World Bank May Target family Planning
WASHINGTON - Under beleaguered President Paul D. Wolfowitz, the World Bank may be scaling back its long-standing support for family planning, which many countries consider essential to women’s health and the fight against AIDS.In an internal e-mail, the bank’s team leader for Madagascar indicated that one of two managing directors appointed by Wolfowitz ordered the removal of all references to family planning from a document laying out strategy for the African nation. And a draft of the bank’s long-term health program strategy overseen by the same official makes almost no mention of family planning, suggesting a wider rollback may be underway.
The World Bank has traditionally championed birth control and other methods of family planning as a key strategy to improve women’s health and economic status.
The controversy has raised worries among some bank officials and health advocates that the Bush administration’s conservative stance on family planning issues may be seeping into the institution.
The managing director, Juan Jose Daboub, denied he was making substantial changes to the bank’s policy or that he demanded deletions to the Madagascar report. Daboub, a Roman Catholic with ties to a conservative Salvadoran political party, questioned staff outrage directed at him.
“To me this sounds like a storm in a glass of water,” he said in a recent interview. “There is no reason understandable for this.”
Bank staff members dispute Daboub’s claim that he made no changes to the Madagascar report. “It’s a blatant lie,” said one staffer who has seen the document. Like other internal critics, the employee requested anonymity because he said he feared for his job.
A copy of the report obtained by the Los Angeles Times shows repeated deletions of references to family planning and contraception.
Women’s health advocates said the situation was worrisome. “There’s mismanagement there,” said Carmen Barroso, a regional director for the International Planned Parenthood Federation. “Wolfowitz appointed a guy in a very high position who felt free to censor in line with his personal beliefs. I think that’s good grounds for sacking.”
The controversy has added fuel to anger at the bank over Wolfowitz’s management style and his involvement in two unusual and large pay raises given to his girlfriend, Shaha Ali Riza, a bank employee on loan to the State Department.
Wolfowitz’s problems have been compounded by revelations that Defense Department officials told one of their contractors to hire Riza for a short-term contract while Wolfowitz was the deputy Defense secretary. The Pentagon announced Wednesday that it was looking into the matter.
These issues will be on the table as the bank’s board of directors meets today to debate Wolfowitz’s future.
The board reportedly met Tuesday to discuss changes made to a draft document that lays out a long-term “Strategy for Health, Nutrition and Population Results.” These papers, periodically revised, set bank policy and shape funding.
Overseen by Daboub’s office, a draft version raised alarms among some staff members because it contained only one reference to family planning, and that was to a past project.
The current policy paper refers to family planning at least 23 times, repeatedly identifying it as a fundamental tool for tackling poverty and disease.
Scaling back family planning funding “would have a tremendous impact because the World Bank is a major lender in the health sector, particularly in the poorest countries,” said Bea Edwards, international director at the nonprofit Government Accountability Project.
The bank lends to private organizations such as the Gates Foundation as well as the United Nations Capital Development Fund.
The Bush administration has imposed its beliefs about family planning and abortion on other international organizations.
It has cut funding for U.N. agencies that promote family planning, forbidden any group it funds to discuss abortion and pushed abstinence programs.
Bank staff members say the Madagascar plan has been finalized and worry that other country plans may be altered as well.
Daboub said he would send at least 11 country reports, including Benin, Chad and Cameroon, to the board before December. “I respect the freedom of our partner countries to decide” on family planning, he wrote in an e-mail to colleagues meant to quell their anger.
Daboub said he did not ask that family planning be struck from the Madagascar report. “It is not true,” he said.
Yet internal e-mails obtained by the Government Accountability Project appear to indicate otherwise. Referring to Daboub as the “MD,” an acronym for his title as managing director, Madagascar country program coordinator Lilia Burunciuc wrote to colleagues on March 8, 2007: “One of the requests received from the MD was to take out all references to family planning. We did that.”
Burunciuc added that this is “a potential problem for us” because Madagascar had made a “strong request for help” on family planning in the document, which serves as a three- to four-year plan for the goals a country wants to achieve with the bank’s help.
Madagascar identified improved family planning as one of its national commitments.
Yet a copy of the report includes edits and deletions, which a bank staffer said were made by Daboub’s office, showing that specific targets to boost contraceptive use were cut and broader aims were rewritten.
In one graphic, the words “improved quality of health services to ensure easy access, affordability and reliability” were inserted in place of “improved access and provision of contraceptives.”
Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times
I cannot help but wonder just what there is in it for these rich bastards here in our world to keep starving people half a world away from controlling the size of their families. These poor folks are already unable to feed their children. Why force them to have more kids they can’t feed? Is it just to pander to the Pat Robertson’s of the world with their twisted ideologies or are they somehow hoping that this will make them monies? I am missing something…what is it?
They need more cannon fodder, simply put.
This is a very bad policy. While population issues tend to get ignored, we can’t stop global warming or other environmental deterioration without stabilizing population.
