abortion and related aspects of women's health. The GGR remained in effect until 1993, when newly elected President Bill Clinton repealed the policy, citing it as "excessively broad" and stated that it "undermined efforts to promote safe and efficacious family planning programs in foreign nations."

Upon taking office in 2001 however, President George W. Bush immediately re-authorized the GGR as US foreign policy through executive order, stating, "It is my conviction that taxpayer funds should not be used to pay for abortions or advocate or actively promote abortion, either here or abroad."

Since then, numerous domestic and international groups have been tracking the consequences of the reimplementation of the Mexico City Policy. What they've found is that across the board it has been dire, contributing to a lack of access for women in poor countries to comprehensive health services. By denyingNGOs from "actively promoting abortion," the GGR also restricts any attempts to aid local grassroots women's movements in foreign countries fighting to legalize or make abortion available as a method of family planning.

Dr. Ejike Oji of Nigeria testifying before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs states:

"Women in Nigeria are dying and are maimed daily and needlessly from lack of access to reproductive health care and the all-too-often resulting unsafe abortions. U.S. policy – the Global Gag Rule – is directly at odds with efforts to address these threats to maternal health.

In Kenya, where abortion is illegal with the exception of rape and where the life of
the mother is at risk, unsafe abortion accounts for 30% of maternal deaths, and at least half of the hospitalizations in public gynecology wards. Because of this Kenyan doctors often take a very "liberal" approach to the interpretation of Kenya's restrictive abortion policy, with the knowledge that if they do not, women will be forced to conduct unsafe abortions that place their lives at higher risk. While local Kenyan women's groups have been pushing for greater reproductive rights, the GGR undermines their efforts at every turn. A January 2008 article in Ms. Magazine notes that this forces many such groups and physicians to make hard choices:

Women's-rights groups in Kenya have been pushing for a new national law on reproductive rights, as well as supporting a continental protocol on the rights of African women and a patients' bill of rights. But they're not helped in their efforts to improve reproductive health care by the global gag rule, which has forced a number of clinics to turn down U.S. funds rather than stop discussing abortion. Three clinics of the Family Planning Association of Kenya (an affiliate of the International Planned Parenthood Federation) and two clinics of Marie Stopes International (the U.K.-based reproductive-health NGO) have been closed for loss of funds, according to a 2004 report from the Center for Reproductive Health Research and Policy in San Francisco.

As a 2006 article on Uganda from Off Our Backs points out, "Bush foreign policy, as seen in the Global Gag Rule, contributes to the silence that surrounds abortion.... The policy was meant to reduce the number of abortions; instead, women who need these services are dying from complications due to unsafe abortions."

Tied into women's reproductive rights, the GGR has also had a detrimental effect on varied aspects of sex education, so vital in fighting the global AIDS epidemic:

The global gag rule has also led to a pullback in overseas delivery of contraceptives, according to recent testimony by Rep. Nita M.Lowey (D-N.Y.) before the House Foreign Affairs Committee: "U.S. shipments of contraceptives have ceased to 20 developing nations in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. In some areas, the largest distribution centers for contraceptives have experienced decreased access for over 50 percent of the women they serve."

This decrease in funding for essentials such as contraceptives is already threatening to reverse positive results in high HIV-infected areas such as Uganda, where the impressive gains made in encouraging safe-education is now being replaced by "abstinence-only" programs--which is supported by the GGR's broad premise. This has often put conservative US policies in line with the policies of conservatives in Uganda, both tragically out of touch with what global and local physicians see as the pressing medical needs of the people.

University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty member John Ferrick, who organizes an annual Uganda Study Abroad trip, has noticed first hand how GGR has dismantled that country's effective fight against HIV spread and infection.

...in past years there were many condom advertisements and billboards. This was in accordance with Uganda's ABC program to fight HIV/AIDS: Abstinence, Be faithful, use Condoms. Their ABC program helped to make them a model for dealing with HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa. During my trip this year, however, I saw only one condom billboard. There was, however, an abundance of abstinence billboards, sponsored by the First Lady of Uganda, JanetMuseveni. The switch from condoms to abstinence is not only because of the beliefs of President Museveni and his wife but also because of Washington, D.C

Local MD Fred Wabwire-Mangen, MD and professor at the Ugandan Institute of Public Health, agrees: "Washington will fund anything for abstinence," he says.

In early March 2008, Population Action International (PAI) and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) conducted a joint policy research trip to Zambia, to study the effects of the GGR and the conservative US foreign aid policy on women's health. Their findings paint a dire picture:

By all appearances, reproductive health seems to have vanished from Zambia both conceptually and as a health service. At the policy level, there is no official framework forSRHR. At the program level, sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services are thin and fall far short of demand. Rates of maternal death, unplanned pregnancy and unsafe abortion -- especially among young women -- are persistently high. Contraceptivestockouts have become more frequent and community-based SRH outreach throughout rural Zambia is non-existent, thanks to the Global Gag Rule. While the U.S. is one of a handful of donors providing FP/RH assistance and donated contraceptives to Zambia (about $6 million in FY07, compared with $216 million in PEPFAR funding), this small amount of U.S. assistance is hamstrung by Global Gag Rule restrictions....

As recent as 2007, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to modify the GGR so that organizations that were ineligible for U.S. assistance under the restrictive policy could at least receive contraceptives. The Senate supported this provision and, additionally, passed a provision to overturn the entire policy. But faced with a Bush Administration veto of all the funding for foreign assistance programs, and lacking the numbers to override it, this language never made it into the final bill, and the Mexico City Policy remains intact. This month the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a bill to increase funding for the fight against HIV/AIDS thru PEPFAR (President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). At question is whether the final bill will reflect a substantial challenge to GGR, or maintain the status quo.

So what can be done?

For one, GET INVOLVED. There are numerous groups (listed below) who have been fighting to repeal the Global Gag Rule through lobbying and education.

Second, VOTE. There is a justifiable tendency to become cynical with politics, and especially in this overlong primary season, to become disenchanted. But the GGR was put into effect by people voted into office, on the Congressional and Executive level, and it is the only way to see it repealed. It's your money that's being used. You can decide on whether you want to have it spent further on such things as a 100 year occupation of Iraq, or whether it can possibly be used to save lives at home and abroad.

And third, VOTE SMART. Disillusion with the loss of a preferred primary candidate may lead some to sit out an election or--in what can only be called absurdity--vote for a candidate opposed to their political leanings. Before anyone walks into a booth to push a button or pull a lever out "sour grapes," remember that real lives are at risk. Find out where your candidate, and even your lesser preferred candidate, stands on this issue, before voting for someone who stands for an opposing principle.

It might just be another insignifcant vote for you, one that may not yield *all* that you were hoping for. But for many women across the globe, it's a matter of life and death.

See also:

Articles:

How the Mexico City Policy Perpetuates the High Rate of Unsafe Abortion in Nigeria- Dr.Ejike Oji

Reproductive Rights Without Borders

Are U.S. Policies Killing Women?

What Zambia Teaches Us About International AIDS Policy

Uganda and the "Global Gag Rule"- Off Our Backs

Organizations:

Free Choice Saves Lives 2008 Presidential Candidate Campaign

Access Denied: US Restrictions on International Family Planning

International Women's Health Coalition

Center for Reproductive Rights

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