Andrea Joy Campbell: “the question before us today deals with a just and absolutely essential need in the world. I think my colleagues have…”

“the question before us today deals with a just and absolutely essential need in the world. I think my colleagues have made this clear. But one colleague in particular, my dear friend and a man for whom I have a great deal of respect, the gentleman from Illinois, said that abortion and family planning are not related; and of course that is right. Nobody wants abortion as a means of family planning. But that ignores one very important point, and it is true from anybody who has visited family planning centers in the United States. Many, many women come to a family planning center because they think they are pregnant, and their first exposure to family planning is because they think they are pregnant. That is the truth in the United States; it is demonstrably even more so in the Third World. USAID has done studies on this. In particular, in Tanzania they found that, when women came in for a legal abortion, only 19 percent had had any education exposure to, or experience with, family planning. And USAID found in Egypt that, when women came in, if they had an abortion, they left, 98 percent of them, aware of family planning. The other study is in Turkey where the realization of family planning doubled.…”