Obama overturns ban on overseas abortion funding

WASHINGTON (AFP) - President Barack Obama has overturned what he described as an “unwarranted” 8-year ban on US govt funding for family-planning groups, which carry out or facilitate abortions overseas.
Shortly after he signed an executive order cancelling the restrictions, on the third full day of his presidency, Obama said in a statement the ban had “undermined efforts to promote safe and effective voluntary family planning in developing countries,” and that the issue had become too politicised.
The so-called “global gag rule” cut off US funding to overseas family planning clinics which provide any abortion services whatsoever, from the operation itself to counselling, referrals or post-abortion services.
First introduced by Republican president Ronald Reagan in 1984, it has been repeatedly overturned by Democratic administrations and reintroduced by the Republicans.
Obama’s action reversed the orders of president George W Bush, who when he came into office in 2001 immediately froze funds to many family planning groups working overseas. “It is clear that the provisions... are unnecessarily broad and unwarranted under current law,” Obama said.
For too long, he added, the ban “has been used as a political wedge issue, the subject of a back and forth debate that has served only to divide us.”
The order won Obama praise from Democratic lawmakers, family planning and women’s rights groups, and drew angry condemnation from pro-life organisations and Republicans.
With the restrictions lifted, more “healthcare entities can receive US funds for family planning and reach a bigger pool of women,” Tait Sye, a spokesman for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America told AFP.
Kim Gandy, head of the National Organisation of Women, said Obama had reversed a policy that “has forced international family planning organisations to make an impossible choice between providing comprehensive reproductive health care and receiving funds that enable them to help women in need.” “Women around the world have died as a result of this heartless policy,” she said.
According to Population Action International (PAI), the gag rule resulted in Nepal’s largest family planning provider losing two-thirds of its total supply of contraceptives and saw the number of women in Ghana who sought care for complications after an abortion soar after contraceptive supplies were cut off to a large clinic there.