Congress has once again found its foreign-aid bill stalled over abortion language that it would never try to impose at home. In a world where unsafe abortions kill tens of thousands of women each year, a gag rule on abortion is a harmful trap that has had, as its primary result, the delay of funding for health care and family planning.

With Congress ready to complete its session either late this week or next, international family planning money stands at a requested $542 million from the White House – a level that would erase a 30 percent decline in funding since 1995 – $425 million in the Senate and $385 million in the House. The House version, unlike the other two, however, includes what is known as the global gag rule, adopted first by the Bush administration, which says, in effect, that no U.S. family planning money may go to organizations that fail to sign a pledge promising they will neither perform nor promote abortions – even if they do so with their own private funding. On the campaign trail, Gov. George Bush supports the gag rule; Vice President Al Gore opposes it.

President Clinton has both rejected the gag rule, when he first came into office, and grudgingly accepted it when Congress tied it to the United States paying arrears to the United Nations. He should reject it this time and favor the Senate version, which both Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins properly supported.

U.S. law already prohibits the use of U.S. funds to pay for abortion. Family planning programs worldwide spend most of their resources trying to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Providing a reliable, steady source of funding for these organizations so that they may coordinate services and build long-term agreements in poor countries is essential. The relief group CARE reports that nearly 600,000 women die every year of pregnancy-related causes – 99 percent of these deaths occur in the developing world.

A prohibition on organizations from even mentioning abortions as a choice would not stand up in a U.S. court; there’s no reason for Congress to export a value the country itself doesn’t hold. And no reason to stop funding that would reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies worldwide.