Exportable righteousness, expendable women

摘要

The "global gag rule" is stifling debate about reproductive health. It's going to force a lot of poor women in developing countries to bear children they don't want. It's likely to increase (not decrease) the number of "coat hanger" abortions. And it's probably going to get a lot of women killed, which will in turn boost death rates among the children they leave behind. So why exactly is it U.S. policy? The desire to control fertility may be nearly as ancient and universal as sexual desire itself.Every culture, it seems, has had its contraceptives, although their efficacy has varied greatly. To prevent pregnancy, the Petrie Papyrus, an Egyptian medical text from 1850 BC, recommended vaginal suppositories made of crocodile dung. In the 4th centuryBC, Aristotle described women coating their cervixes with olive oil before intercourse. Women on Easter Island made suppositories from seaweed. And from the 1930s to the 1960s, Lysol, now a popular household cleaner, was marketed coyly to American womenas a "certain ... yet safe" disinfectant douche. In the developing world today, nearly two-thirds of all women in their reproductive years--about 525 million of them--rely on some form of birth control, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). But there is still a great deal of unmet demand for contraceptives. More than 100 million women in these countries say they want to delay the birth of their next child or stop having children altogether, but are not currently using contraception.