New story up at Pacific Standard:
In July of 2010, newspapers in Ghana published a “Wanted” poster featuring the face of a quiet-looking man in his sixties with rimless glasses, sideswept hair, and a deeply lined forehead. The image bore a striking resemblance to flyers used by radical anti-abortion groups in the United States to harass abortion providers—posters one U.S. court found to be tantamount to a death threat. The man was James Phillips, a demographer and professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. For more than a decade, from 1993 to 2005, Phillips had spent time working on public-health issues in the town of Navrongo, in Ghana’s rural, traditionalist Upper East Region near the border of Burkina Faso.
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Although it wasn’t clear at the time, the attack on Phillips marked the beginning of a new anti-contraception movement—conceived in the U.S., but unfolding in Africa, where women’s frustrations with the dearth of safe, effective family planning options are being co-opted and repurposed by a corner of the Christian right.
