On family planning, US vs. much of the world

The world's rising disapproval of US foreign policy stems in part from opposition to the war in Iraq and the "with us or against us" tone of the world's only superpower.

But beneath the focus on geopolitics, such hot-button social issues as family planning and women's reproductive rights are also demonstrating America's shifting stature in the world - especially as the Bush administration seeks to placate its socially conservative base.

In a series of regional meetings on population and development, the US has pressed other countries to back down from goals in family planning and women's reproductive rights, targets set in tandem with development plans and adopted with strong US support a decade ago. At the most recent meeting in Santiago, Chile, earlier this month, 40 countries rejected a US move to stress abstinence over contraception in a declaration, and thus bring it more in line with Bush administration priorities.

US proponents of the administration's redirection of international family policy say the US is simply running up against foreign elites bent on the status quo. Those elites, they insist, do not reflect the interests of developing countries.

But critics emphasize contrary evidence in lopsided votes against the US at international progress-report meetings.

"It's one of the most drastic examples of US isolation," says Sharon Camp, president of the Alan Guttmacher Institute, an international reproductive-rights organization. Pointing to the Santiago meeting, she adds, "When every country, and in such a Catholic-dominated region, votes against your position, that's a remarkable defeat."

America's solitary stance on reproductive rights and international aid for family planning joins other factors in US isolation - among them, withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol and rejection of an International Criminal Court.

But proponents of administration policy say the apparent isolation is due to the US emphasis on primary healthcare over an outdated focus on population control. If the US is isolated, they say, that isolation is only from a global family-planning community the US itself has built up over the past four decades.

"I don't see the US as isolated, I see it as prescient," says Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute (PRI), a Virginia-based organization that monitors population-control abuses worldwide. "The US was in the vanguard back in the 1960s when the focus was the population bomb, and it is leading the way again as the focus shifts from population control to primary healthcare."

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