We all knew the Mexico City policy would be reversed, no? It has not showed up yet at whitehouse.gov, but the media has assured us that President Obama rescinded it on January 23. So, for the next four to eight years, your tax money and mine is now permitted to be allocated toward foreign non-governmental organizations which perform and promote abortions as part of their holistic family planning and population control missions.
(I'm so tired of the "but the money doesn't have to go to pay for abortion, it can go for other things including things that prevent abortion." Money is fungible. The point of the policy is clearly not to prevent abortion or to reduce it, because as everyone has observed by now, there is no way it can do so, at least not on its own. The policy per se provides for the US to be neutral -- to decline to provide money for foreign abortion-as-international-family-planning-aid --- and because money is fungible, you can only do that by declining to give money to people who perform and promote abortion. And pressure matters. Thousands of people (rightly if you ask me) boycott Nestle because of aggressive baby-formula marketing, despite the fact that Nestle also puts some of their profits into poverty reduction programs world wide. They do good stuff; that's no reason to take the pressure off them, in fact it's an argument for continuing to keep the pressure on.)
When President Clinton rescinded the MCP on January 22, 1993, pro-life activists are reported to have taken the choice of the date as a slap in the face. When President Bush reinstated it on January 22, 2001, did they take the choice of that date as a signal of warmth towards the cause? I suppose we are to take it as something different from a "slap" that President Obama chose to rescind the MCP on the day after the hot-button date, the one that would have been the "slap."
I am not sure about that. On the one hand, the result is the same. During Republican administrations the policy is in place and the U. S. is neutral towards abortion as family planning/population control. During Democratic administrations the policy is rescinded and the U. S. is willing to send international aid to fund abortion as family planning/population control. Flip. Flop. Flip. Flop.
Looked at with as critical and dispassionate an eye as I can muster, it is certainly interesting that, in an age when issues like the economy and health care and education and the state of the Middle East are all larger than life, this one teeny tiny piece of foreign policy has been among the first items to receive the full attention of incoming administrations, three times in a row.
Anyway, back to the date. Can we assume that the date was January 23 and not January 22 "on purpose?" Is it a gesture at all? Is it a gesture without any meaning at all? Do you think President Obama thought it was meaningful from his end?
I subscribe to the theory that, when politicians who support legal abortion, or who belong to a party that supports legal abortion, make any move at all in the direction of protection of the unborn or acknowledgment of their humanity, the pro-life moment should celebrate that and let them know that the effort (however small) is really appreciated.
A gesture of waiting one day to do what was to be done anyway is a pretty small crumb. Microscopic.
Still... if the pro-life movement took Clinton's 1/22 action as a slap, not just a rescinding of the policy but a deliberate nose-thumbing, maybe it's fair to say, "OK, it's a piece of foreign policy, one we expected, it's not meant to mock American activists or as a specific response to the March for Life or anything like that. It's not like we don't already know that President Obama's not on our side."
And yet... this football, this little thing, is always one of the first things on the table.
That, not the date per se, that is significant.
UPDATE: Here's another view.
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