DOTTIE BUSH WAS A FAMILY PLANNING ACTIVIST

In 2002, President George W Bush blocked $34 million appropriated by Congress to the UN Population Fund. In 2001, he cut funding to the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

George Bush's grandmother must be spinning in her grave. This stalwart supporter of birth control has a grandson who has refused to fund the United Nations Population Fund.

A friend of my mother's told me the following bit of history about her friend Dottie Bush. This was during the time when Anthony Comstock, a crusading Protestant, passed US laws prohibiting the dissemination of contraceptive information and devices. Mrs Bush and her friends all knew doctors who would break these laws to enable their private patients to space their children, but they also knew low-income women without access to contraceptives had unwanted babies or illegal abortions. These prominent women decided to start the Connecticut Birth Control League. They set up a clinic on the second floor of a house. The ground floor provided the cover, as it housed a women's exchange shop.

One day, they heard that the Governor would raid their clinic in two days. They held an emergency board meeting. The three members with the largest limousines offered their cars and chauffeurs to empty the second floor. My friend said, "Dottie's car wasn't big enough but mine was, so I oversaw the midnight evacuation of all medical supplies."

Ten hours later, the Governor arrived with a motorcycle escort of state troopers. As he emerged from his limousine, he nodded toward the second floor. Troopers swarmed upstairs while he purchased trinkets. When they came down, the head trooper gave the universal sign, hunched shoulders with empty hands unturned, for "We couldn't find anything." The Governor paid up and left, never to return.

What a contrast! The President's grandmother defied the law to help low-income women, while her grandson uses his power to increase the misery of low-income women who are unable to feed the children they have.

Harriet Stinson is the founder of California Republicans for Choice. Reprinted with permission from the Population Media Center Newsletter, November 2002.