Mr. Bush, This Is Pro-Life?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
[snippets]
ZINDER, Niger
When I walked into the maternity hospital here, I wished that President Bush were with me.
A 37-year-old woman was lying on a stretcher, groaning from labor pains and wracked by convulsions. She was losing her eyesight and seemed about to slip into a coma from eclampsia, a complication of pregnancy that kills 50,000 women a year in the developing world. Beneath her, cockroaches skittered across the floor.
Last month, Mr. Bush again withheld all U.S. funds from the U.N. Population Fund.
Village women are the least powerful people on earth. That's why more than 500,000 women die every year worldwide in pregnancy - and why we in the West should focus more aid on preventing such deaths in poor countries.
Call me naïve, but I think that if Mr. Bush came here and saw women dying as a consequence of his confused policy, he would relent. This can't be what he wants - or what America stands for.
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Nicholas Kristof Reproductive Rights Feminism Pro Choice Bush
