Promoting birth control in Africa faces a host of obstacles – patriarchal customs, religious taboos, ill-equipped public health systems – but experts also blame a powerful, more distant force: the U.S. government.

Under President George W. Bush, the United States withdrew from its decades-long role as a global leader in supporting family planning, driven by a conservative ideology that favored abstinence and shied away from providing contraceptive devices in developing countries, even to married women.

Bush’s mammoth global anti-AIDS initiative, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, poured billions of dollars into Africa but prohibited groups from spending any of it on family planning services or counseling programs, whose budgets flat-lined.

This is not news for me. I have already read about this issue. I think it was in the book Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey D. Sachs