His decision will defeat his own political purpose. He says the Declaration of Independence should include the unborn in America, but he has said nothing about the 92,000 dead infants a year abroad who may be a victim of the myopic policies of Republican congressional leadership. Bush is trading away even more than the lives and rights of pregnant women in developing nations. He is trading away American credibility. Developing countries increasingly link family planning to economic development and increasingly see safe abortions as one of the options, however troubling, that a woman must have.
Abortion transcends political and religious boundaries.
Egypt, Nigeria, Mexico, Bangladesh, Lithuania, and Turkey all have about the same rate of abortion as the United States. Before Reagan, the United States was seen as a leader in helping nations provide access to family planning. Clinton had begun reasserting that leadership. Bush is taking us back to a blindness about the bodies. He is taking us back to a time when, as far as abortion goes, we were a developing nation.