Jun 11, 2009
David Brooks and MCP Misinformation
cowritten with Kevin Hilke.
***
On the Friday, January 23 installment of PBS’s The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, conservative The New York Times columnist David Brooks made a speculation about reproductive health so inexcusable in its ignorance as to warrant a public apology. Lehrer asked Brooks and liberal mainstay Mark Shields for their thoughts on President Obama’s decision to rescind the “Global Gag Rule” or Mexico City Policy (MCP), named for the venue of the United Nations conference at which the Reagan Administration announced its inception in 1984. “President Obama,” the Guttmacher Institute said in January,
affirmed his administration’s strong commitment to women’s health and international family planning assistance by rescinding the “global gag rule” and by committing the United States to restoring support for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). The global gag rule [...] prohibited overseas organizations from receiving U.S. family planning assistance if they used their non-U.S. funds to provide abortion information, services or counseling, or engaged in any abortion rights advocacy.
David Brooks
Shields’s hastened response—Lehrer and his producers gave this important issue a scant thirty seconds of airtime—left a good deal to be desired, but he spoke strictly, and accurately, on the politics of the move: “It’s ping-pong. I mean, the Republicans come in, take it down, Democrats come in, change it. Republicans come back, Democrats….” Brooks, to his credit, attempted to talk policy, but his ignorance on the issue made the attempt a feeble and dangerous one:
It would be very curious to know what actual effect [the gag rule, or MCP] has. I remember going to AIDS groups in Mozambique and Namibia, and we have these big social issue battles over these issues. On the ground, it made no difference at all. So it’d be curious to know what the practical effect is.
“No difference at all”? Has Brooks been in a bubble for the past twenty-five years? Neither reproductive rights advocates on the left nor Christianist zealots on the right have ceased pointing out the difference in the twenty-five years the rule took effect. Brooks might have consulted, for one, the Center for Reproductive Rights’s 2003 report “Breaking the Silence: The Global Gag Rule’s Impact on Unsafe Abortion,” which details quite concretely, using on-the-ground case studies in Ethiopia, Kenya, Peru, and Uganda, “what the actual effect” of MCP is. As Ethiopia’s Eunice Brookman-Amissah puts it, introducing the report:
Contrary to its stated intentions, the global gag rule results in more unwanted pregnancies, more unsafe abortions, and more deaths of women and girls. We who have seen those effects first-hand can no longer tolerate silence about the gag rule’s tragic effects.
Indeed, the one thing that both conservatives and progressives agree on here is that MCP has meaningful, practical, visceral effects.
This is a view shared, too, by female aid recipients who, like an Afghani national attempting understand why the United States denies her the options it affords its own women as a matter of fundamental civil rights, are baffled to be met with blank stares from U.S. development workers who are helpless to explain the patently irrational MCP. Thanks early action by the Obama Administration, she no longer needs to ask the question. Brooks, on the other hand, should immediately get on the phone with his favorite reproductive rights expert—and his Christianist “family values” advocate of choice—and start asking question after question.
[...] just doesn’t exist”—or won’t until Republicans are in charge, anyway. As we often say, David Brooks is a [...]