Population Connection Sttment on Boxer-Snowe Amdt-overturns Global Gag

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http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=45406


"We applaud the Senate for voting today to adopt the Boxer- Snowe Amendment to overturn the Global Gag Rule and to ensure that America's foreign policy reflects Americans values.

"The Global Gag Rule denies U.S. family planning aid to foreign health care providers that use funds from other sources - - including their own governments -- to provide legal abortions, to provide counseling or referrals on legal abortion, or to publicly support legal abortion within their own countries. It forces providers to choose between receiving desperately needed funds or maintaining the ability to provide patients with full and complete information and the right to speak out on an important public health policy issue. Either choice hurts the women these providers exist to help.

"The effects of the Global Gag Rule have been dramatic. In countries throughout the developing world, health care providers have been unable to agree to sacrifice their rights and ignore their responsibilities to provide women with information about all of their legal options. In Kenya, clinics have closed leaving tens of thousands of poor people without the services they need. In Ethiopia, contraceptive supplies in some clinics have run out, leaving thousands of women at risk for an unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. Indeed, rather than preventing abortion, the Global Gag Rule only makes unsafe abortion more likely because it cuts off funding for contraception.

"The Senate today stood up for freedom of speech, for medical ethics and for the health of women in the poorest countries in the world. They recognized that our policies should be guided by our values and that our government should not impose restrictions on foreign health care providers that it can't impose on Americans