The Lebanon Conflict & Reproductive Health: UNFPA Steps Up

Sarah M. is a college student working in Washington, D.C. this summer. We're excited to have her working with us on Rewire for the month of August!

Currently there are an estimated 750,000 people displaced in Lebanon, with no end to the violence in sight. Of those 750,000, statistics suggest that slightly over half are women and girls.

Those of us who have watched popular medical dramas, or those of us who have followed humanitarian crises in the past, know that babies do not stop being born when there is an upheaval—natural or man-made. Women do not suddenly stop needing reproductive health care. People still have sex and family planning is still necessary. Miscarriages still happen and complications in birth do not wait.

Youth Blogger: Hard Lessons Learned in Lobbying

Monday was my quintessential intern experience. Advocates for Youth rounded up interns from organizations across the city and had us join forces to lobby for the Protection Against Transmission of HIV for Women and Youth Act of 2006, better known simply as PATHWAY.

I was excited as Monday approached. I was going to lobby. I was going to talk to the representatives. I would persuade them with jargon like PEPFAR, socially responsible spending, micro-lending, and female-initiated methods of prevention. I would reason with them on a personal level and try to show them what I considered to be the error of their ways. For a second, I think I probably convinced myself that my group would simply have to educate them on the scope of the epidemic in order to convince them to co-sponsor. It never occurred to me that lobbying would be hard and probably unsuccessful.