http://www.guardian.co.uk/aids/story/0,7369,1030583,00.html
US ends funds for African Aids programme Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington Thursday August 28, 2003 The Guardian The US government has cut off funds to an Aids programme for refugees in Africa - six weeks after President George Bush toured the continent promising to fight the disease - because it objects to the activities of one of the aid agencies involved, Marie Stopes International. A state department official said yesterday that US law prohibited the funding of organisations that support China's repressive population policy - a definition sufficiently elastic to include Marie Stopes, which runs family planning programmes there. However, organisations that work on reproductive health and Aids argue that the decision betrays the Bush administration's wider hostility to abortion. Its commitment to a rightwing Christian agenda has led it to promote abstinence as a strategy against HIV-Aids in preference to condoms, they say. The present funding cut is curious because Marie Stopes is just one of seven agencies involved in a project to promote HIV-Aids prevention and awareness in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Sudan, as well as in Sri Lanka, Asia. The other partners are the International Rescue Committee, Care, the American Refugee Committee, the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children, John Snow International and Columbia University's department of population and family health. News of the cuts emerged barely six weeks after Mr Bush toured five African states to launch a $15bn (£9.5bn) Aids initiative. It was later cut back drastically, with Congress approving just $2bn of the $3bn sought in the first year. A state department official yesterday conceded that the consortium was doing good work. Last year, the state department gave $1m to the consortium, formed eight years ago, but it decided to end aid this year. "The nature of the decision was a legal one, and it is based on the relationship Marie Stopes enjoys with the Chinese government," a state department official said. At no point has the state department accused Marie Stopes of abetting forced abortions and sterilisations. It appears to be implicated by its association. "Marie Stopes has a relationship with the Chinese government and its birth limitation programmes that has caused a legal impediment," the official added. Marie Stopes argues that its work on contraception in China is intended to halt the need for abortion. "We are working for the opposite of that - to reduce abortion and increase choices," Samantha Guy, a Marie Stopes spokeswoman, said. She said the aid cut would force the organisation to cancel a new project in Angola. Marie Stopes is the second agency targeted by the Bush administration, which is rigorously enforcing a 1985 law that bans US federal funding for groups that assist in enforced sterilisation or abortion. In July 2002, the White House overrode Congress to block a $34m award to the UN Population Fund for its work. UNFPA works with Marie Stopes and other agencies in China. It did so despite compelling evidence. UNFPA confines its activities to 32 counties in China, selected because they agreed in 1998 to abandon targets and quotas for abortion, according to a spokeswoman for the agency, Kristin Hetle. Organisations working on reproductive health argue that the law is being used to mask a wider agenda of the Bush administration, which has poured funding into programmes preaching sexual abstinence as a strategy against teenage pregnancy and Aids. It has also promoted such tactics in foreign aid programmes, favouring Christian organisations over other, more established agencies. ------- "Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded project." - James Madison _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
