By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a long-time supporter of “women’s reproductive health,” announced a new $63 billion plan to bring a more “woman- and girl-centered approach” to global health care services that will include a dramatic increase in “family planning and reproductive health” care.
CNSNews.com is reporting that Secretary Clinton announced the Obama administration’s Global Health Initiative (GHI) on Monday at Johns Hopkins University, saying it has “everything” to do with foreign policy and will bring much needed health care to “more people in more places.”
“This is a signature of American leadership in the world today,” Clinton said. “It’s also an issue very close to my own heart.”
The GHI introduces a “new approach” to global health care, which is aimed at “saving the greatest possible number of lives” by expanding existing health programs “to help countries develop their own capacity to improve the health of their own people,” she said.
This will be done by encouraging and helping poor countries to run their own health care systems instead of relying on foreign aid workers. Even though the programs will be funded through international aid networks, they will be run by local governments.
Clinton explained that this aspect of global health addresses not just a humanitarian concern but a geopolitical one as well, since poor, weak states often are crippled in part because of poor public health.
“We invest in global health to strengthen fragile or failing states,” Clinton said. “We have seen the devastating impact of HIV-AIDS on countries stripped of their farmers, teachers, soldiers, health workers, and other professionals.”
She also said the new GHI programs will have what the Obama administration describes as a “woman-centered” approach, providing funding for neonatal care, family planning services, and infant health care.
According to a government fact sheet, GHI program goals for family planning are aggressive. The government plans to “prevent 54 million unintended pregnancies by meeting unmet needs for modern contraception. Contraceptive prevalence is expected to rise to 35 percent across assisted countries, reflecting an average 2 percentage point increase annually. First births by women under 18 should decline to 20 percent.”
Clinton said family planning – including pregnancy prevention – not only will improve women’s health but also will reduce the poverty that often afflicts large families in poorer countries. She said women must be given more control over when they become pregnant.
“We are scaling up our work in family planning and maternal and child health, areas in which the United States can and must lead,” Clinton said. “Every year, hundreds of thousands of women die from complications related to pregnancy or childbirth – nearly all of them in the developing world.”
She went on to say: “Family planning represents one of the most cost effective public health interventions available in the world today. It prevents both maternal and child deaths by helping women space their births and bear children during their healthiest years and it reduces the deaths of women from unsafe abortions.”
Clinton does not mention a report appearing in April of this year in the medical journal The Lancet that challenges the mantra of pro-abortion groups about out-of-control global maternal mortality rates. For the first time in decades, researchers found a significant drop in the number of women who die worldwide each year from pregnancy or childbirth, down from 526,300 in 1980 to 342,900 in 2008.
She also neglected to mention that the journal’s editor, Dr. Richard Horton, told the New York Times that some advocates for women’s health tried to pressure his publication into delaying release of the new figures until after key meetings with the United Nations and Secretary of State Clinton for fear the good news would lessen their chances of receiving more foreign aid.
“I think this is one of those instances when science and advocacy can conflict,” Dr. Horton told the Times.
Clinton went on to say that the GHI will be “making up for lost time” in funding family planning services, which occurred when the Bush Administration decided to stop funding international aid groups such as the UNFPA because of its support for abortion and China’s one-child policy.
Clinton also said the administration was “moving beyond” the ABC (Abstinence, Be faithful, Correct contraceptive use) anti-AIDS approach adopted during the Bush years to an “A to Z approach to [HIV] prevention” that includes measures such as “male circumcision [and] the prevention of mother-to-child transmission” as well as better HIV screening and education.
In addition to family planning and HIV/AIDS, the GHI will also confront the problem of malaria and tuberculosis and focus on reducing child mortality and malnutrition rates.
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