Eyes Right!

Paying Kenyan Women to be Sterilized

Project Prevention, formerly Children Require a Caring Kommunity (CRACK), pays women drug addicts and alcoholics in the United States and the United Kingdom to be sterilized or to use long-term contraception. The project has now expanded to Kenya, where it is offering women who are HIV positive $40 to have an intrauterine device (IUD), a form of long-term birth control, implanted by a doctor. South Africa, Project Prevention says, is next.

According to the organization’s website (www.projectprevention.org), Project Prevention’s goal is to increase public awareness of the problem of women giving birth to drug-addicted children. It “seeks to reduce the burden of this social problem on taxpayers, trim down social worker caseloads, and alleviate from our clients the burden of having children that will potentially be taken away.” Because the group doesn’t have the resources to eliminate poverty and drug addiction, the website says, “Those resources we do have are spent to PREVENT a problem for $300 rather than paying millions after it happens in cost to care for a potentially damaged child.”

In Kenya, Project Prevention seems similarly to define a poor woman’s child as a “problem” to be “prevented.”  Giving birth control to HIV-positive women, the organization says, will “prevent the conception of a child who will only be born to die.”

Reproductive justice advocates on the Open Society Blog (blog.soros.org) point out that this idea is false on two counts: first of all, explains Anne Gathumbi, the program manager of the Health and Rights Unit at the Open Society Initiative for Eastern Africa, and a founding member of the Coalition on Violence against Women in Kenya, “Overwhelming evidence shows that transmission of HIV can be stopped by giving mothers the medicine Nevirapine before delivery.” Second, adds Betsy Hartmann, the director of the Population and Development Program and professor of Development Studies at Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts, “It ignores the fact that HIV is a chronic condition, not an automatic death sentence. With access to healthcare and the appropriate medicine, people with HIV—both adults and children—are living much longer lives than in the past.”

Hartmann explains that Project Prevention’s funding comes from right-wing sources. According to Forbes.com (October 19, 2010), one of Project Prevention’s main funders is the conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. Barbara Harris, Project Prevention’s founder, told Forbes.com, “I met him years ago. It was an honor.”

Hartmann says that Project Prevention’s targetting of drug addicted women in the United States and HIV-positive women in Kenya is racist. “There is a long history of population control organizations using incentives and disincentives to pressure poor people to be sterilized,” she says. “These were roundly rejected at the 1994 UN population conference in Cairo, but they persist, for example in China and India.”

Asked what her message would be to people considering supporting Project Prevention’s African initiative, Gathumbi had one word: “Don’t,” she said.

A World-Class Deadbeat—Again

In 2009, the Obama administration ended a decade of nonpayment and forked over the $750 million the U.S. owed in back dues to the United Nations. Republicans had blocked paying the U.S. obligation, arguing that the U.N. undermines U.S. sovereignty and that the dues might pay for abortions.

The U.N. has long been a target of the right-wing conspiracy theorists, especially the John Birch Society, which believes that it aims for a “one-world” government that will enslave the world’s population. Today’s Republicans are more narrowly focused on projects such as the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.N. Population Fund. At the end of February, led by the new chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), the House cut funding for the two projects and for U.N. peacekeeping activities.  

“These are the kind of extreme measures I don’t think we’ve seen for years,” said former Sen. Tim Wirth (D-CO), president of the independent United Nations Foundation and Better World Fund.

House members have introduced legislation that would make additional cuts. According to columnist Renée Loth of the Boston Globe, “Representative Kevin Brad of Texas filed something called ‘The Cut Unsustainable and Top-Heavy Spending Act of 2011,’ which would slash $300 million from a different U.N. account. Representative Blaine Luetkemeyer of Missouri led the attack on the climate change panel, complaining that its Nobel prize-winning scientists have ‘whipped up a global frenzy about a phenomenon that is statistically questionable at best.’”

Islamophobia on FOX

Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and potential 2012 Republican presidential candidate, who is a Baptist minister, criticized Protestant churches that provide space to local Muslims. “As much as I respect the autonomy of each local church, you just wonder, what are they thinking?” Huckabee said on the program Fox and Friends. “If the purpose of a church is to push forward the gospel of Jesus Christ, and then you have a Muslim group that says that Jesus Christ and all the people that follow him are a bunch of infidels who should be essentially obliterated, I have a hard time understanding that.” Huckabee went on to compare renting church space for Muslim prayers to renting it to show “adult movies.”

The director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Nihad Awad, called on Muslims to ask Huckabee to apologize and to meet with Muslim leaders. “As always be POLITE,” the CAIR press release advised its constituents. Quoting the Koran, Awad explained that Muslims believe Jesus was a prophet. “Infidels,” he added, is “a term used only by Hollywood B movie directors.”

Meanwhile, Huckabee’s FOX colleague, Glenn Beck, warned his viewers of a vast conspiracy involving Google, Islamic fundamentalists, Communists, President Obama, and others, to establish a “caliphate” and a “new world order. 

The Los Angeles Times Calls for Uganda Sanctions

In a February 1 editorial, the Los Angeles Times condemned Uganda’s notorious Anti-Homosexuality Bill. “Uganda is not alone in its attitudes toward gay rights,” said the paper, “but for the moment, the spotlight is on it. The country should reject this appalling bill immediately and decriminalize homosexuality. The United States gave Uganda $526 million in aid in fiscal year 2010. More than half of that goes to programs to combat AIDS and HIV, and the State Department is reluctant to pull that as leverage. But if the bill passes, that should be reconsidered. Maybe it would persuade Uganda’s lawmakers to move into the 21st century.”