The following speech was given at a teach-in held Oct. 30 in NYC called “It’s Worse Than You Think: Where the Bush regime is taking the world and why it must be stopped” by Cristina Page, author of “How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America”:
Here are a couple of widely held
misconceptions:
1) President
Bush is pro-life–false
2) The Right to Life Movement is concerned about preventing abortion.
You see, when president Bill
Clinton presided over the most dramatic decline in abortion rates in the
recorded history of our country. The right to life movement didn’t send him any
thank you notes. After witnessing how policies that furnished Americans with
greater access to contraception led to fewer abortions being sought, the Bush administration
decided on the very opposite approach. Why? Because the policies that lead to
dramatic declines in abortion are offensive to the right to life movement.
Today, there is not one pro-life organization in the United States that support
the use of birth control. Rather, stripping people of the right to plan a
family, rolling back access to contraception, is now a foundation of the
pro-life agenda. The war against contraception in the United States is
well-under way, well financed. And thanks to their steamy coupling with the
bush administration, the war against family planning has racked up some
important victories.
Let me underscore something for
you. We know what works to prevent unintended pregnancy. What most people don’t
know, but should, is that the countries with the lowest abortion rates in the
world are the ones with the strongest pro-choice policies, like Sweden, Norway
and the Netherlands. You would think
that for the honest pro-lifer, this should be of interest. More concerning,
however, is that the agenda they insist upon has only proven to fail. Why is it
that the countries with the highest abortion rates in the world are the ones
that have enacted the strictest pro-life policies, the very strategies proposed
by the US pro-life movement and currently executed by the Bush administration?
Take abstinence only. We”ve routed
over one billion dollars in federal funding to abstinence only programs.
Interestingly Sweden through out those programs over thirty years-cited their
dismal effectiveness- after implementing comprehensive sex education programs
Sweden enjoyed a 70% decline in teenage pregnancy. We don’t even need 30 years
of data to prove to us what works. Let’s just look at the results of when Bush
was Governor and invested unprecedented sums in abstinence only in Texas. The
result? Texas scored dead last in the nation, 50th out of 50, in the
decline in teen births. In fact, while the rest of the nation enjoyed dramatic
declines in teen pregnancy, by the end of Bush’s term as Governor. Texas had
one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country exceeded by only four
other states, including Florida, which his brother governed using the same
approach. When Bush became president, he boldly took the dead last approach and
prescribed it for the rest of the nation.
The steamy relationship Bush has
with his pro-life base is lucrative one too. One in four federal dollar for
abstinence-only money goes to pro-life groups. And probably the reason these
programs fail is because those designing them are not interested in reducing
teen pregnancy, their interested in proselytizing to children about their
God. Take The Virginity pledge programs,
one called the Silver Ring Thing, got over a million dollars in federal
funding. It’s executive director explained, “we”re not really putting our
energy into abstinence as much as we”re putting it into faith-abstinence is the
tool that we”re using to reach children.”
So, it should come as no surprise
that when Columbia and Yale researchers studied kids in these virginity pledge
programs and compared them to kids not in virginity pledge programs, that the
virgin pledgers had the same rate of STDs as non-pledgers. The only difference
being that virgin pledgers were six more likely to have oral sex, male
virginity pledgers were 4 times more likely to have anal sex, the virgin
pledgers were also less likely to us a condom, more likely to spread the STDS
they have because they don’t get treated for them.
The pro-life movement has found a
friend in George Bush because they share a disdain for information, evidence,
proof, truth. When the pro-life movement asked Bush to appoint an abstinence
only ideologue to over see the nation’s contraceptive program to the poor, Bush
said yes. We now see that the poorest Americans are seeking out abortion
services more. When the right to life movement asked Bush to cut contraceptive
benefits to federal employees, Bush said sure. When they asked him to appoint
an anti-contraception fanatic to the expert panel that approves contraceptives
in the FDA, he said I will. And that was the choice that led the FDA, our
nation’s premier scientific agency, to make its first ideological, religious
decision in its history-denying the over-the-counter application for emergency
contraceptives. When asked whether the
President supports birth control, his spokesman dodged, only willing to say the
president supports “a culture of life.”
When the pro-life movement asked
Bush to de-fund the UN agency that provides contraception to people living in
the poorest nation’s on earth, where family planning is nothing less than a
life-saving technology? Bush said -where do I sign? The loss of that 34 million dollars, 12% of
the agencies budget, led to, worldwide, 12 million more unintended pregnancies,
5 million more abortions, 374,000 infant deaths, 27,000 maternal deaths-and
that’s each year.
A Culture of Life? Pro-Life? The
facts say otherwise.