When Virginia legislators first began considering a forced trans-vaginal ultrasound bill, progressives wondered: "What kind of world are we living in, when "informed consent" is tantamount to state-sanctioned rape?" Here's what kind of world: the kind wherein a mandatory ultrasound law scads worse than the proposed Virginia bill has already been in place for five months. In Texas. And right now there may be no feasible legal way to stop it.
After weeks of protest in the state of Virginia and nationally, Governor Bob McDonnell signs a bill forcing women to have and pay out of pocket for an expensive and often medically-unnecessary medical procedure before they can terminate a pregnancy, suggesting it is an effort to "empower women."
In 2012, three years before the 2015 deadline the world set for itself to reduce preventable maternal deaths and new HIV infections, we must act more boldly than we have up until now. The global health community must work to bring family planning and HIV services together – and quickly – to save women’s lives.
Improving access to sexual and reproductive health services is necessary to advance the Millennium Development Goals. At this critical moment, however, funding priorities for family planning are being shifted away from Latin America and the Caribbean, which may undermine the substantial gains that have been made in the region and overlook the tremendous need that still remains.
"Sting" operations carried out by anti-choice groups who want to eliminate women's access to abortion and birth control have become an issue in the United Kingdom where misrepresentation of the issue of sex selection is being used in a new series of attacks on providers.
Women Deliver, the maternal health advocacy group, today named its “Women Deliver 50,” a list not of individuals, but of solutions, focusing not on the "who" but the "how of change, and hopefully inspriing people to think bigger and crazier, and do better work.
Weekly global roundup: USAID unveils a new policy on gender equality and women's empowerment - but is it too late? Women struggle in fledgling South Sudan; FIFA may let women play in hijab; and unsafe abortion haunts Nepal despite liberal laws.
