[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 14 (Monday, April 10, 2000)]
[Pages 764-767]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks on the Legislative Agenda for International Family Planning 
Assistance

April 7, 2000

    Thank you very much. Please be seated. Good afternoon, and welcome 
to the White House on this beautiful day. I want to thank all of you who 
have joined us, particularly the Members of Congress who are here. 
Representatives Carolyn Maloney and Jim Greenwood will speak in a 
moment, but I also want to acknowledge the presence of Representatives 
Nita Lowey, Nancy Pelosi, Ellen Tauscher, Lois Capps, Connie Morella, 
Joe Crowley, and Barbara Lee. Thank you for being here.
    I thank Secretary Shalala for being here and for her strong 
advocacy. And Secretary Albright and Dr. Ifenne of Nigeria will talk in 
a moment. We are joined today by the Ambassadors from Albania, Colombia, 
and Nigeria. We welcome them.
    I want to thank the foundations and the nonprofits who are here, who 
have stepped up their own support for women's health and family 
planning, and all the individual citizens who have also come here to 
take part in this endeavor.
    This week Congress begins debate on a new budget. And we have a new 
chance to return America's support for family planning around the world 
to the level it ought to be, a new chance to lift the international 
family planning debate out of partisan politics and back to what it's 
really about, human potential and human lives. I have proposed an 
increase of $169 million in USAID's international family planning 
assistance this year and $25 million to support the U.N. population 
fund.

[[Page 765]]

    Members of the administration and I have made clear at every 
opportunity that we are ready to fight, and I know you are ready to help 
us win.
    One person who is not here today, who wanted very much to be here, 
is Hillary, but she's out struggling to make sure I gain a place in the 
Senate spouses' club. [Laughter] But I would like to quote something she 
said last year at the Hague forum: ``We know that no nation can hope to 
succeed in the global economy of the 21st century when its women and 
children are trapped in endless cycles of poverty, when they have 
inadequate health care, poor access to family planning, limited 
education, or when they are constrained inside social or cultural 
customs that impoverish their spirits and limit their dreams.''
    Two weeks ago I was in a little village in India, a country with 
nearly a billion people and a per capita income of about $450 a year. I 
met the women who, with the smallest amount of encouragement, have 
started the women's dairy cooperative and taken over the local milk 
business. I saw their community center's computer that any village 
woman, poor or nearly illiterate, can use to get the latest information 
on caring for a newborn child.
    Think about how life in that one village is changing for the better 
because women have access to education and health care. Hillary and I 
have seen again and again around the world, in the smallest, poorest 
rural villages on every continent, how empowering women lifts the lives 
of individuals and transforms the future of communities.
    Family planning is a vital part of that empowerment. It allows women 
and families to make their own choices and plan their own futures. If 
you believe God created women equal, if you believe every society needs 
women's contributions to succeed, then you must be in favor of returning 
decisions on family life to the hands of women and their families.
    Around the world, the complications of pregnancy kill about 600,000 
women every year. We all agree on fighting child and maternal mortality, 
just as we're working to eradicate polio and TB. But maternal mortality 
has been stuck at the same level for more than a decade now, even though 
we know family planning could help women bear healthier children and 
save the lives of 150,000 women a year. If you're in favor of healthy 
mothers raising healthy babies, you ought to be in favor of family 
planning.
    Around the world, 34 million people are now living with AIDS, and in 
the developing world, almost half of them are women. Last year, AIDS 
killed 1.1 million women, leaving broken communities, crippled 
economies, and millions of orphaned children. If you care about stopping 
the spread of AIDS, you ought to care about empowering women to make 
safe choices for themselves and for their children.
    Around the world, more than a billion young people are entering 
their reproductive years, the largest generation in history, and the one 
behind it is 2 billion strong. More than 150 million women worldwide 
would like to limit or space their children, but they have no access to 
contraception. The option these young people have and the choices they 
make will have vital consequences for every one of us and will, in large 
measure, shape the world of the 21st century. So if you're concerned 
about the health of our planet and about the health of everyone on it, 
you ought to support our family planning assistance around the world.
    America has a profound interest in safe, voluntary family planning, 
a moral interest in saving human lives, a practical interest in building 
a world of healthy children and strong societies. And because we are a 
nation that believes in individual freedom and responsibility, we have 
every interest in supporting others around the world who seek the same 
rights and responsibilities we ourselves enjoy.
    That is why we have consistently supported family planning since 
1993. We do not fund abortion. We fund family planning we know reduces 
the demand for abortion. And I have asked Congress to return our support 
for international family planning to the level it reached in 1995, a 
level that serves our interests, keeps our promises, and leverages 
support from other donors around the world.
    I urge Congress to give us that money without restrictions that 
hamper the work of family planning organizations and bar them

