Aid and family planning
By Kath Gelber
Should Australian overseas aid be linked to the promotion of family planning programs? According to Senator Brian Harradine, never. His anti-contraception, anti-abortion, anti-family planning, anti-sex and anti-woman comments have received a great deal of publicity lately.
Harradine was able to get $34 million out of a total allocation of $130 million for family planning programs frozen, pending the outcome of an inquiry into that funding. In return he agreed to support the federal budget.
Nice deal, really. For some, that is. The independent inquiry has since found that family planning programs are "beneficial" to Third World development. The federal government is under pressure to unfreeze the $34 million. The Australian Council for Overseas Aid has called for immediate resumption of family planning projects.
But what exactly do we mean by "family planning projects"? And how do they benefit Third World development?
In Brazil, for example, a huge 40% of women of reproductive age have been sterilised. The aid provided by foreign governments to Brazil has been linked to family planning programs that promote sterilisation — which is carried out overwhelmingly on poor and poorly educated women. Often sterilisation is performed on women undergoing caesarean section — at times without consent.
Some have called sterilisation a subtle form of genocide, another means by which the industrialised nations are able to carry out their policies of exploitation of the resources of the developing nations.
Other family planning programs around the world have been criticised for their lack of choice and manipulation of women's reproductive role. In 1989 Tapol, the Indonesian Human Rights Campaign, made the very serious allegation that schoolgirls in East Timor were being injected with contraceptives without their knowledge. In the 1970s coercive sterilisation programs were in place in India.
Are these instances sufficient to call for an end to funding of family planning programs? Not, in Harradine's terms, because family planning is "wrong" but because the programs may be used as a means of the industrialised countries of the north controlling the reproductive capacity of the women of the south for their own interests?
That approach would also be short sighted. Women have been campaigning in the developing countries for better access to contraception, better access to safe and legal abortion, in short, for control over their own bodies. Women having the ability to control their reproductive capacity means, among other things, having access to education — a broad education that allows women to know about and make decisions about alternatives in their lives. Currently, women make up two-thirds of the 900 million adults in the world who cannot read or write. Educating women improves their quality of life, as well as reducing infant mortality rates and family size.
So when countries like Australia investigate how they spend their overseas aid, all these issues need to be taken into account. The stated objective of overseas aid is to improve the quality of life of its recipients. We need to make sure this is what it actually does.