This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
Administrator J. Brian Atwood
International Family Planning: Building a Bipartisan Coalition for Foreign Assistance
The Community Forum, Bucks County, PA, December 2, 1997
U.S. Agency for International Development
It is a pleasure to be here. It is often easy in
Washington, as we argue for resources and justify our
policies to the Congress, to underestimate or be
distracted from the critical support grass roots
organizations such as those represented here today
offer to USAID and its programs.
So at the outset let me express my appreciation for
the activities of all of the Bucks County organizations
represented today. Keep up the good work. We need
you, and I am glad to have the chance to talk with you
today. Special thanks to Maggie Groff of Planned
Parenthood for facilitating today's forum-- and to the
Pennswood Social Concerns Committee for hosting us.
I also want to thank Congressman Jim Greenwood
for his support of development assistance and in
particular his leadership in Congress in educating
members about the importance of family planning and
reproductive health programs. Congressman
Greenwood is one of the most determined advocates for
family planning both in the U.S. and overseas.
Congressman Greenwood, in the finest spirit of public
service, has risen above partisan politics aside and has
done what is right. I thank him for his statemanship.
As you may know, USAID stands for the U.S.
Agency for International Development. USAID funds
many programs designed to improve the health and
well-being of our world's poorest citizens. We also
work with developing countries to develop the type of
political, economic, and social institutions necessary to
enhance trade and investment and improve standards of
living not only of developing countries but, in the long
run, our own country as well.
With respect to international family planning
assistance, we fund a wide range of programs,
including contraceptive research, research on how to
most efficiently and effectively deliver family planning
services, training for doctors and other health workers
in provision of contraceptives and other medical
services, and procurement of modern contraceptive
methods.
You may have actually seen mention of our
programs recently in the newspaper, when the
international family planning program was highlighted
during Congressional debates. The past two years have
been difficult times for supporters of family planning.
Unfortunately, each time Congress debates family
planning the dialogue quickly becomes entangled in the
debate about whether we should try to gag or constrain
the activities of groups with whom we work overseas.
From the beginning of my tenure as USAID
Administrator, I decided that we cannot unnecessarily
shackle such a critical humanitarian program. When
the population program is threatened, so are the lives
and well-being of many thousands of women and
children. Likewise, America's credibility as the leader
in family planning programs around the world.
So why is family planning assistance being
attacked? Certainly, it is not because America's family
planning programs somehow cause abortions. Again, let
me be unequivocal: family planning prevents abortions.
A woman faced with an unintended pregnancy may
take desperate actions in order to protect her health, or
the health and well being of her family. Data from
countries as socially and religiously diverse as
Hungary, Russia, Mexico, and even our own United
States show clearly that increases in effective use of
contraception cause decreases in abortions.
For two decades, U.S. population assistance
programs have strictly adhered to our law forbidding
the use of U.S. funds to support or promote abortions
overseas. Those of us trying to build a bipartisan
coalition of support for family planning need to dispel
the myth that this is a debate about abortion. When we
fail, the program is cut and shackled.
But when the debate focuses on family planning we
win, because family planning works, it is voluntary,
and it is making the world a better place by protecting
human health, facilitating economic development, and
preserving the environment. The voting patterns in
Congress bear out this basic trend.
Family planning programs have been one of the
greatest success stories of U.S. development assistance.
These programs have helped bring down family size
from six children to three children. Smaller family size
has meant, healthier, better cared for and more
economically productive families. And it has meant
slower population growth, and therefore a healthier
environment. By demonstrating our concern for the
health and well being of families in the developing
world, the United States is advancing its most humane
and compassionate values.
The fact is that in the one short hour that we will
be here together, the population of the world will
increase by nearly another 10,000 people. Most of
these 10,000 people will be born in the developing
world, where competition for scarce resources is
already fierce and where hopelessness is a common
currency.
