One of the big "gotchas" of last Thursday's Republican debate was directed at Jeb! Bush for having been on the board of the Bloomberg Family Foundation director from March 2010 until he stepped down in late 2014. Jeb! said he was only on the board because it did stuff with education, he didn't know about the Foundation's work with Planned Parenthood, and that he had a solid record of forcing Florida's women to have limited reproductive health choices and to have babies whether they wanted them or not.
So here is the work of the Foundation that Jeb! thinks he has to run away from.
Since 2006, the foundation has invested more than $12 million alone in a maternal health program in Tanzania. The additional $50 million Bloomberg announced in 2012 helped to expand the Tanzania project, which provided family planning, as well as post-abortion care, in several health centers. Abortion is largely illegal in Tanzania except to save the life of the mother, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights.
The money also paid for “advocacy grants” to organizations in Nicaragua, Burkina Faso, Senegal and Uganda to improve access to reproductive health services, contraception and family planning information.
Those four countries were jointly selected by Bloomberg’s philanthropy and Planned Parenthood Global, the international division of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
“When women have the power to decide if and when to have children there are fewer unintended pregnancies, fewer maternal deaths, and greater opportunities for women, families and their communities,” Cecile Richards, President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement in 2014. “To do this, governments need to play a stronger role to ensure that all women have access to the health care they need, no matter who they are, no matter where they live.”
Saving non-American women's lives clearly is not something Jeb! wants to be associated with. Not that Jeb! "I'm not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues" Bush has such a
stellar record on women's health issues here at home, either. This is the guy who blocked Medicaid funds from paying for women's health services when he was Florida's governor. This is the guy who used his line-item veto power
to axe $2 million in funding for a breast cancer research institute AND a
measly $30,000 for a cervical cancer tax force.
When Jeb! says we don't need to spend money on women's health issues, he clearly means it.