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World leaders are preparing for the U.N. conference on population in Cairo this September, mindful of President Clinton’s reversal of the 1984 Reagan/Bush ban on foreign aid for family planning. But the Vatican is warning that outside family planning services will lead to Westernization–a message tailored to fundamentalist Islamic leaders, whose allegiance with Catholic countries helped defeat a section in the 1992 Earth Summit document that promoted family planning (“Still Ticking,” March/April 1993). Vatican envoy Monsignor Diarmuid Martin told Arab delegations last spring that he supported their wish to “respond to the challenges of the modern world in a way which does not damage what is precious in those traditions” important to Arab culture, including “the special role of women.” Then, two months later, delegates from Morocco and Iraq expressed concern that the Cairo conference will conflict with their cultural traditions. Population and reproductive rights organizations retorted that “culture and tradition” do not justify practices that jeopardize women’s health and freedom. But the Vatican seems to be winning its campaign. As one member of the U.S. delegation puts it, “A hierarchy of celibate men will control the rest of the world’s access to birth control.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

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