Meanwhile, don’t miss Michelle Goldberg’s recent reporting in the Daily Beast about what’s at stake for women around the world in the next election. The article starts with a Liberian version of my mom, albeit one who’s a bit more socially conservative:
Gertrude Gorma Cole, a midwife in Liberia’s Bong County, is almost universally known as “Mother Dear.” A warm, grandmotherly presence in a traditional lappadress, she has been practicing at least since the 1970s. In some ways, she is conservative. Speaking of Liberia’s disastrous teenage pregnancy rate-which is high even by West African standards-she blames both the social breakdown caused by the country’s savage civil war and the lax ideas of the international NGOs that swept into the country in its wake. …
Yet there is one thing Mother Dear does not distrust: the programs to provide birth control, which are largely supplied by USAID….”If they cut off funding for family planning, more mothers are going to die,” she says.
​Goldberg dips into the GOP candidates’ promises, and looks at the likely results:
If Romney is willing to scrap the only federal program to provide birth control to low-income women in the United States, programs to do the same thing abroad certainly aren’t safe. We already know that, like every Republican since Ronald Reagan, he’ll impose the global gag rule, preventing any American money from going to organizations that perform or even counsel about abortions. He will likely follow George W. Bush in withholding money from the United Nations Population Fund, or UNFPA, an agency that promotes reproductive health worldwide.
If Romney is willing to slash American funding for HIV/AIDS, which has significant Christian conservative support, it seems likely he’d be willing to do the same for USAID’s family planning programs, which don’t. USAID remains the world’s largest source of birth control for poor countries-a role it played even under Bush. If that changes, as Liberia shows, the consequences for the world’s most vulnerable women will be horrific.
