Imperialism and choice
Last month, United States House of Representatives speaker and arch-Republican Newt Gingrich announced he would block all US foreign funding unless it was tied to a prohibition on US-funded international family planning organisations lobbying governments on abortion issues. Specifically, the Republicans are refusing to pass legislation to repay the US's debts to the UN ($1.7 billion in dues and "peacekeeping " expenses) and the International Monetary Fund ($18 billion) unless the prohibition is included.
Many family planning and pro-choice organisations in the US have expressed outrage at this "gag rule". They correctly point out that the imposition of the reactionary, religious ideas of one US political party on all of the (supposedly) independent, expert services operating in diverse circumstances around the world is profoundly undemocratic and reflects a colonial attitude towards the women of the Third World.
The Republicans' latest move (aimed at strengthening its electoral support in the growing anti-choice movement in the US) is not, in fact, a new or different approach to the US's business-as-usual foreign aid. In fact, it is the logical conclusion of the practise, (if not the rhetoric), of all imperialist nations' foreign policy in relation to the Third World.
The reproductive lives and choices of Third World women have been systematically abused for decades under the guise of "aid". While some individual family planning services have undoubtedly tried to improve and broaden these women's reproductive choices, the colonialists' policies of genocide (especially against indigenous populations) and, more recently, the promotion of "population control" by the IMF, World Bank, imperialist-funded aid programs, and consequently Third World governments themselves, have injured or killed millions of women.
In many Third World countries, "family planning" has come in the form of forced sterilisation. In 1989, Indonesia's President Suharto — backed then, as now, by the US and Australian governments — won the UN population prize for his Planned Parenthood Program in East Timor. This program, supported by a World Bank- and United Nations-sponsored "family planning" clinic established in Dili in 1985, targeted 95,000 East Timorese women between 1985-90, of which it is estimated that 80% were forcibly sterilised.
Millions of women in India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Central and South America and many other poor countries have been injected, without their knowledge or consent, with long-acting experimental contraceptives such as Norplant and Depo Provera, often with disastrous consequences for their health. This barbaric practise, which continues in some countries today, served the dual purpose for imperialism of allowing the big drug corporations (like the Nazis during WWII) to "test" their new drugs without fear of public exposure or prosecution by the victims, as well as reducing non-white populations.
On the other side of these abuses of women's reproductive rights, the World Health Organisation estimates that every year more than 20 million women terminate unwanted pregnancies through unsafe abortions likely to damage their health. Unable to access either safe abortion services or appropriate health care after the operation, the WHO calculates that each year, more than 200,000 women die from unsafe abortions, the overwhelming majority of them in the Third World.
For the sake of all women, the Republicans' attempt to further restrict Third World women's right and ability to control their reproductive lives must not be allowed to succeed.
But in fighting that fight, we must not forget the bigger picture that the Republicans are moving to cement into another law: in a world divided by imperialism into those who have and those who don't, women will always be a major target and the major victims of injustice.
The enslavement of Third World countries in perpetual and rising debt to the imperialist nations precludes any possibility of billions of people raising their standard of living sufficiently to make informed reproductive choice even a possibility for women.
According to the WHO's 1994 report Women's Health and Human Rights, the Third World debt crisis and the structural adjustment programs imposed on Third World countries by the World Bank, IMF and the imperialist powers' "free trade" agreements are the single greatest factor in the deterioration of women's health and well-being.
Amidst such gross inequality on a world scale, many Third World women cannot even choose to live, let alone control their reproductive lives. The struggle for reproductive freedom for all women is ultimately a struggle for an end to imperialism.
By Lisa Macdonald