NEW YORK - There has been quite a bit of chatter on the Web about how President Bush is trying to portray his middle initial, W, as standing for "women" and attempting to cast his agenda in a pro-woman light. While no elected official will ever declare that he is "anti-woman," it is difficult to see the Bush agenda from any other perspective.
Soon after his inauguration, Mr. Bush issued the global gag rule, an executive order that denies U.S. government assistance to family planning or reproductive health agencies in other countries that make any reference to abortion in the course of counseling or providing services to their clients.
The rule also prohibits any advocacy for legal abortion, even if made without the organization's own funds. When the International Planned Parenthood Federation's Western Hemisphere region refused to accept those unethical restrictions on its freedom of speech, it was denied $12 million of critical support by the U.S. Agency for International Development in 2001. The people affected by the gag rule: poor women in Latin America and the Caribbean who rely on family planning clinics for basic medical as well as reproductive health services.
This year, Congress approved $34 million for the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), but the White House is balking at releasing the money. This is the third consecutive year that UNFPA money appropriated by Congress has been withheld, forcing the closing of dozens of reproductive health clinics that often were the sole source of medical help for miles around.
The administration's justification is a widely discredited report linking UNFPA to forced abortions in China, most recently debunked by a fact-finding team sent to China by the State Department. The people affected are again poor women in developing countries.
In March, the National Council for Research on Women released a disturbing report on how the administration has systematically distorted, deleted and misrepresented much of the information on women's issues on U.S. government Web sites and publications.
For example, in 2002, the National Cancer Institute reworked its Web site to claim that studies examining links between abortion and breast cancer were inconclusive. In reality, five years earlier, The New England Journal of Medicine had published an exhaustive study that showed there was no link whatsoever. The people affected were women, in this country and overseas.
Under the Bush administration, the United States has yet to ratify the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The treaty has been ratified by 170 countries. It defines discrimination against women, provides an agenda for improving women's rights and requires reports on how this agenda is being met. It does not impose any new laws or establish an enforcement authority.
But for this administration, which disbanded the President's Interagency Council on Women and the White House Office of Women's Initiatives and Outreach, improving the status of women has not been a priority.
Ten years ago, at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, 179 countries agreed on a Program of Action that empowers women in many different ways. Funding for many international public health projects is based on this program. Yet the Bush administration has worked against the Cairo agreement in every follow-up meeting for the past three years, undermining the international community's efforts in this area and putting another roadblock in the way of funding women's health initiatives. We are bracing for its next barrage at this week's meeting of the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean in Puerto Rico.
These examples constitute only a small part of the administration's disgraceful record. At the end of April, hundreds of thousands of women, men and youths joined the March for Women's Lives in Washington, D.C, rallying not because they thought W stood for women, but because the administration is systematically undoing many of the gains achieved by women in the last half-century.
What does W really stand for? Wrong for women.
Carmen Barroso is regional director for the Western Hemisphere of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.