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A battle broke out at
the World Bank this week, with Europeans fighting to
keep “reproductive health services” and abortion
in one of the bank’s development strategies over
repeated US objections. World Bank representatives from
France, Germany, Italy and Norway fought to keep out
language proposed by US representative Whitney Debevoise
during discussions on the bank’s strategy for Health,
Nutrition and Population Results. The row thwarted any
decision and discussions stalled on Tuesday.
The talks over the strategy document
got heated when the US objected to language on “reproductive
health services, including abortions.” The US proposed
to change the phrase “reproductive health services”
to “age appropriate access to sexual and reproductive
health care,” but the Europeans charged that the
US phrasing would deny access to young women.
International Planned Parenthood Federation
(IPPF) launched an e-mail campaign to support the abortion
language and challenge the US position. Aimed at Germany’s
Eckhard Deutscher, chair of the World Bank’s board
of directors, IPPF calls for “the inclusion of
access to reproductive health services and sexual and
reproductive rights language”. Accusing the US
language proposals as being “ideologically-motivated”,
IPPF urges Deutscher and the other members of the board
to “continue to hold firm on sexual and reproductive
health and rights.”
Conservatives at the UN have noted
that while the term “reproductive health services”
has never been defined by the General Assembly to include
abortion, but that UN agencies, treaty bodies and powerful
NGOs like IPPF continue to misinterpret the term to
include abortion.
A letter dated April 19 from French,
German, Norwegian, and Belgian board members reportedly
insisted on an endorsement of family planning programs.
This is the second time in the last few weeks that the
World Bank family planning policy has come under scrutiny.
Earlier this month, reports were circulated about a
leaked e-mail accusing the bank’s managing director
Juan Jose Daboub of deleting all references to family
planning in a document on country assistance to Madagascar.
When the Daboub story was reported
by the major presses, World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz
denied that there were any changes to the bank’s
policy on reproductive health, saying it was still a
major part of the bank’s development agenda. According
to the bank’s own document, it “began working
in population and reproductive health over 30 years
ago and has lent more than $3 billion to these issues.”
In the latest C-FAM White Paper “The
World Bank: How It Comprises Economic Development by
Promoting a Population Control Agenda”, author
Andrew Essig of De Sales University analyzes the way
the bank’s support for radical family planning
and population control since the 1960s has hampered
economic development in poor countries. According to
Essig, the bank was “founded with high hopes”
to relieve the suffering and misery of war, but for
some suffering populations targeted for these aggressive
population control programs, it has “probably led
to more sickness and misery and not less” and with
“no real economic benefit to show for it.”
To read Andrew Essig’s research
paper on the World Bank: http://www.c-fam.org/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_view&gid=19&Itemid=37
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