Ipas > U.S. policy hurts women at home, abroad

U.S. policy hurts women at home, abroad

October 23, 2006

With practically no public funding for abortions, many U.S. women who rely on Medicaid — many of them women of color — have to make hard decisions about whether to continue a pregnancy or how to pay for an abortion.

Photo courtesy of Richard Lord.

To the outside world, U.S. abortion laws are believed to be among the globe’s least restrictive. But for the past 30 years, many American women have been prevented by law from having access to safe abortion care.

Since 1976, the federal Hyde Amendment has effectively erased poor women’s ability to obtain publicly funded abortions. Attached to the annual federal spending bill, it prohibits the use of its government funds to perform abortions in the vast majority of cases.

In an Oct. 20 article posted on the Center for American Progress website, Ipas Policy Associate Patty Skuster and Jamie D. Brooks, staff attorney for the National Health Law Program, argue that the Hyde Amendment robs U.S. women of their internationally recognized human rights. In “Does the Hyde Amendment violate human rights?,” the authors write that the Hyde Amendment is in direct conflict with global agreements that affirm all persons’ rights to control their fertility, including the 1999 United Nations consensus that “where abortion is not against the law, health systems should … ensure that such abortion is safe and accessible.”

But in the United States, where abortion was made legal nationwide in 1973, the reality is that abortion does not exist for the women who can least afford an unwanted pregnancy. And it’s not just the 12 million women of reproductive age on Medicaid, many of them women of color; other legislation that echoes the Hyde Amendment denies abortion care to women in the military, the Peace Corps, federal prisons and those who rely on the Indian Health Service.

U.S. policy limits abortion in the international arena as well. The Global Gag Rule mandates that overseas agencies that receive U.S. Agency for International Development funding cannot use their own money to provide abortion services, information or even lobby their own governments to loosen restrictions on abortion.

With the Hyde Amendment limiting abortion domestically and the Global Gag Rule in place, women in the United States and in the developing world may face similar hard decisions.

Women and girls from the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder are often forced to make untenable choices: pay the rent or scrape together the money for an abortion. In the lesser developed countries, the inability to pay often means an unsafe abortion. Or, failing to secure the money necessary, women from New York to Nigeria find themselves with a child they must struggle to support. And those are the choices women should not be forced to make, say Skuster and Brooks.

“All women, regardless of their economic status, deserve to be afforded the dignity to make personal decisions about pregnancy and childbearing and the ability to access the reproductive health care necessary to implement those decisions. For [30] years, U.S. policies have been allowed to violate the human rights of women at home and abroad. We must work for the day in which our laws protect those rights instead.”

For more information, contact:
Kirsten Sherk
Senior Associate, Media Relations
e-mail: sherkk@ipas.org
phone: 919.960.5612
fax: 919.929.0258