On September 2, 2014, I attended a meeting hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies regarding the future of Global Health. CSIS is an organization made up of former Clinton administration officials and other major actors in American public policy. The panel of medical experts assembled discussed two major concerns relevant to how we allocate foreign aid. These two concerns were how to improve health care equitably and how to prevent the spread of infectious diseases like Ebola. I will shelve the discussion of inequality until later, but now it is time to reflect on infectious diseases. The Ebola crisis has revealed the manner in which prioritizing family planning over vital health initiative can be a disastrous choice.
The Ebola outbreak has revealed just how inadequate the medical infrastructure of the developing world is at containing an infectious disease. In a July article about the Ebola outbreak, J. Stephen Morrison explains how these developing countries were unprepared for the virus. Morrison reminds us that developing countries suffer from a lack of institutional stability, “Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea are three exceptionally poor, contiguous countries, each with acutely inadequate public health infrastructure, poor governance, and up to now utterly ineffectual national leadership.” As far as the international health community is concerned these outbreaks reveal that more needs to be done in order help these countries ensure the health and safety of hundreds and thousands of people. Of course, is this “crisis” being blown out of proportion?
According to the panel at CSIS, infectious diseases are not taken seriously enough by political leaders as a threat to health and life. At the conference, Tim Evans declared that viruses and infectious diseases can be “more deadly than bullets.” All of the panelists agreed that health crises do not get as much attention as military stand-offs in the Middle East for example. What these experts tried to convey is that this is an important issue that has devastating consequences if ignored. On this point, I must say I agree.
The international community and the United States government should respond by reallocating funds from its family planning budget to provide for basic sanitation and medical facilities. Abortion and population control advocates have taken away hundreds of millions of dollars away from sanitation and basic health initiatives (see my previous article here). It is time to realize that neglecting basic health initiatives in order to advance “sexual rights” is a callous dismissal of the real concerns of the developing world. As Mr. Morrison has said, “Ebola in West Africa is a wake-up call to the region and the wider international community of the need to put a higher priority on ensuring that there are the basic capacities in place to prevent, detect, and verify outbreaks and respond effectively.” Regardless of whether or not Mr. Morrison and I agree about the morality of artificial family planning we agree that the basic medical needs of communities must be met. Clinics are more useful to prevent and treat the spread of Ebola than birth control pills. Our foreign aid should reflect this reality.
About The Contributor
