It Takes a Village by Hillary Rodham Clinton Page B

doing this come from abroad. I’m reminded in particular of a clinic I visited in a rural part of Indonesia.
    Every month, tables are set up under the trees in a clearing, and doctors and nurses hold the clinic there. Women come to have their babies examined, to get medical advice, and to exchange information. A large poster-board chart notes the method of birth control each family is using, so that the women can compare problems and results.
    This clinic and thousands like it around that country provide guidance that has led mothers to devote more time and energy to the children they already have before having more. The fathers, I was told, have also been affected by the presence of the clinic. They are more likely to judge their paternal role by the quality of life they can provide to each child than by the number of children they father.
    This community clinic program, which is funded by the government and supported by the country’s women’s organizations and by Muslim leaders, is a wonderful example of how the village—both the immediate community and the larger society—can use basic resources to help families. The honest, open, matter-of-fact manner of dealing with family planning issues that I observed in Indonesia provided me with a point of comparison to the approaches I have observed in many other places.
    The openness about sexuality and availability of contraception in most Western European countries are credited with lowering rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion among adolescent and adult women. By contrast, more than one hundred million women around the world still cannot obtain or are not using family planning services because they are poor or uneducated, or lack access to care. Twenty million women seek unsafe abortions each year.
    In October 1995, I saw a striking example of the consequences when I visited the Tsyilla Balbina Maternity Hospital in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. I learned that half the admissions there were women giving birth, while the other half were women suffering from the effects of self-induced abortions. I met with the governor and the minister of health for the state, who have launched a campaign to make family planning available to poor women. As the minister pointed out to me, rich women have always had access to such services.
    We may think that our country is far from this end of the spectrum, but the statistics tell a different story. Two in five American teenage girls become pregnant by the age of twenty, and one and a half million abortions are performed in America each year. It is a national shame that many Americans are more thoughtful about planning their weekend entertainment than they are about planning their families. And it is tragic that our country does not do more to promote research into family planning and wider access to contraceptive methods because of the highly charged politics of abortion. The irony is that sensible family planning here and around the world would decrease the demand for legal and illegal abortions, saving maternal and infant lives.
    As usual, the children pay. When too-young parents have children, or when families expand without the means to support their growth, children are affected by the burdens and anxieties of parents who cannot meet their obligations. Family planning, more than just limiting the number of children parents have, protects the welfare of existing and future children.
    The Cairo Document, drafted at the International Conference on Population and Development in 1994, reaffirms that “in no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family planning.” And it recognizes “the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing, and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so.” Women and men should have the right to make this most intimate of all decisions free of discrimination or coercion.
    Once a pregnancy