Abortion: The New Standard for U.S. Population Aid

Abstract

The U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) has cut off assistance to the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), after 17 years of continuous funding, because the IPPF refuses to guarantee that it will deny assistance to any of its national family associations that engage in abortion-related activities. The AID action is meant to implement new U.S. policy, first enunciated at last summer's UN International Conference on Population in Mexico City, that American government funds would be denied to any nongovernmental organization that engages directly or indirectly in abortion-related activities-even though no U.S. government funds are involved. The IPPF is the world's largest private, voluntary organization supporting family services in developing nations. It is an international federation of independent family associations, with headquarters in London. Each year, the IPPF has allocated approximately $50 million, secured from government and private donors, to its members in 98 developing countries and for its headquarters operation. In recent years, the AID contributed $11 million annually in direct funding, and an additional $3-$4 million in free contraceptive supplies, to the IPPF. The federation had been prohibited from using AID resources for abortion-related activities; otherwise, the organization had considerable flexibility in employment of these funds. For calendar year 1985, the IPPF applied to the AID for about $12.5 million in direct funding and $4.5 million in free contraceptives. This contribution would have amounted to approximately one-quarter of the IPPF's total projected budget. The IPPF is the first AID recipient to be defunded under the new U.S. policy against funding of nongovernmental organizations that or actively promote abortion method of family in other nations.1 Since 1973, the Congress has prohibited the use of U.S. population funds to for the performance of abortion method of family or to motivate or coerce any person to practice abortions.2 In 1981, Congress amended this requirement to prohibit the use of such funds to pay for biomedical research on abortion as method of family planning or to support lobbying for abortion. * For more than decade, these prohibitions had been interpreted to apply to grantees' use of AID funds, but not their use of funds from other governments or from private sources. The current policy goes much further. It says, in effect, that nongovernmental organization's use of its own funds or funds from another government for abortion-related activities makes it ineligible to receive AID assistance. Although the new policy was announced only last summer, there had been indications early 1982 and 1983 that such policy was being implemented. In December 1982, the AID terminated its long-standing support for International Family Planning Perspectives, scientific journal published by The Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI), in large part because two articles published in the journal had contained factual information about abortion in developing countries. The AGI is currently challenging this action in the federal courts. During the summer of 1983, the AID, under pressure from U.S. senator, refused to renew its many years of funding to The Pathfinder Fund, private American organization involved in international family program development, until Pathfinder agreed to renounce its use of private funds for abortion-related training and other programs. At the 1984 Mexico City conference, the U. S. government made it clear that governments involved in abortion-related activities could continue to receive bilateral population assistance from the AID, provided that they maintained U.S. funds in segregated accounts used only for approved purposes.3 Until February of this year, however, nongovernmental organizations were given no indication of the standards to which they might be held accountable. It was only after the AID terminated its funding of the IPPF that the agency finally floated draft clause indicating what U.S.-incorporated nongovernmental organizations would have to do to obtain AID population funds.4 According to this clause, which has now been sent to U.S. missions in Haiti and Egypt, U.S. corporation receiving AID population assistance cannot provide such funds or any goods or services financed by such funds to foreign nongovernmental corporation unless it certifies in writing that the foreign corporation is not in any way involved in abortion-related activities paid for with non-AID funds. Such activities are broadly defined: All abortions are defined a method of family planning, unless performed to save the pregnant woman's life. Thus, foreign corporation receiving AID funds subgrantee or sub-subgrantee could not use non-AID funds to perform an abortion for victim of rape or incest or to provide abortion counseling or referral for her. It could not provide the most basic information about abortion's legal availability. Nor could it advocate that abortion remain legal in country where it had already been decriminalized. Given that approximately 2.5 billion people live in developing countries where abortion is legal under at least some circumstances (including China, India, Bangladesh, Brazil, Tunisia, Turkey and Morocco), the draft clause would make it almost impossible for U.S. agency to grant any of its AID funds to many of the major nongovernmental family programs