Repealing the Global Gag Rule Is Only the First Step

After eight years of a policy that denied funding for crucial health services, stifled democratic debate, contributed to deaths from unsafe abortion, and stood in the way of global progress toward access to safe abortion, the Global Gag Rule should soon be history.  The impact will be certainly be significant -- clinics refunded, organizations again able to speak out on abortion issues -- however, repealing the Gag Rule will not actually end the longstanding ban on foreign aid for safe abortion care.

The ban on foreign aid for abortion is based on the government's interpretation of the Helms Amendment, adopted in 1973.  The Helms Amendment states "No foreign assistance funds may be used to pay for the performance of abortion as a method of family planning or to motivate or coerce any person to practice abortions."  

The language of the ban is as peculiar as its implementation.  One might wonder, under what circumstances is abortion used as a "method of family planning?"  Abortion certainly isn't family planning when a pregnancy threatens a woman's physical or mental health or where the woman is a victim of sexual violence.  Under Helms, could USAID have a role in ensuring women's access to safe, legal abortion under these circumstances?

In countries where abortion is legal under a broad set of conditions, the ban has meant that no U.S. assistance can help the government make services safer (for example, through training or equipment), or indeed to make safe abortion care available at all. In Nepal, where the government is working to implement the 2002 abortion law, USAID-funded training facilities and clinics dedicated to treating complications of unsafe abortion may not be used for safe abortion care. The government instead had to build new facilities or compromise quality of care by using less appropriate facilities.

U.S. administrations have applied the Helms language to effectively prohibit any use of foreign assistance funds for safe abortion care, but also to prevent dissemination of information about abortion or the purchase of equipment to treat abortion complications.  The prohibitions are applied equally to non-governmental organizations (NGOs), foreign governments and multi-lateral organizations (by contrast, the Global Gag Rule only applies to NGOs and dictates what they do with their own, non-USAID funding).  

This includes the purchase and distribution of manual vacuum aspiration instruments, life-saving equipment that can be used to both provide safe induced abortion as well as to treat complications from unsafe abortion and miscarriage, particularly in low-resource settings.  Though USAID funds train providers to treat complications from unsafe abortion, funding for the equipment to put this training into practice must be acquired elsewhere.

The Helms Amendment has even led to the control of information about the scientific, public health, and human rights aspects of abortion -- far beyond any reasonable interpretation of the language of the law.  USAID-funded journals and databases have been censored systematically and through outlandish intrusions.  In April 2008, administrators of the U.S.-funded Popline database made the word abortion an unsearchable stop word, all because of a phone conversation over USAID's concerns that Popline may be violating the abortion ban by including what they thought were abortion advocacy materials.  The items in question were articles in A: the abortion magazine, published by Ipas, in an issue on the growing recognition of the linkages between abortion and human rights. Abortion was shortly reinstated as a search term but the offending articles remain banned from the "world's largest bibliographic database" on reproductive health literature.