AIDS advocates and public health groups are pressing President-elect Obama to make a clean and early break with the Bush administration’s practice of conditioning U.S. aid on recipients’ policies on abortion and abstinence education. They also want to increase the United States’ financial commitment beyond existing levels.
They are pressing the incoming Obama team to get this done in the new administration’s first 100 days.
A coalition of more than 100 U.S.-based and foreign groups is circulating a list of recommendations that includes overturning the so-called Mexico City Policy that President Bush reinstated his first day in office, in 2001 and bars U.S. aid to non-governmental organizations that provide abortion referrals and counseling, and for spending $12 billion in fiscal 2010 on global AIDS prevention. The Mexico City Policy originated with former President Reagan and was overturned by former President Clinton, in 1993.
Susan F. Wood, a co-chair of Obama transition team on women’s issues, already has indicated that big changes are coming in these areas, but the groups’ pleas have taken on added urgency because Obama will be overhauling U.S. foreign assistance while he tries to address the intensifying financial crisis at home.
“This new administration has a historic opportunity to renew U.S. partnerships internationally and refocus, consolidate and expand our existing global health and development initiatives,” reads an eight-page memo signed by groups such as the Global AIDS Alliance, Physicians for Human Rights, local ACT UP affiliates and public health organizations in Kenya, NIgeria, Uganda and other nations.
Some of the groups successfully lobbied Congress this year to enact a $48 billion reauthorization and expansion of Bush’s plan to fight AIDS and other diseases overseas that, among other things, overturned a requirement that one-third of the money for HIV prevention be spent on abstienence education.
But the groups see Obama’s election as an opportunity to invigorate efforts to combat transnational problems such as contagious disease and food shortages. And candidate Obama did pledge to invest at least $50 billion on global HIV/AIDS by 2013.
Among the groups’ other recommendations:
Restore U.S. funding for the United Nations Population Fund efforts to promote voluntary family planning and HIV prevention. Bush halted the funding in 2002, saying the U.N. program supported abortion programs in China.
Remove barriers to using money in the global AIDS reauthorization law to purchase contraceptive supplies.
Be flexible in implementing guidelines in the law so comprehensive prevention programs that emphasize a number of approaches, including abstinence and distributing condoms, can qualify for assistance.
— Adriel Bettelheim
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