Britain Needs Its Own Mexico City Policy, to Stop Funding Abortion Overseas
One of the first of the Trump administration’s many pro-life moves was to stop funding abortion overseas. Trump reinstated and expanded the Mexico City policy that President Obama did away with in 2009. If President Trump has had any doubts about the fitness of his decision over the last two years, he has only to look to the United Kingdom, where the government is busy trying to explain to the public why it saw fit to give the scandal-plagued International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) over 130 million pounds in January. Along with Marie Stopes International, the IPPF was one of only four non-governmental organizations that refused to cease performing abortions as a condition for receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in American foreign-aid money in 2017.
British taxpayers have a lot to be angry about. The polling firm ComRes found in 2017 that 65 percent of them would like to stop funding abortion overseas. There is, of course, the fact that, according to the IPPF’s own 2017 annual report, they funded the abortions of more than 1 million unborn babies that year — and that these were mainly babies in developing countries. Brits also ought to be furious about the huge salaries paid to the charity’s officials, even in the face of an ongoing investigation into allegations of corruption and intimidation by high-level employees. But all this pales in comparison with the latest revelation: According to Kenyan court documents, the IPPF “solicited the services of prostitutes for guests during official functions of the organization.”
Yes. Pimping.
Americans, even pro-choice Americans, may want to stop reading now and write President Trump a thank-you note for reinstating and expanding the Mexico City policy. He has saved us from funding, with our hard-earned tax dollars, an organization that is accused of offering young volunteers as unpaid prostitutes to guests at African functions. The sheer hypocrisy of this is astonishing, from a charity that on its website proclaims: “Without access to basic human rights, . . . women lack the ability to have control over their own bodies” and “aren’t able to protect themselves from STI’s, unplanned pregnancies, or gender-based violence.” What control over her body could an impressionable young girl have when she is offered as a sexual favor by IPPF? How can she protect herself from a venereal disease, or from physical abuse in the process? The unplanned-pregnancy part is easy, I suppose, when you work at IPPF.
The question U.K. tax payers are asking their government is why the IPPF, an abortion NGO, is held to much lower standards than other charities are, such as Oxfam, which was cut off from aid after revelations of some of its own sordid practices. It may be that pro-abortion-rights lobbyists in their country have the same kind of hold on a segment of their politicians that U.S. lobbyists have on some of ours. Perhaps in the U.K., as in the U.S., left-leaning lawmakers are hopelessly in the thrall of richly funded organizations such as Planned Parenthood that have the money and organization to put a mortal dent in the career of any politician who doesn’t support them unconditionally.
For the U.K., in response to the current scandal, to cut off the heads of the hydra that is the international abortion industry may require the national to have a transformational leader like our own President Reagan. It was he who instituted the Mexico City policy in 1984. Some say it resulted in a loss of more than 20 percent of IPPF’s budget. Or, someone like President Trump, who has come under severe fire for expanding the policy.
Like Americans, the British are eager to be a force for good across our troubled world. They especially want to see women and children thrive, knowing them to be the most vulnerable in places where poverty and unrest make life a constant crisis. The two-faced International Planned Parenthood Foundation, taking money to “protect and care for women” while at the same time being a sink of corruption, is not a force for good.
Maybe it’s time not only for Americans to thank President Trump for redirecting our money away from IPPF but for the British to institute a Mexico City policy of their own.
