The Gates Foundation & Trump's global gag rule

Bill and Melinda Gates speak out about Trump's imposition of the Mexico City policy (the global gag rule) which blocks US money from going to any organization overseas that does abortions or even only discusses abortion with patients. This includes organizations that provide contraception to poor women, that help AIDS patients, malaria patients, patients with TB, etc.

Melinda Gates Credits Contraception With Her Personal and Professional Success ...

[O]utside the U.S. and other wealthy nations with advanced medical systems and reproductive health care, access to birth control can be “a matter of life and death,” Gates writes, crediting family-planning services with keeping 124,000 women alive in 2016. Without reliable contraception, women and children are less likely to be healthy and more likely to perish during or after childbirth. In the areas where the Gates Foundation focuses its work, spacing out children by at least three years doubles the chance of a child’s survival to age 1

In a better world, this kind of unambiguous data would engender widespread support for programs that give women the resources they need to determine for themselves when, whether, and how they give birth. In our actual world, Donald Trump reinstated and expanded the global gag rule, which cuts U.S. funding from any organization that provides abortion care, information, or referrals, even though U.S. aid already can’t go toward abortion care itself. This means some of the world’s most comprehensive, far-reaching programs in the reproductive health sphere are now ineligible for U.S. aid money. Previous research has connected the rule to spikes in unplanned pregnancies and, ironically, abortion rates in sub-Saharan Africa. Gates’ essay predicts that Trump’s reinstatement of the gag rule will bump up the number of women who want to prevent pregnancy but don’t have access to contraception, a statistic that currently sits at 225 million women worldwide ....

More on this ... Melinda Gates Thinks Every Woman Should Have Access to Birth Control and Trump's 'global gag rule' could endanger millions of women and children, ​Bill and Melinda Gates​ warn