During the twelve months since I was last here and spoke about the threats of global overpopulation and the challenges of balancing population, our resources and the environment, 78 million people have been added to the planet, your airport has run out of room and California has run dangerously low on water and electricity. I guess I had better give a more compelling speech this time.

I was struck during the recent discussions around free trade in Quebec that, while there was talk about preserving the environment, there was no talk about the effect that population growth has on environmental degradation and the benefits that family planning can bring to both reducing that growth and enhancing the economic development of a country while reducing the strain on its natural resources.

Our country does not deal easily with these issues. But I submit that population growth and the status of women are increasingly relevant to our future, to our health, to the state of our environment and to world peace.

What should the United States be doing? Five things: supporting discounted AIDS drugs, child survival, childbirth services, family planning, and democracy building.

The problem with the first three measures is the lack of infrastructure. We can't get the medicines and services to the mothers and children who need them. What we have been able to deliver to most women who need it is the fourth thing: family planning. Family planning works. It's cheap, it's not high tech—it can get distributed. It enables women to plan and space their births. Yet despite the Cairo Accord in 1994, where the United States agreed to increase the amount we spend on family planning abroad, we have cut our foreign aid for family planning from $548 million annually to $425 million.

We as a nation should also be engaged in democracy building. Building it through non-governmental organizations and civic groups. Instead, the new administration aims to reduce the impact of women's groups in society by imposing the Global Gag Rule-- the Mexico City Policy, which prohibits U.S. Aid recipients, including International Planned Parenthood affiliates, from using money from other sources for either performing legal abortions or lobbying to change their country's abortion laws.

So International Planned Parenthood affiliates now have the choice of 1) taking U.S. family planning money, using that money to provide family planning services and gagging themselves, or 2) turning that money down, struggling on their own to provide family planning services and full pregnancy options counseling, and being able to exercise their right to free speech to lobby for abortion rights for women.

Here is what the President said in January when he announced the Global Gag Rule: "It is my conviction that taxpayer funds should not be used to pay for abortions or advocate or actively promote abortion, either here or abroad." The President went on to say that he wanted to make abortion more rare.

In contrast to the President's statement, the facts are:

• Taxpayer funds are not now and have not been used to pay for abortion for more than 25 years. This has been prohibited under the Helms Amendment of 1973. Taxpayer funds that the President is restricting can only be used for family planning, not abortion. The Gag Rule restricts what Planned Parenthood affiliates do with their own money.
• The Gag Rule will not make abortion less common. The last time we went through this in the 1980's, abortion rates went up because the best providers lost their funding. The result was an increase in unintended pregnancies.

The cumulative impact of the Global Gag Rule is that it:

• violates medical ethics,
• cuts off funds from legal abortion providers who are in the best place to provide family planning after an abortion to prevent repeat abortion,
• cuts off funds from the best family planning providers who refused to be gagged,
• hurts public health by preventing reports on maternal mortality and morbidity from illegal abortion, and
• hurts democracy building.

The Mexico City Policy, have no doubt, was aimed at International Planned Parenthood-- to put us out of business. They hope we turn down the money and go broke. Who gets hurt by all this, other than International Planned Parenthood? Women and children. The need for family planning worldwide is as large as ever.

-- Excerpts from a speech given by Sanger as Chairman of the IPPF/WHR Council in April 2001

(Full Speech in PDF).