Africa's family-planning funding drought

In a brightly painted house on the edge of the crowded slum of Eastleigh, teenage boys bicker during an energetic game of ping-pong, while girls compare patterns in a room cluttered with sewing machines.

Occasionally, someone slips away to a barren room upstairs where the real business of this center takes place: HIV testing and counseling for young Kenyans.

Just over a year ago, these rooms were packed with women, mostly poor and from the surrounding slums, who came for low-cost contraception, prenatal care, and general reproductive health services.

But funding for family planning has been drying up. Groups are starting to feel the effects of Bush administration regulations that ban aid to those who perform or advocate abortion. At the same time, the battle against HIV/AIDS - which includes prevention as well as issues like AIDS orphans - has taken precedence over more general family planning. And because the two efforts are not integrated, family clinics are finding they're losing ground.

For Africa, where a new United Nations report says 1 in 16 women dies during pregnancy - often of a failed abortion - women's groups warn that the results of such funding cuts could be devastating. "Everything now is about HIV/AIDS," says Linus Ettyang, program manager of the Family Planning Association of Kenya (FPAK), which turned the Eastleigh clinic into a youth AIDS center when it lost US funding in 2001. "The tragedy is that loss of that funding for family planning will lead to more abortions and more women dying in childbirth."

But many religious organizations hail the US stance, saying that family planning clinics are responsible for the high rate of back-street abortions in Kenya. "We have some abortion going on in the hospitals. That has been always been, but a good part of that is lack of counseling," argues Father Raphael Wanjohi, founder of a group called Pro-Life Kenya. "The counseling they get is since you are single and you have nobody to assist you, the best thing is to abort."

At a meeting in Cairo five years ago, UN member states developed a 20-year plan to slow population growth globally, arguing that poverty and the population explosion were linked. The plan's key objectives included boosting the availability and funding of family planning services, especially to the poor, and improving women's reproductive health and access to contraception.

But nine years later, contraception and abortion continue to be sharply divisive issues in many conservative African countries, especially ones where the Roman Catholic Church is strong, as it is in Kenya. More than 30 percent of Kenyans are Catholic, including the country's new president, and the church here has been vocal in opposing not only abortion, but also any sort of contraception, including the use of condoms to prevent the transmission of HIV/AIDS.

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