From the article:
"A new study shows abortions actually go up when the U.S. pulls funding from NGOs offering abortion referrals. That's only one way underserved populations suffer...
The new Lancet study found that between 1995 and 2014, whenever international patients stopped receiving contraceptives and family planning advice due to the gag rule being reinstated, rates of pregnancy—and abortions—shot up. It’s not the first study to suggest this effect.
'It’s hard to imagine a framing of the policy that is both able to simultaneously restrict funding for abortion and actively promote contraception,' Nina Brooks, the lead author of the new Lancet study and a doctoral student at Stanford, told me.
Marie Stopes International (MSI) offers programs around the world to help women and girls access contraception, family planning, abortion, and other services. Although MSI conducts abortions with non–U.S. funding, its U.S. funds went toward contraception and family planning. MSI refused to sign the gag rule, and lost about $80 million in U.S. aid.
'People think this rule prevents U.S. funding from going to abortion. Well, that’s always been the case,' Kimberley Lufkin, head of U.S. communications for MSI, told me. 'This is really just for contraception.' One MSI program, for instance, focused on traveling to rural communities to offer family planning and contraception in pop-up clinics. In the wake of the gag rule, 20 of these mobile clinics in Madagascar and five in Uganda were shuttered. 'The women live in remote villages, where it would take them three days to walk to a clinic,' Lufkin says. 'We used to come to them, and now they really don’t have anywhere else to go.'
The trend toward higher rates of abortion can be halted entirely when the gag rule is lifted, the Lancet report’s authors say. 'Our hope is that one would look at the unintended consequences that we find and realize that no matter what your view on abortion, this doesn’t seem like a good policy,' Grant Miller, director of the Stanford King Center for International Development and one of the study’s authors, told me.
AMODEFA has continued to operate as many clinics as possible despite the massive funding cuts. Their stance on abortion has not changed. In fact, they are trying to open two more abortion clinics to fill the void left by the rule—and to keep women from turning to more dangerous options. What effects the rule will have on HIV, tuberculosis, and other health issues in Mozambique, and around the world, is still unknown."