U.S. Republicans Take Culture War Abroad with Global Gag Rule

A mother and child in a health center in Africa. (via Creative Commons / Flickr user Novartis AG)

Beyond the recent onslaught of attacks on Planned Parenthood by members of America’s conservative party, an even larger threat to the right to reproductive services, one that could impact millions of women in the world’s poorest nations, looms as House Republicans work to reinstate a global gag order on family counseling services.

The Global Gag Rule was rescinded under President Barack Obama in 2009. Last week, however, a far stricter version of the Rule was passed overwhelmingly by Republican congressmen. Under that rule, all U.S. financial assistance to international health organizations counseling women on family planning options—abortion in particular, can be blocked. Such assistance includes funding for HIV/AIDS, water and sanitation, and child education.

Ranking House Member Nita Lowey (D-NY) said the Gag Rule "muzzles doctors and nurses throughout the world." She added, "...that means an expectant mother who has walked six hours while bleeding to reach the only health clinic in the region may not get the life-saving care she needs - or even a referral."

As critical funding for preventative health care hangs in the balance for millions of women, President Obama finds himself in a national cultural war debate that now has international implications thanks to conservative lawmakers.

Originally referred to as the Mexico City Policy, the 1984 Ronald Reagan-issued executive order, was used as a political flashpoint, polarizing Republicans against Democrats in what could be seen as one of the first firing shots of a culture war that would continue to plague U.S. domestic policy for decades.

A question left out of the abortion debate remains: is it really necessary to take domestic cultural disputes global?

According to a recent global survey on abortion, published by the Guttmacher Institute, a large percentage of safe, lawful abortions take place in China and India. If China and India are removed from the analysis, 86% of women of childbearing age in the remaining developing nations face highly restrictive abortion laws. And by “restrictive” they mean to say that abortion is only permitted to save a woman’s life, to protect her physical or mental health, or in cases of rape, incest, or fetal impairment.

In addition, the U.S. push to curtail abortion procedures seems entirely unwarranted when looking at the statistics, which suggest a steady decline in abortion rates in those same developing nations. Guttmacher estimates that the global number of safe abortions fell from 25.6 million in 1995 to 21.9 million in 2003. The organization also found that unsafe procedures have changed very little, from 19.9 million in 1995, to 19.7 million in 2003--a mere 1%. These unsafe abortions were performed either by unskilled practitioners in unhygienic conditions, or they were self-induced. The worldwide data thus concludes that the rate of unsafe abortion is trailing behind the rate of safe abortion procedures.

As the studies clearly show, unsafe, potentially life-threatening abortions will continue and are continuing at a steady rate.

Shouldn’t Americans be asking their legislators why, then, is the Republican majority fighting to silence medical practitioners in these developing nations? Why gag the very people who could save women’s lives?

Wal-Mart “Too Big to Sue” in Gender Discrimination Case?

Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court considered the legitimacy of Dukes v Wal-Mart, a massive class action lawsuit filed on behalf of 1.5 American million women that accuses Wal-Mart LLC of denying equal pay and equal access to career advancement. The prosecutors are seeking a stop to its alleged discriminatory practices, as well as back pay and punitive damages that could cost Wal-Mart over one billion dollars.

At issue was not whether the plaintiffs, with individual cases dating back to 1998, even have a case. Instances of women earning roughly 77% of what their male peers earned are common; women who qualified for raises but were passed over by their male counterparts with less experience seem to have been the norm for more than a decade. Instead, the “highest court in the land” heard the defense question whether or not millions of women could be included in one single class action suit. Lawyers for Wal-Mart claimed that they could not form an effective defense against the millions of individual cases and that there was no common injury.

The question that Wal-Mart posed, eerily reminiscent of the one made by big banks at the height of the economic meltdown, was: “Aren’t we too big to fail sue?”

It makes sense that Wal-Mart would take this tactic. After all, they’re in good company: several corporations and business groups, threatened by the precedent that Dukes could set for large-scale class action suits, have filed friend-of-the-court briefs siding with Wal-Mart. It seems the largest retailer in the world, whose sales hit $405 billion last year, feels that it, too, is “too big to fail.”

But the six plaintiffs who represent the millions of women are making their claim under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They argue that “the policies and practices underlying this discriminatory treatment are consistent throughout Wal-Mart.” And each incident of discrimination, if taken to court separately, could pit the largest private employer in the world against one single woman at a time.

Let me repeat that again: one woman against the largest employer in the world.

The question that I would ask the Supreme Court justices, then, who reportedly sided with the corporate behemoth, would be: if corporations have the rights of personhood, as they were recently granted, why can’t individual persons have the same rights as corporations to consolidate their legal claims?

If Wal-Mart LLC, which serves 41 regions, 400 districts, and 3,400 stores housing one million workers in the U.S. alone, is allowed to take each woman to court individually, it will set a precedent not just for the rights of women, but for all individuals. Common law will dictate that corporations and their armies of attorneys will have the same access to justice as individuals with a mere fraction of their money and resources. In a world like that, will there ever be a fair fight?

MAKE CHANGE: Sign a Petition to Ratify CEDAW in the U.S.

For International Women's Day (March 8) and Women's History Month, the National Organization for Women in the U.S. is spearheading a petition that calls for President Obama to take action to ratify the critically important women's rights treaty from the United Nations, the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

Since the treaty was introduced in 1979, hundreds of countries from every region of the world have ratified it to signal the intention to work towards gender equity. The United States has yet to ratify CEDAW.

Sign the petition now! It will be delivered to the White House at the end of March. It's a simple, effective way of showing that you support gender equity.