But the administration interprets the use of reproductive rights in the document as a code for abortion rights.

Similarly, the administration is said to be offering lukewarm support to countries aggressively pursuing condom campaign and not abstinence.

To drive this point home, the administration as passed a policy that requires 33 percent of the billion of dollars pledged for HIV/AIDS programmes in Africa go towards abstinence programmes.

The President of the United Nations Foundation, Timothy E. Wirth, said: "Tens of thousands of women are now being infected every year and the US should be held responsible."

According to Wirth, the world can no longer pretend and that the US had become the epitome of regression where women's reproductive choices had been curtailed and millions more condemned to a sure death.

The Director General of International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), Steven Sindling said that as a result of the 'global gag rule', there has been an increase of unwanted pregnancies around the world: "More deaths from pregnancy-related causes, more HIV infections sand more unsafe abortions."

Sindling expressed concern that much is at stake for the world's women in the November American election: "Every American needs to think carefully about the need to safeguard the sexual and reproductive health and rights of women, men and young people at home an in the developing world."

Speaking on the impact of the global gag rule to the youth, Marcela Howell the Director of Advocates for Youth said that for the 1.1 billion youth between ages 15 and 24 the ideologically driven abstinence until marriage programme had little information to protect them from unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, including HIV and AIDS.

Howell said young people have a right to sound prevention strategies that are based on science and not politics.