On Friday, if we finally have the opportunity to watch the first debate between the now official candidates for President of the United States, we will no doubt hear questions about each candidate's views on foreign policy. We Americans tend to think of foreign policy in terms of war, terrorism, international trade and today, perhaps financial policy. Few of us think of U.S. assistance to combat extreme poverty in Africa as an important part of our foreign policy.
As a country, we view U.S. assistance for global women's heath programs as important, but not necessary to our own interests. This is because we have somehow divorced "people" from foreign policy; it is as if a small group of people in power in other countries generate all the issues that must be addressed by our government. And further, we have separated "women" from the larger body of citizens. Why address merely women's issues when we can address a nation's issues?
It's true that women have particular needs that are distinctly different than the needs of an entire population. Everybody needs clean water; yet only women can die from childbirth. Also, the needs of women are so intrinsically tied up in the needs of families, communities and nations that it's absurd to consider "women's issues" apart. Women are the fabric of a nation. It is ridiculous to think that women should be invisible when we deal with poverty alleviation, conflict, global relief and environmental pressures, all of which lend themselves to peace and stability (or a lack thereof). Women are disproportionately affected by all these calamities. Nations can only develop economically so far without the participation of half of their citizens.
But we can't expect women to be a significant part of any solution if they exist in a society in which it is considered easier and cheaper to get a new wife than to save the one who is hemorrhaging from childbirth. So we can't say that women's health is what we will get to after we have a handle on education. Because in the society I've described, the girls aren't going to school any time soon.
For the U.S. to be a significant part of the solution that elevates the status of women and all that such progress entails, our foreign policy has to start dealing with the realities of women's lives instead of attempting to legislate morality. Just about everybody agrees the rate at which women around the world die from preventable causes of pregnancy and childbirth is a tragedy. But the fact is that keeping women alive includes contraception. In much of the world, contraception actually saves women's lives by allowing girls to delay childbearing and by permitting undernourished women to space their children. A leader may debate the morality of contraception in his or her private views, but those views will eventually crash into the morality of letting hundreds of thousands of women die needlessly. It's best to leave that philosophical debate to the person whose life hangs in the balance.
We can enter into inane debates on condom use as well, or we can acknowledge that new HIV/AIDS infections increasingly occur to young, married girls and our international assistance can stop blocking efforts to distribute condoms as a matter of survival.
These issues form a core part of our foreign policy as much as oil, war and trade. The United States supports global women's health, but all of it goes out with our government's stamp of morality (such as a policy that requires one-third of all PEPFAR HIV prevention funds to be spent on abstinence-only programs) and is our foreign policy. American foreign policy currently provides no money for multilateral approaches to global women's health because the Bush Administration, in its most egregious of decisions, withheld the U.S. contribution to UNFPA for seven years. Not only does this funding need to be restored, but we need to do far more.
The next President will take
office in a world where a woman dies every
minute from preventable complications of pregnancy and childbearing, where 600 million women are illiterate,
where 82 million girls living in low-income countries will be married
by the time they turn 18, where 6,800 new cases of HIV occur every day.
No candidate for President of the United States has the luxury of naïveté as to what these statistics mean to the world. Rampant poverty and discrimination against women across much of the globe will hinder all our efforts to create a more and more prosperous, technologically savvy and environmentally stable world.
In Friday's debate, questions about foreign policy will likely be parsed into individual issues in order for the candidates to answer in the time allotted. It would be more helpful for Americans to hear each candidate's philosophical approach to foreign policy. Let's hope our next President is both grounded and visionary enough to recognize that women are part of the whole, that when we are smart about it, we can be part of the progress in which societies evolve to the point where women participate economically and politically. We Americans would be far better off if we invested in the world's women.
