BUSH POLICIES KILL

from: Population Institute March-April 2005
 
     [Open quote] In some countries a third of the family planning clinics have closed due to the withdrawal of U.S. funds, according to the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.  Howard Dean, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination last year, attributed the closings to the Bush administration’s so-called global gag rule.  The gag rule is a policy that denies U.S. family planning funds to overseas organizations which, in countries where abortion is legal, provide abortion related services or information, using private funds, along with other reproductive health and family planning services.  Before his election to head the DNC, Dean, a former governor of Vermont, was the founder of Democracy for America, a grassroots organization established to support socially progressive and financially responsible political candidates.
     Dean blasted special interest groups that are attempting to bring about a total ban on U.S. finding for family planning services -- even by organizations that abide by the gag rule -- by phony statistics and misleading press releases implying that world population growth has nearly stopped and is about to go into decline.  “Nothing could be further from the truth. Net growth has slowed slightly, but the world’s population is still growing by 76 million per year—the equivalent of adding a new
U.S. population every four years.”
     Dean contended that a “similar campaign of lies and distortions” is under way to raise questions about the safety and effectiveness of condoms.  “Men and women across Africa are dying of AlDS because religious fundamentalists have persuaded them not to use condoms on the basis that the manufacturers have supposedly infected condoms with the HIV virus,” he said.  Twenty-seven million people in sub-saharan Africa are infected with HIV, Dean stressed, and about 20 million have already died of the disease.  He noted that supplies of U. S. donated condoms and other contraceptives have been reduced significantly in at least 29 countries.   “Men in sub-saharan Africa have access to an average of only three condoms a year,” Dean observed. “In southern Africa, where over a quarter of the adult population is living with HIV-AIDS, unavailability of condoms is a death sentence.”
     “The human suffering caused by these misguided policies and inadequate funding is staggering,” he said, pointing out that:
     *The number of women and girls who die every year from pregnancy and childbirth related complications equals the total number of U.S. deaths in World War I, World War II, the Korean war and the Vietnam war combined.
     * 140,000 women bleed to death each year during childbirth.
     * Approximately 100,000 women die each year from infection, another 40,000 from the agony of prolonged labor.
     * 75,000 women die each year trying to end pregnancies. The U.N. estimates that worldwide 18.3 million women and girls try to self-induce abortions each year. Many of those who survive face lifelong disabling pain.
     Dean said that when these statistics are added to “the exhausting burden of repeated pregnancies and births . . . you have a global picture of suffering that demands global response.” [Close quote]

 
I can’t help but note that these superstitious/religious folk who are lying to other superstitious folk about the effectiveness of condoms and who spread the rumor that condom companies are infecting the condoms with the aids virus are just killing off superstitious folk like themselves i.e. the potentially religious. This is why knowledge and modernity will win out over religion, superstition and black magic every time. Stick with the knowledgeable and let the ignorant kill themselves off. I know that sounds cruel, but those who believe the lying religious folk are asking to be duped and to die out.
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“Ninety percent of everything is crap.” —Theodore Sturgeon [Now there’s a positive attitude we all can get behind.]