Another two million in countries such as Kenya, Mali, or Senegal live with a debilitating side effect of the delivery that often leads their husbands to abandon them. After a long and difficult labor, a tear called a fistula occurs, leaving the woman unable to control her bladder or bowels.

For the past four years, women’s health activist Jane Roberts has been traveling around the country quoting statistics like these, but she says not a day goes by that they don’t make her see red. That’s because the deaths and the disabilities were preventable for just a dollar or two in medical supplies that President Bush refuses to buy.

Every year, Congress allocates $34 million to the United Nations Population Fund, a 38-year-old organization that brings health education, birth control, and safe-birth supplies to the women of the world, along with fighting AIDS and genital mutilation of girls. And every year since 2002, the Bush administration has refused to send the money on the long-discredited grounds that it will be for coerced abortions in China.

Roberts, a 65-year-old retired French teacher who lives in Redlands, Calif., was so incensed in 2002 that she felt she had to do something. The idea she came up with was simple: If 34 million people were to give just $1, the UN Population Fund would have its money. So Roberts started sending out e-mails.

That was the start of 34 Million Friends, a grassroots initiative co-founded by Roberts, who has since traveled to Mali and Senegal to meet women the fund has helped, written a book on the experience (34 Million Friends of the Women of the World, Lady Bug Press) and, in 2005, was named a Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year.

To date, 34 Million Friends has raised just under $3.5 million for the UN Population Fund. That’s only a tenth of the goal. But for a woman living in Africa, says Roberts, who will speak on women’s health March 7 as part of an International Women’s Day event at Seattle Central Community College, even $1 counts.

“When people say, ‘What can a dollar do?’” Roberts says, “I say, ‘It can save a woman’s life.’”

One effort of the Population Fund — which goes by the initials UNFPA for its original name, the United Nations Fund for Population Activities — is to distribute safe-birth kits that include a sterile plastic sheet, a bar of soap, a sterile razor blade to cut the umbilical cord and a piece of string to tie it off.

It “gives women a safe place to have their baby and it prevents tetanus,” Roberts says. Total cost of each kit: $1.25.

While President Bush continues to sit on the organization’s U.S. funding, she says, a record 180 nations contributed a total of $360 million to UNFPA in 2006.

Blocking the funding “really puts us outside the mainstream and hurts our reputation in the world,” Roberts says. “People are just baffled by what many consider to be a [U.S.] war against women.”

[Event]

Jane Roberts (34millionfriends.org) will speak on “Taking Action for Global Women’s Health” on Wed., March 7, 7 p.m., at Seattle Central Community College, Room 209-210, Broadway and Pine, Seattle. Info: (206) 632-8547 or info@NOWSeattle.org.