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from discussing or debating reproductive health choices. Those 
congressionally sponsored restrictions impose a destructive double 
standard. When would we ever accept rules telling Americans at home not 
even to discuss women's health and women's choices? And how in the name 
of democracy and freedom can we impose those rules on others, which 
would be illegal here in the United States? That is not the American 
way.
    We know Americans favor family planning at home and voluntary family 
planning assistance abroad. We should not cloud what is at stake here. 
Does the United States want to save lives, promote mother's and child's 
health, and strengthen families and communities around the world? 
Together, we must make sure the answer is a resounding, unequivocal yes.
    Now I would like to turn to someone who has been a leader for us in 
the administration and around the world in making this case for women's 
health and women's empowerment, herself a trailblazer and a role model, 
who has distinguished herself, I believe extraordinarily, as our 
Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright.

[At this point, Secretary Albright, Dr. Ifenne, and Representatives 
Maloney and Greenwood made brief remarks.]

    The President. Well, I want to thank all of the speakers. Secretary 
Albright, thank you. And I thank Representative Carolyn Maloney, purist 
though she is. [Laughter] We need a few. [Laughter]
    And I thank Representative Greenwood; so many other Members who are 
here: Representative Pelosi, who had to leave, Representative Lowey have 
been leaders in this fight. And I thank, particularly, the Republicans 
who have joined in this fight. Representative Connie Morella here. I was 
just looking at Connie thinking, she's probably got more kids and 
grandkids than anybody else in this audience--[laughter]--and therefore, 
probably has more standing on this issue than anyone else. And we thank 
her and all the Members of the House who are here. I thank them.
    But mostly, I want to thank you, Dr. Ifenne, for being here. I think 
you could see what a responsive chord you struck. But when you were 
speaking and then when Congressman Greenwood got up to speak and he 
talked about visiting a village in Bolivia, you know, the fundamental 
problem here, I believe, is that too many people are voting on this 
issue based on either pressures they receive or personal values they 
hold dear, genuinely. But they've never actually seen this.
    If I hadn't been President, I don't suppose I ever would have gone 
to those small villages in Latin America and Africa and India and East 
Asia and met with all those village women who are, I think, the most 
impressive citizens in the entire world today, changing the whole 
future.
    When Dr. Ifenne was talking, I remembered, when I was in Senegal, I 
visited with a group of village women who came to see me from their 
little village. They wanted to come to the capital to see me, because 
Hillary had gone out to see them, and it was a village where genital 
mutilation was practiced. And these women organized the village and got 
rid of it. And so they got up, dressed in their beautiful native dress, 
and they came to see me, and they even brought along a handful of men 
who supported them. [Laughter]
    When you see these things, when you see people in the most basic 
ways taking control of their lives, and you realize it is pro-child, 
pro-family, pro-every value that any of us ever proposed to espouse, I 
believe that the United States is--in my budget, I think it's the least 
we should be doing. And frankly, I only proposed that much because I 
thought it was the most I could get passed.
    But if you were to ask me what I have learned as President about our 
dealings with other countries, I would say two things. One is, large 
countries too often forget the little people in other countries. You 
can't afford it here, because they can vote you out. But we know that 
the citizens are the strength of this country; the same is true 
everywhere. The other thing I have learned is that we get far more--that 
foreign policy is a lot more like real life than most people imagine. 
You get a lot more, on the whole, out of cooperation than coercion.
    So, Doctor, we thank you for coming. It's a long way from Nigeria. I 
hope your trip

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will prove to be worthwhile. If every Member of the United States 
Congress could hear you, I'm quite confident we would prevail. For the 
rest of us, we have to do our best to add to your voices.
    But I hope as you argue this you will remember to talk to those who 
have never been to those villages about what we know is true. The 
empowerment of individuals in difficult circumstances is the ultimate 
answer to all of our challenges, and this is a very important part of 
that.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 2:02 p.m. in the East Room at the White 
House. In his remarks, he referred to Dr. Enyantu Ifenne, Director, 
Center for Development and Population Activities of Nigeria; Albanian 
Ambassador to the U.S. Petrit Bushati; Colombian Ambassador to the U.S. 
Luiz Alberto Moreno; and Nigerian Ambassador to the U.S. Jibril Muhammed 
Aminu.