Educating women is one of the most effective methods for combating crippling poverty and disease in the developing world. Education is conversely related to infant mortality; the more education a woman receives, the lower the chance that her children will die in their first year of life. Women who are sufficiently numerous and literate to run a cottage industry, create a farm management plan or read about nutrition are better prepared to make choices about their lives and the lives of their children.

Intimately tied to a woman’s educational and economic opportunities is the age at which she first gives birth and also the number of children she bears. Children change women’s opportunities, from primary schools in rural Africa that will not allow students with children to many cultures for which motherhood signifies the transition from focusing on oneself to focusing exclusively on one’s children, even if having children renders a woman completely dependent upon her husband for food, health care and shelter.

Traditional systems arose to provide for members of the society, ensuring a community of people with symbiotic roles. However, while the rationale behind maintaining traditional systems prevails, rapid technical and economic changes have rendered many communities as broken circles. All too often, women and their dependent children are left without the support they could expect in a traditional system.

An exodus of men pursuing lives in industry, a disproportionate number of men receiving secondary and tertiary education while their sisters and wives stay back in the villages and the ravages of AIDS, war and famine have left many women and their children without a provider. Women capable of caring for themselves and their children are essential to breaking the cycle of want in too many places around the world. Capability evolves, in large part, with education.

Among the educational measures taken around the globe to empower women are programs collectively termed family planning. One of the largest global umbrellas for family planning is the United Nations’ Population Fund. Programs sponsored by the U.N. agency include educational programs for child and infant nutrition, pre-natal health, basic reproductive health education and the distribution of feminine hygiene products to women throughout the developing world.

In a world without the videos we see in junior-high health class and devoid of the diagrams in our high-school biology texts, many women are unable to access information about the basic functions of their bodies, the changes their bodies undergo during pregnancy and the unique needs – nutritional and otherwise – of expectant women.

Information about matters of sex and fertility often are based in erroneous myth. Not the variety of myth associated with a community’s stories about itself, but the kind of myth that sends people on a destructive path. For example, among the Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania, the prevalent belief that eating regular meals during pregnancy will endanger the child has led to unnecessary miscarriages, bone loss, infant mortalities and maternal death.

The skyrocketing incidence of HIV infection in South Africa accompanies an even more tragic epidemic. Myths about sex with a virgin ridding one of the deadly infection have led to an epidemic of rapes, including brutal violations of infants and girls.

Secretary of State Colin Powell told the U.S. Senate that the work done by the U.N. Population Fund was invaluable in providing “critical population assistance to developing countries.” President George Bush agreed, by progressively proposing an increase in funding to the fund over the level provided by the Clinton administration.

However, last week, under pressure from the conservative groups the Republicans desperately need to gain a decisive majority in the Congress in the mid-term elections, Bush withdrew his support. Despite a government fact-finding trip that found no evidence of UNPF money being used for sterilization in China, funding for women’s health and educational programs in the developing world was pulled.

While the money may be diverted to the State Department’s Agency for International Development, the situation underscores how easily the health and well-being of the world’s most vulnerable can be deprioritized in political posturing.

Some family planning opponents believe that by supporting the United Nations Population Fund, the U.S. government is endorsing abortion. Obviously, funding something many consider immoral is a poor choice for voluntary contributions.

The fact is that abortion as a population control strategy is not a feasible idea in many developing nations. Many nations and faiths prohibit the practice. In many places, medical facilities and personnel are simply not equipped to provide abortions, much less in a sterile environment with safe instruments and an untainted blood supply. Moreover, supporting abortion is far more expensive, requiring physicians and nurses, instruments and hospital stays. Compared to informational leaflets, women’s nutrition workshops, and contraceptives, abortion is an inefficient use of family planning funds in the developing world.

Many of the cultures operating in the traditional system hold in high regard the potential of life and the sanctity of motherhood. Promoting programs that patently disregard such values, thrusting a traditional woman into the post-modern minefield of choice and failing to adequately provide the educational and health support required for healthy women and children due to priority funding for abortion is not a sustainable or realistic policy.

The Bush administration should honor its commitment to providing for the health of women and children. Health education and nutritional assistance are hardly points of debate. Send the $34 million proposed to the United Nations Population Fund and stipulate that it be used specifically in education and outreach. Stability and development arise as women become more educated and empowered, more able to make the decisions they and their children need to thrive and survive in a rapidly developing world.

Rachel Faber Machacha is a graduate student in international development studies from Emmetsburg.