This has been American foreign policy in regards to family planning overseas more or less for the past 20 years. In 1984 Ronald Reagan first instituted the now infamous “Global Gag Rule.” The purpose of this rule being, ostensibly, to save lives in response to the forced sterilization policies put in place in some parts of the world. While this rule does not prohibit family planning per se, it places severe limitations on the range of family planning services that can be offered by non-government organizations by cutting U.S. funds to those organizations that support and perform certain services. Enough with being subtle, I’m talking about abortion.

If there is any word in the English language that can get people fired up, this is it. But let’s be realistic here; the world already has over 6.1 billion people living on it. We are expected to have close to 9 billion people on this spaceship earth, according to UN mid-range projections, by 2050. There are many good arguments for carrying capacity and such which say that 6 billion is already too much. Perhaps abortions are not the answer for overpopulation, and I am not necessarily saying that they are, but family planning is. It is a simple leap of logic to imagine that many organizations would turn down federal aid because they could not, in good conscience, pretend that abortion was not, in some cases, a viable and life-preserving option. Suppose also that these organi-zations, such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation and Marie Stokes International, are then forced to begin closing clinics due to funding losses. Whether you like abortion or not, these clinics save lives. Lives are not only saved through education and medical treatment at these clinics but lives are saved years down the road because the births of thousands of children were prevented through contraceptives and other means.

Each person on this planet uses energy, eats, drinks, and leaves an impact on the environment. Here in America, we do the most of these things compared to other countries. Despite the fact that, per capita, most other nations don’t even come close to our levels of consumption does not mean that population explosions in places like Africa do not have an effect on us or on our planet. Quite the contrary! The earth is like a bathtub and when there are too many people in the tub, nobody gets clean. It is high time that we, as “leaders of the free world” got our act together and work responsibly, without half-measures, to address the problem of overpopulation. Clearly, by limiting the scope of our aid to countries less able to control their populations than ourselves, we are doing a disservice to our global community and to the very planet itself. It is an injustice to allow our government to make decisions based upon subjective moral judgments that put peoples’ lives at risk!

There is really no way to do this matter justice in the short amount of space that I have been given. I strongly recommend that you do an Internet search for “global gag rule” or pick up your latest issue of WorldWatch magazine. Or better yet, buy a plane ticket to Afghanistan, Nairobi, or Kisumi. Ask the women of those countries if they think that family planning is a good idea. After you do these things, then you may want to write a letter to the president. You will probably end up telling him, since he seems to have missed the idea, that family planning is an essential priority for our planet’s future sustainability, the health of women and families in developing countries, and the basic right of people everywhere to be able to safely control the size and spacing of their families.