The conservative cowboys of the media are throwing their hats in the air and tap-dancing on the tables to celebrate George Bush’s overwhelming dominance of American (and world) power.

They’re cheering because now the rich will get even richer and George Bush will be absolutely unstoppable in his war on Iraq, his war on terrorism, his remorseless war on the U.S. poor, and his war on women around the globe.

They certainly must know, if they’re even half awake, that Bush’s religious crusade has already brought disease, unimaginable physical suffering and death to countless young women and babies. When he celebrated his very first day in office by reinstating the “global gag rule”— arbitrarily refusing U.S. aid to any women’s health agency in the world that so much as mentioned the word “abortion” — he set the tone. Next he cancelled the $34 million U.S. contribution to the United Nations Population Fund, and the oppressive impact on women (more about that in a minute) would have gladdened the hearts of the Taliban.

Then, at a meeting in Bangkok in late October, Bush went even further. Delegates from Asia and the Pacific had gathered to prepare for a United Nations population conference in December. The U.S. sent a newly appointed, inexperienced but confidently fanatic spokesperson, together with John Klink, a hardliner who formerly represented the Vatican, to threaten the rest of the world. The U.S., they told the stunned delegates, is all set to withdraw its support from an historic 1994 agreement on reproductive health.

George Bush, in other words, is gearing up to police the wombs of the world’s women.

What a sick joke: this ignorant man (now hailed as “shrewd” because he won the election on the backs of the World Trade Centre victims and a prostrate Democratic opposition) has allied himself morally with the very nations that he loves to denounce as “the axis of evil”. Aside from the Vatican, unflaggingly determined to impose its religion on the bodies of all women everywhere, Bush has no greater ally in this campaign than the fundamentalist Islamic nations.

But what exactly has he done? Let me backtrack. Here are just a few of the programs slashed or suspended when Bush yanked that $34 million from the U.N. Population Fund last summer:

* Family planning programs in eight rural districts of Kenya (programs that taught about HIV/AIDS prevention, contraception and safe delivery);

* An initiative to cut maternal deaths in Mozambique, and to stop the spread of AIDS among youth;

* Training in emergency obstetrics for doctors in Bangladesh, where one woman dies every hour from complications in pregnancy and childbirth;

* The first-ever population study in East Timor, to help plan an AIDS prevention program among youth, refugees, fishermen and sex workers;

* A two-year plan in the Indian state of Maharashtra (population 99 milllion) to reduce neonatal mortality. About 500 babies will die needlessly this year alone, and 200 to 300 more women will die in childbirth;

* a plan to train 4000 Vietnamese health care workers and supply 500 clinics in remote mountain areas with essential medical equipment and drugs;

* Programs to supply contraceptives in Thailand, Nepal, Algeria, Kazakhstan, Laos.

And now, ostensibly because they insist that the U.N.’s approach to reproductive health means “abortion and nothing but abortion” (a willful misunderstanding), the Americans are ready to pull back from the Cairo Program of Action. At a U.N. population conference in that city in 1994, the world turned decisively toward support for women’s human rights. Instead of forced campaigns to limit fertility, the U.N. member states would offer women the education and medical support to make their own informed decisions about disease prevention, pregnancy and birth.

Little known outside U.N. circles, the Cairo agreement was nevertheless an important stride forward. The world’s most disadvantaged women would now be entitled to the same dignity and freedom as the most privileged.

But with Bush’s threat to reject the Cairo principles, all that is reversed. Funds for key world health programs may be jeopardized. The rights of women world-wide will be brushed aside so that Bush can reward his religious-right supporters.

I once believed that women’s progress, so hard-won, could never be reversed. George Bush is going to show us, however, just how we can be pushed back. Over the next two and maybe six years, he will appoint countless extremist judges and bureaucrats to whittle away the laws and institutions that protect U.S. women’s equality rights. America, once a beacon of feminist achievement, will become a dread example of what can happen when religion and politics entwine to waltz us back to the dark ages.

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