Because Of Hillary Clinton, Emergency, Contraception Is Banned In Honduras

Eric Zuesse

Of course, one of Hillary Clinton’s proudest claims is that as the U.S. Secretary of State she championed reproductive choice throughout the world. She championed it in words, but her actions were sometimes in the opposite direction, and there is perhaps no nation where her actions as the U.S. Secretary of State had a bigger impact than Honduras, which case will therefore be examined, and her impact on this documented, here:

The reason that the morning-after pill, which enables raped women to avoid becoming pregnant from a rape, was made illegal by the government that now exists in Honduras, is that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton persuaded President Barack Obama not to terminate U.S. financial aid to the coup-regime that came into power there on 28 June 2009. Without that aid, the democratically elected President would quickly have been restored. Though the U.S. Ambassador in Honduras told Secretary of State Clinton that there was no way in which that coup was legal and that consequently it undoubtedly was a “coup” and that existing U.S. law therefore required U.S. funding of the Honduran government to cease immediately, she ignored the law, and she ignored everything except her friend Lanny Davis the lobbyist whom the coup-plotters had hired to represent them to Democrats (a different lobbyist was hired to represent them to the congressional Republicans). President Obama took his Secretary of State’s advice and refused to enforce the law, and Hillary Clinton publicly praised what the regime was doing. The regime was condemned throughout Latin America, because the coup, which consisted of the local aristocracy or ‘oligarchs’, overthrew the democratically elected President of Honduras, who had wanted a land-reform law to be introduced. Immediately after the coup that overthrew him, the newly installed regime allowed the aristocrats’ paid thugs to murder anyone who tried to lead the opposition; and therefore the regime that had been imposed by Honduras’s aristocracy and kept in power by America’s aristocracy, has remained stable since. However, after the coup, Honduras has had the world’s highest murder-rate. Thus, it’s a stable but now extraordinarily violent country. (Detailed documentation of every allegation in this paragraph can be found in the “Honduras” section of this article I earlier wrote about “Hillary Clinton’s Six Foreign-Policy Catastrophes”; and that section on Honduras, in turn, links to 68 sources, which provide the sometimes gruesome details regarding Hillary Clinton’s impact upon the lives of the Honduran people since the coup. However, that article didn’t mention this matter concerning contraception, rape, and abortion; and, so, the present article will be an extension from that earlier one, dealing specifically with Hillary Clinton’s impact upon family-planning and reproductive choice in Honduras.)

One feature of the new, U.S.-backed, regime, was the imposition of draconian fundamentalist laws against contraception and intensifying the abortion-ban. On 13 February 2012, the Center for Reproductive Rights headlined “Honduras Supreme Court Upholds Absolute Ban on Emergency Contraception, Opens Door to Criminalize Women and Medical Professionals” and reported:

The Honduras Supreme Court has upheld the country’s absolute ban on emergency contraception, which would criminalize the sale, distribution, and use of  the “morning-after pill” — imposing punishment for offenders equal to that of obtaining or performing an abortion, which in Honduras is completely restricted.

“By banning and criminalizing emergency contraception, Honduras is telling the world it would rather imprison the women of its country than provide them with safe and effective birth control,” said Luisa Cabal, director of international legal programs at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “Today’s decision from the Honduras Supreme Court blatantly disregards women’s fundamental reproductive rights and completely ignores the respected medical opinion of experts around the globe. It will cause significant harm in the lives countless women and doctors across the country. …

Consequently, the hell in Honduras has been accentuated by punishment of women who have been raped, and punishment of doctors and pharmacists who try to help them.

