PAI Urges Obama to Repeal Bush's Global Gag Rule, Save Women's Lives

*Expert Availability to Discuss Executive Order and Report*

(Washington) Today, Population Action International (PAI) urged President-elect Obama to quickly take executive action to repeal the Global Gag Rule—a Bush-era restriction on USAID family planning funding that has cost thousands of lives in developing countries around the world.

Population Action International’s Global Gag Rule Impact Project’s video documentary and 8 in-depth country case studies show the economic and social suffering as a result of the Global Gag Rule. The policy prevents health clinics in developing countries from receiving U.S. funding for family planning assistance—and even donated contraceptives—if the clinics use funding from other sources to provide abortion counseling or services. The report found that:

• Contraception is far less available in clinics across the globe; providers in 29 countries were cut off including a clinic in Lesotho that distributed 400,000 condoms from 1998-2000.
• Nonprofit health clinics have been forced to reduce medical staff; in Kenya 8 clinics were closed and up to 30% of their health professionals were cut.
The largest family planning provider in Nepal lost all USAID-donated contraceptives, two-thirds of its total supply.
• The Global Gag Rule forced one of the largest family planning providers in Ghana to cut its workforce by more than 50%. Due to the cut-off of contraceptive supplies, the number of women seeking post-abortion care for complications nearly doubled.

By repealing the Gag Rule and providing greater access to modern contraceptives, the U.S. would help avert some of the estimated 52 million unintended pregnancies and 22 million induced abortions every year. Every year an estimated 536,000 women die in pregnancy or childbirth from preventable causes. Rescinding the Gag Rule and providing universal access to contraceptives would prevent 250,000 maternal deaths annually and significantly reduce infant deaths.

Since its reinstatement in January 2001 by the Bush administration, PAI has been instrumental in pressuring the Administration and Congress and—more recently—President-elect Obama to save lives and rescind the Global Gag Rule. Repeal of the Gag Rule has been an urgent and high priority item in meetings with the Obama Transition officials by PAI and members of the global health community. Thanks in part to PAI’s research and advocacy efforts, including Congressional study tours that have taken Members of Congress and dozens of their staff to see first-hand the impact of the Gag Rule in Africa and elsewhere, Congress took significant steps in 2007 to mitigate the harmful impacts of the Gag Rule. House and Senate-passed foreign aid appropriations bills contained provisions exempting U.S.-donated contraceptives from the Gag Rule. PAI’s campaign strategy garnered new support from Members of Congress on both sides of the abortion debate forging a growing consensus behind pragmatic "prevention first" policies that most Americans favor.

The Access Denied documentary and country case studies can be found at http://www.populationaction.org/globalgagrule/Summary.shtml

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For more information or booking PAI spokespeople:

        Michael Khoo, Fenton Communications 
        Ph: 202-822-5200, Cell: 202-669-7911, E-mail: michael@fenton.com