Global population is not the only cause of
environmental degradation, famine, economic
stagnation, high infant mortality rates and ethnic
conflict. But we must recognize the important
amplifying effect of rapid population growth on all of
these threats to the world today. If we fail to see that
smaller, better cared for families are in everyone's best
interest, our legacy could well be one of growing
disorder, social degradation, and conflict.
Today, there are over 100 million couples in the
world who would use family planning if only they had
access to high quality contraceptive services. Compare
that to the 290 million couples currently using family
planning. Fulfilling unmet need could reduce maternal
deaths by at least 20 percent -- which means saving the
lives of 100,000 women each year.
Voluntarism is the essence of USAID's population
assistance programs. Let me be clear, we reject with
equal firmness the extremists on both sides: those who
would involuntarily impose coercive programs and
those who would deny women access to family planning
services. The former is the reason we cannot and will
not condone the coercive policies of the People's
Republic of China. The latter is the reason we cannot
accept the reimposition of the Mexico City policy.
We seek to avoid these extremes and focus instead
on meeting basic human needs and supporting informed
decision-making. Our family planning programs work
to ensure that women and men have the information to
make informed decisions about the size of their
families, and the contraceptives and services to prevent
unintended pregnancies. Thirty million couples around
the world are practicing family planning today because
of U.S. assistance.
Our maternal health programs work to provide
prenatal care and nutrition, to develop effective and low
cost ways to identify high risk pregnancies, and to
establish low-tech -- but lifesaving -- referrals for
women whose lives are in danger from complications of
their pregnancies.
Our child survival programs have pioneered the use
of oral rehydration, case management for pneumonia,
immunization outreach, and have demonstrated the most
dramatic decreases in child mortality over the shortest
time span ever seen.
Our programs to prevent AIDS and other sexually
transmitted infections have demonstrated the value of a
strategy which aims both at changing high risk sexual
behavior and at early detection and treatment of
infections, and we are seeing the first evidence of a
slowing of the AIDS epidemic in countries from
Thailand to Uganda.
And our new commitment to education for girls
and women is reflected in the bright smiles of girls at
school in the highlands of Guatemala and the eager
intensity of young women in the hills of Nepal who are
reading their very first words.
Through the enlightened work of people like
yourself, we will help create that better place, a world
in which care deeply about people, and combine our
values and beliefs with concrete actions that help to
make them a reality.
While all of you here today are deeply concerned
about the issue of international family planning, many
of you would also to here about many of the other
activities of USAID.
The last several years have found the development
community doing a lot of soul, searching about how to
make development more effective as the world around
us has changed rapidly. Losing the geostrategic
rationale has been tough on our budget, but the end of
the Cold War could be the best thing that ever
happened to development. For the first time, we are
being allowed to pursue a development agenda based on
achieving results.
We now live in a world where political and
economic freedom have advanced. Our government no
longer sees supporting morally bankrupt leaders as
either good politics or good policy. Today, we live in
a time when we can focus development with great
intensity on promoting economic growth, fostering
democratic systems, and addressing global health and
environmental problems.
The American taxpayers should be pleased to know
that our program today invests in their future. It
invests in job security as we create the new markets of
the 21st century. It invests in environmental protection
as we work to create a climate change strategy for the
developing world. It invests in our health safety as we
try to deal with dangerous diseases at their source.
The history of the Marshall Plan, the remarkable
standard of living reached by countries such as South
Korea and Taiwan, the victory over smallpox
throughout the world, the peaceful transition to
democracy in South Africa and Poland and the spread
of democracy throughout our hemisphere show us one
thing. Multifaceted development assistance programs
work. The challenge is ahead is how to use the scarce
resources we have, together with other international aid
donors, to make development assistance work better
and in a way that best advances our national interests.
Like many other government agencies, USAID
faces very tight budgets in the years ahead. There is a
bipartisan commitment to a balanced budget by the year
2002, and our aid programs must deal with that policy
directive. In practical terms, development assistance is
unlikely to increase, except possibly to adjust for
inflation.
