[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 30 (Thursday, March 8, 2001)]
[House]
[Pages H813-H814]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               INTERNATIONAL FAMILY PLANNING AND HIV/AIDS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Pence). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton) is 
recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, today is International Women's Day. Women of 
the world have very little to celebrate. Tragically, the new President 
withdrew family planning counseling across the developing world, where 
family planning had begun to have a structural effect on life for men, 
women and children.
  The average family size where people have had access to family 
planning assistance has been reduced in a very short period of time 
from six to four. Now, we see the closing of clinics.
  Mr. Speaker, what troubles me most this evening is the effect on the 
spread of AIDS. Just this week, we learned that India is about to 
experience the same tragedy that has overtaken Africa, as AIDS spreads 
like wildfire across the Indian continent.
  When we in this country think of AIDS, we think of it as a male 
disease, but worldwide, 50 percent of those or almost 50 percent of 
those with AIDS are women. Seven percent of the people with AIDS are in 
sub-Saharan Africa. Ninty-five percent of the AIDS worldwide are 
orphans. Eighty percent of women with AIDS worldwide are in sub-Saharan 
Africa.
  If this epidemic moves, as it now seems to be, to India, what we will 
be seeing is the engulfing of continents where most of the world's 
people live with AIDS. How do we stop that? We know that the drugs, the 
expensive drugs, are simply not going to millions upon millions of poor 
people.
  Family planning is a preventive low cost way, not only of planning 
family size with all of the effects that has on development, but it is 
a way to stop the spread of this deadly disease. Integration of AIDS 
treatment and detection and prevention with family planning is a 
critical way to go at this epidemic.
  In the same place, counseling for family planning, counseling about 
AIDS prevention can be the most essential one-stop health service in 
the world today. It eases significant costs.
  And perhaps most poignantly, we can begin to prevent mother-to-child 
transmission of AIDS, the most tragic consequence of this epidemic.
  Did we know that girls, little girls, are far more likely to become 
infected than little boys? It is probably because it is far easier to 
take advantage of little girls.
  Preventing AIDS and controlling childbirth must take place in the 
same orbit and in the same place. We, of course, have made that much 
more difficult at a time when we should be embracing ways to conquer 
the AIDS epidemic.
  On this International Women's Day, I call upon the administration to 
look for ways to increase both AIDS funding and family counseling. 
Family planning counseling, and certainly the availability of 
contraceptives, the way we have thought necessary in this country, the 
double standard that we have used to make contraceptives available here 
but deny it in developing countries is having tragic effects well 
beyond anything we imagined.
  This evening I cannot stand here and say that there is an answer to 
the world spread of AIDS. I can say that this country has within its 
grasp the tools to keep this epidemic from completely overwhelming 
developing countries.

[[Page H814]]

  Mr. Speaker, if we do nothing else this International Women's Day, I 
ask that we think about women in the Third World who have been 
abandoned by our contraceptive counseling policy, and I think we, at 
best, have an obligation to think seriously about how to make our way 
back to the inroads we were beginning to make.

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