While improvement in education and social security may help reduce the birthrate, it just won’t be enough without family planning.
Environmentalists need to become more vocal on this.
I believe, along with the pandering to the christian right, that the pharmaceutical companies have something in this for them. They need more guinea pigs.
The answer to tom’s question is found in Economics 1A, Lesson 1: the more destitute people you have competing for jobs, the lower the amount of pay they will accept.
This concept is the foundation of market fundamentalism and the “global economy”.
andersdl,
I agree, the cost of labor goes down when there are more laborers competing for the jobs. And true believers like Wolfowitz think they are upstanding moral citizens as they adhere to the free market religion. Before it is finished, the free market religion may make the Catholicism of the Spanish Inquisition look tame and humanistic by comparison.
I think an economic reason for scaling back family plannng is secondary. Right-wing conservative Christians got their President, their Congress, have put in their judges, and their Wolfowitz. These people know what God wants and, praising the lord, trample upon those who aren’t one of them. The creeping Christian fascism is becoming more visible. The election of 2008 can’t come fast enough!
Divide and conquer. Everyone will fall if the family is divided. Your only support will be the church.
This has been part of Lord George’s policy all along! We must remember that
“women’s health” is important and must remain important! The more desperate
the peasant, the more power the overseer.
Daboub is a from El Salvador; a place where selling condoms can get you brought up on charges for murder. The attractive part of poverty for the rich bureaucrats is that they get a piece of very dollar allocated o “help” the poor. The overseers of the programs to eradicate poverty and starvation generally live in very nice housing and drive about in very nice automobiles. Very little help ever arrives at the doorstep of the poor.
Insane religionists operating through mad politicians like Bush conspire to promote the population explosion that is expanding social chaos and making their precious “Armageddon” inevitable. So, it’s the extremist churches and mosques that are plotting and maneuvering toward a global holy war that will destroy God’s creation, the Earth? Perhaps in their psychosis, they turned into the scheming ministers of Satan their sermons deplore!
It’s really much simpler . . . educated women control challenge the status quo. Who stands to lose if women improve their lives and those of their children?
Wolfowitz as head of the World Bank is just another example of the lengths to which the neo-cons will go to get their ilk into control of everything in the world. The previous responses are great, but the main thing that needs to happen is to strip the neo-cons, the PNAC folks, the GDG people and any other imperialists and/or fascists of their power; strip them of their wealth and work for a just society worldwide. Family Planning and birth control are just as important for our survival as a species as is a turn-about for global warming.
“Family Planning and birth control are just as important for our survival as a species as is a turn-about for global warming.”
Well said, and I agree 100%.
One way to strip the neo-con society of its wealth and power is to reduce the human population by giving women the right to decide if and when to birth how many or few children, and devolve to continental networks of eco-tech villages that farm and trade for family and community, and surround themselves with miles of healthy wilderness, and recycle 100 percent of industrial and human waste, using whatever technology is helpful.
This may not seem possible now, but it’s a goal to work toward so humanity can live in peace and balance with the Earth - and survive.
I think conservatives are against family planning not only for reasons of religious domination of women but because the more world population grows, the cheaper the labor becomes for their corporations.
Conservative’s solution for overpopulation is to kill others and steal their resources. To keep growing forever, centralizing power and concentrating wealth until they’ve consumed the world.
“Family Planning and birth control are just as important for our survival as a species as is a turn-about for global warming.”
If this is true, then we must believe that after millions and billions of years of “evolution”, we have just now reached a point at which killing babies in the womb is the only answer. What will be next? If that is truly the case then the end must be near.
No, I take that back we have tried other things like that before. There were the Spartans, the Holocaust, Rwanda, Saddam Hussein, etc. Even these heinous acts were overlooked, tolerated and accepted for a time.
I propose that only those who believe there should be fewer people on Earth should be the ones who have to die. If anyone truly believes that the death of some is imperative for the survival of the rest of us, then…. martyr anyone?
As an ex Bank health person, I find this quite disturbing. The family
> planning issue is complex. While I was at the Bank, there was
> considerable debate on how to deal with family planning. One group
> advocated a focus on population and population control. There were
> others of us that believed this often backfired politically and that
> family planning should be included as a component of broader health
> services support. The argument being that one of the strongest
> determinants of lowering maternal morbidity and mortality was the
> continuous, voluntary availability and access of modern family
> planning services to women of reproductive age. One study we did in
> Catholic Philippines showed that if every women of reproductive age
> that voluntarily desired to control their fertility could/did, population would be at replacement levels.
>
>
> All of the health service projects I took to the WB Board while at the
> bank contained a family planning component. During the Bank reviews
> this was never an issue. The only question I received from the Bank
> Board prior to approval was from the US Director, “does the project support abortion?”
>> If what is described in this article is accurate, Wolfie and his
> cronies must go.
>>
> Stan