Letters to the 108th Congress

March 12, 2003

Dear Mr. Chairman:

I am writing to express the American Bar Association’s opposition to efforts to extend the so-called “Mexico City” policy to the disbursement of federal funds under the U.S. Leadership Against HIV/AIDS. Malaria and Tuberculosis Act, pending legislation that embodies the President’s proposed emergency AIDS relief initiative. The Mexico City policy currently bans foreign nongovernmental organizations receiving U.S. family planning assistance from using their own money to provide any abortion-related services. The American Bar Association is concerned that incorporation of a similar prohibition in legislation that would increase funding for HIV/AIDS relief and prevention in Africa and the Caribbean will seriously undermine efforts to treat infected women and children, who are especially at risk in those targeted areas

Women now represent half of those infected with HIV worldwide and 55 percent of those in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the AIDS pandemic has taken its greatest toll. In some parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, the infection rate for adolescent girls is five times that for adolescent boys. Sadly, the discrimination suffered by women and children diagnosed with HIV or AIDS has done more to fuel the pandemic than perhaps any other contributing factor in this region of the world.

Women and children with HIV or AIDS are commonly ostracized by family and friends because of the parochial assumption that they contracted the infection from immoral behavior. They are often physically abused, driven from their family homes, and forced to live on the streets and fend for themselves. Understandably, women who fear that they or their children might have HIV or AIDS are afraid to seek medical help from clinics that are well known to provide AIDS care. Reproductive health programs or other health programs that offer a variety of services in addition to HIV/AIDS diagnosis and treatment, therefore, are critical to effective HIV care and prevention efforts because they enable women to discreetly receive HIV care and prevention counseling, thereby reducing their risk of persecution.
While the ABA opposes in principle any federal law, regulation or policy that prohibits foreign non-governmental organizations that receive U.S assistance from using their own funds to provide health-related services that are legal in their own country, application of such a policy in these circumstances would be particularly egregious because it would undercut the effectiveness and purpose of emergency funding legislation by undermining efforts to educate, diagnose and treat people with HIV or AIDS in the most devastated regions of the world.

The American Bar Association urges you to resist all efforts to attach Mexico City funding restrictions to policy initiatives that are meant to provide much needed assistance overseas to combat the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Sincerely,

Sidney D. Watson
American Bar Association AIDS Coordinating Committee

cc: Members, House Committee on International Relations

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