This budget cloud has, however, a silver lining.
Despite the severe budget cuts in U.S. aid levels, the
United States has retained real influence in shaping the
common agenda among the donors. We have convinced
our friends and allies that we cannot measure success
simply by the money we can spend, but the impact of
our programs. As such, we have tried to stress the
need for a prudent, budget-conscious development
assistance strategy based on the following principles and
programs:
- the need for more work in the democracy-governance area, and for the principle that economic
progress cannot be sustained in the absence of strong
political and judicial systems;
- strengthening the capacity to work in nations
emerging from conflict, nations such as Angola,
Bosnia, and Cambodia;
- stressing consistent patterns of relief, recovery, and
development, instead of merely lurching from one crisis
to another with our scarce funds;
- promoting the key role of women in development,
combining maternal health programs with access to
family planning and reproductive health services, child
survival programs, girls education, and the economic
opportunity created by microenterprise programs;
- the promotion of economic growth and open
markets, which lie at the heart of development, while
emphasizing that economic growth does not occur in a
vacuum, and cannot be sustained without strong and
open government institutions, sound environmental
management, sustainable population growth, and
healthy and well-educated citizens.
Despite the many successes of development
assistance, there are still very serious challenges before
us. Despite the Koreas, Taiwans, Singapores, and
Polands, we must recognize the overwhelming problems
in other parts of the world. For example, 22 of the
world's 30 poorest countries are in Africa. A quarter of
all African children die before their fifth birthday from
disease and malnutrition. Only half of all adults are
literate, and fewer than 20 percent of young people can
attend high school.
We also face the consequences that continuing
problems of underdevelopment and economic
grievances, perceived and real, have produced
throughout the planet. Regional conflicts have become
more violent, and the human, financial and political
cost of these conflicts is staggering.
Since the Gulf War, the United States has mounted
27 military operations as a result of ethnic conflicts and
failed states. Up to one million people lost their lives
through genocide in one year in Rwanda. In the former
Yugoslavia, the loss of human life in less than four
years was the greatest in Europe's post-World War II
history. The number of refugees and displaced persons
in the world now numbers close to 50 million. While
there are many causes for these conflicts, the fuel that
fires many of today's civil and ethnic conflicts is
poverty, and the inability of nations to realize lasting
social, political, and economic development.
Finally, there is the scourge of HIV/AIDS. More
than 40 million children in 23 developing nations will
likely have lost one or both of their parents to this
disease by the year 2010. In countries across Africa,
Asia, and Latin America, HIV/AIDS is unraveling
years of economic and social development.
USAID has established 540 HIV/AIDS projects in
42 countries. We have reached more than 14 million
people with comprehensive HIV prevention education,
trained more than 5,000 people and provided support to
more than 300 private voluntary and nongovernmental
organizations to implement HIV prevention programs.
But there is still so much more to be done.
Let me conclude that the success of USAID, and
our development and trade assistance programs
generally, have always rested on bipartisan support, as
well as the support of civic-minded individuals and
groups like yourself. You have been the key to
sustaining our critical work. To this I am most grateful,
for an informed electorate enhances USAID's ability to
continuing our work in the many ways we do and in the
many diverse places where we operate.
And again let me thank Congressman Greenwood.
He understands that development assistance is not a
Democratic or Republican program. It is an American
program, advancing clear national interests and
representing a win-win strategy both for ourselves and
those in developing countries.
But just in case he faces foreign aid critics in his
district, let me stress that foreign aid is not a giveaway.
U.S. exports to countries receiving U.S. aid have
grown by 76 percent from 1990 to 1995, creating
hundreds of thousands of jobs here in the United States
as we improve the quality of life in recipient countries.
As we face the 21st century, those of us who support
development assistance have much to encourage us and
much to challenge us. In that regard, I hope I can
continue to work with all of you on the critical
problems facing our world, and USAID's efforts to deal
with them. Thank you very much.
This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