The President whom Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the ten main aristocratic families of Honduras, overthrew and prohibited from running for President ever again, Manuel Zelaya, had, in April 2009, vetoed a law that the Honduran legislature (controlled by those ten families plus another 15 or so) had just passed to ban the morning-after pill. So, that law didn’t enter into force until the U.S.-imposed regime restored it. However, the restoration of the ban wasn’t final until this decision was handed down by the Honduran Supreme Court. As Amnesty International said at that time:

 On 1 February, the Supreme Court in Honduras upheld a decree imposing an absolute ban on emergency contraception. This decree was vetoed in May 2009 by the former President on grounds that it conflicted with the Constitution. The Supreme Court has now concluded that the decree is constitutional and that Congress can begin to develop laws enforcing a ban of the emergency contraceptive pill on the basis of its alleged “abortive” nature. The World Health Organization, Pan-American Health Organization, and several other expert bodies have clearly stated that the emergency contraceptive pill is not abortive; it is a form of contraception that works by ensuring the egg is inaccessible and impeding fertilization. The criminalization of the emergency contraceptive pill will have appalling consequences. For example, rape victims will be unable to prevent pregnancy …

And so it has been in Honduras.

During the period since the 28 June 2009 Honduran U.S.-backed coup, the hell in Honduras has been so bad that Honduras has become one of the top sources of illegal immigration into the United States. The world-record-high murder-rates and crushing poverty, with no opportunity for the public to ‘move up in the world’ other than through becoming one of the paid enforcers for the aristocrats, which often also entails leading the now-booming drug-gangs there, has essentially forced out of Honduras millions of residents, and many of them have escaped through Mexico into the United States, in order to be able to have a decent life, rather than murder and be murdered.

Hillary Clinton’s opponent in the U.S. Presidential campaign, Donald Trump, never talks about the hell that Clinton and Obama have been imposing around the world (except regarding non-Christian-majority countries such as Libya), and he seems to view illegal immigrants as if U.S. foreign policies have nothing to do with creating the problems that those people are facing, but there is no indication that he would continue those policies, which have been causing them to be illegal immigrants here. To the contrary, his anti-interventionist foreign-policy proposals would be inconsistent with coups and invasions regarding any foreign country whose government is not posing an imminent threat to U.S. national security. Trump’s foreign-policy proposals are not in any way favorable toward those of Hillary Clinton (who is simply an extreme version of Obama’s worst policy-orientations). (And America’s own Federation of American Scientists has stated that Obama is lying in order to ‘justify’ his policy now to ignore existing in-force nuclear treaties with Russia as being supposedly not violations of them. So, though he may not be as much of a neoconservative as she is, he basically is one, too. His aggression against Russia is subtle, but forceful.) Consequently, at least regarding foreign policy, a President Trump would be authentic change, irrespective of whether a particular voter would approve of that change as opposed to continuing America’s existing foreign policy but in a more extreme way. Among other things, a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote to retain the status-quo in Honduras and around the world, but to go much farther in the same direction. A vote for Donald Trump is a vote to change that status-quo — to change (and in some important respects reverse) that direction.

The biggest impact of this election will be on foreign (including both economic and military) policy. Even domestically within the United States, the difference between the two candidates on foreign policies will have a much bigger impact, including possibly even nuclear war, than will the other policy-areas, which the general public erroneously think will have a bigger impact upon their lives and their future than will foreign policies. (And here are quoted recent reports in the Washington Post, Spiegel, Huffington Post, and other serious media, discussing her preparing her coming Administration’s plans and personnel for a war with Russia; and Obama is right now setting everything up for her to be able to start the war as soon as possible.)

Regardless of whether the American public know it, the main impact of this Presidential election will be on foreign policy, including on the immense impacts that foreign policy will have domestically.

So: this is not the time when the U.S. will be progressing but instead regressing, and intelligent voters will be aiming to minimize the harms, rather than to achieve progress. Progress, at this stage so late in the game, is still being hoped-for only by some fools who happen to be also progressives. Any intelligent progressive, at this late stage, is focused entirely upon minimizing the harm. And the maximum harm could happen with surprising rapidity. (Back in 1961, the estimation of experts was that — as one of the few who spoke publicly stated — “A nuclear war between the United States and Russia would be all over in 24 or 48 hours because both sides would let go with their full atomic arsenals.” The estimates today are far more precise but unpublished, and they’re all well under an hour — some as low as 20 minutes.) There wouldn’t be any surrender, nor any armistice. There would only be the end of civilization, and unspeakable misery (including details that are ignored by the major media, such as this) until practically everyone is dead (from starvation if nothing else). Those are the stakes in this election.