Here is one of the many loaded questions from a new Zogby poll, with which respondants are being confronted with:

“President Obama just reversed a federal law that prohibited foreign governments or international agencies from using U.S. funds for abortions. Do you agree or disagree with President Obama’s decision?”

Anyone who has actually read Obama’s memo and understands the so-called Mexico City Policy knows the flaw with this question. This is very clearly explained right in Obama’s memo:

The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (22 U.S.C. 2151b(f)(1)), prohibits nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that receive Federal funds from using those funds “to pay for the performance of abortions as a method of family planning, or to motivate or coerce any person to practice abortions.” 

What you should get from that is that the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 prohibits the use fo federal funds for overseas abortions. Period.

The August 1984 announcement by President Reagan of what has become known as the “Mexico City Policy” directed the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to expand this limitation and withhold USAID funds from NGOs that use non-USAID funds to engage in a wide range of activities, including providing advice, counseling, or information regarding abortion, or lobbying a foreign government to legalize or make abortion available.

So Reagan expanded the reach of the law, forbiding any group that even talked about abortions overseas from getting any federal money, even though the 1961 law forbid them from using federal money for those purposes anyway.

In addition, I direct the Secretary of State and the Administrator of USAID to take the following actions with respect to conditions in voluntary population planning assistance and USAID grants that were imposed pursuant to either the 2001 or 2003 memoranda and that are not required by the Foreign Assistance Act or any other law:  (1) immediately waive such conditions in any current grants, and (2) notify current grantees, as soon as possible, that these conditions have been waived.  I further direct that the Department of State and USAID immediately cease imposing these conditions in any future grants.

What Obama does here is simply returns the law back to its original purpose, which was to merely prohibit federal funds from going toward overseas abortions.

Zogby is hardly the only one getting this wrong. One commenter on this site said that Obama is the most pro-abortion president in history. That’s an empty talking point. Let’s look at the facts, and those are contained in his official actions. By reversing this memo, Obama’s abortion policy is on par with presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, because the same law was in effect during their administrations.

During the Reagan and two Bush administrations, the law was expanded to the point of absurdity.