Michelle Landsberg
Toronto Star
January 26, 2002

Just a month ago, in a pre-Christmas glow, President George Bush was posing in Washington with Farida, an Afghan refugee woman, and magnanimously signing The Afghan Women and Children Relief Act of 2001. He promised that America would stay in Afghanistan until the country was rebuilt, and he pledged "educational and medical assistance to Afghan women and children".

"We fight for values we hold dear," Bush said that day, while reviling the Taliban's "barbaric, indefensible, brutality toward women." But it's a dicey job, being George Bush's poster girl for the war against terrorism. In the cold light of January, Farida is yesterday's woman, and Bush has made an abrupt U-turn on some of those golden promises.

Last week, Bush decided to withhold the $45 million that both houses of Congress had agreed to give to the United Nations Population Fund, also known as the UNFPA. The president's sudden decision --- a political sop to the extremist right-wing of his party --- is already having a dramatic impact on programs to help women around the world, but the impact will be especially "barbaric, indefensible and brutal" in Afghanistan.

Picture a little kit the size of two decks of cards. It is called the Clean Delivery Kit, and the UNFPA has already distributed thousands of them in Afghanistan and the surrounding refugee camps. Every kit, as achingly simple and basic as its four pieces of "equipment" may seem, has the potential to save the life of an Afghan woman.

Afghan women have an average of seven children each. Contraception is virtually non-existent; sixteen or seventeen pregnancies per woman are not unusual, beginning at the much too young age of 14 or 15. Of the 1.5 million refugees who flooded out of Afghanistan when Operation Enduring Freedom began, 375,000 were women of reproductive age, and 56,000 of them were pregnant. Of the 7 million Afghans remaining inside their borders, 7 million are internally displaced, on the run from armies and bombs. Of them, 300,000 are pregnant girls and women.

They often give birth unattended, lying on the bare ground, or on filthy mattresses in crowded and dirty clinics. The kit provides a clean plastic sheet to lie on, a razor to cut the umbilical cord, a string to tie it off, and soap so that "the baby can be welcomed into the world by someone with clean hands", in the words of an UNFPA official.

The UNFPA is also deeply involved in helped to rebuild the health infrastructure of shattered Afghanistan. And yet, and yet, the American President, with his "dearly held values", now sees fit to refuse the funding that enables the UNFPA's work.

How many of those poster girls for the war on terrorism will now bleed to death, terrified and in pain, while giving birth? How many will die of raging infections, leaving another family of motherless children to the harsh mercies of that ravaged country?

It's an old Republican trick, dating back to Ronald Reagan, to keep the extremist wing of the party under control by toying with the fates of women around the world. Bush made good on his promises to fundamentalist groups on his very first day in office, when he reinstated the Reagan-era "global gag rule", which denies all U.S. foreign aid to any women's health agency in the world that dares to speak out on abortion-related issues, even if it does so with its own, non-American funds.

Now, to placate the only militant anti-choice crusader who campaigned against the UNFPA funding bill --- one Chris Smith of New Jersey --- President Bush defies the majority will of Congress, and the desperate need of Afghan women.

Note, however, that UNFPA does not promote abortions; in Afghanistan, it does not even hand out contraceptives. (Maybe it should). Bush's hypocrisy is starkly revealed by the fact that, in November, he gave UNFPA $600,000 for reproductive health work in Afghanistan. Now, to appease homegrown fanatics, he's willing to sacrifice Afghan women's lives. It's hard to square this "indefensible brutality toward women" with dearly held American values and Bush's often-expressed folksy, heartfelt indignation on behalf of the Taliban's prime victims. Mere weeks ago, Laura Bush was out there fronting for the bombing of Afghanistan in the name of the oppressed Afghan women.

Perhaps, by the time this column appears in print, Bush will have relented. Even so, his political gamesmanship is a heads-up to all who care about the future well being of Afghan women. Unless we keep up the pressure and the public awareness, those airy promises will melt away like tracer fire in the night.