Tracing the inauspicious history of the global gag rule can feel like watching a game of high-stakes Ping-Pong. In 1984, Republican President Reagan instates the rule, which forbids family planning organizations who receive US foreign aid from performing abortions, discussing safe abortion as an option with patients, or advocating for abortion law liberalization or reform in their own countries - even if they use other funds for those activities. Republican President Bush the First keeps it on the books; Democratic President Bill Clinton rescinds it on his first day in office. Republican President Bush the Second immediately reinstates the rule; Democratic President Obama scraps it. Women's health advocates were delighted when Obama got rid of the global gag rule, but a nagging - and none too insignificant - concern remained: what about four, or eight, years from now, when Obama is no longer be in office and his successor sees fit to bring the gag rule back?
During the Senate Appropriations Committee mark-up yesterday, Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) proposed an amendment to the foreign aid appropriations bill that would permanently negate the global gag rule by stipulating that foreign NGOs should not be disqualified from receiving US family planning assistance based on their providing services that are permissible in their own countries and legal here. The amendment passed the committee, 17 to 11, with one member voting present. In introducing the amendment, Sen. Lautenberg argued that the gag rule forces NGOs abroad to "lose out on badly needed funds, or take the money and sacrifice their responsibility to their patients." And, he added, it "creates no choice for the women who are forced to go without the care they need to be healthy."
"This is not something that should flip-flop depending on who's president," says Susan Cohen, Director of Government Affairs for the Guttmacher Institute. "It so affects family planning that we need to provide stability and predictability to be most efficient and effective. And since this is the policy of the President and Congress, we should write it into law."
In debate over the amendment, Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) predictably implied that the amendment would provide taxpayer funding for abortion abroad, when in fact the Helms Amendment, which is unaffected by this legislation, has long banned foreign aid funding for abortion.
Cohen believes that the full Senate has the votes to pass the amendment, citing the resounding defeat that greeted Sen. Mel Martinez's (R-FL) attempt to reinstate legislatively the global gag rule after Obama rescinded it in late January, when 60 senators voted to keep the gag rule off foreign aid funding.
The appropriations bill itself also allocates an increase in family planning funding, to $628 million, of which $50 million would fund UNFPA, the UN family planning agency. The House allocates slightly higher levels, and the two amounts will be reconciled in conference committee.
Speaking of conference committee - the House's version of the bill does not address the global gag rule. Will that pose a problem for Lautenberg's amendment? Advocates are hopeful that Chair of State and Foreign Operations Subcommittee Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY) will protect this amendment, and cite Lowey's co-sponsorship of a previous, parallel bill, the Global Democracy Promotion Act, on which Lautenberg's amendment was based.
