The CDC recently reported that one in four teen girls, sexually active or not, has a sexually transmitted infection. But all four out of four teen girls need better prevention education to avoid STIs and make healthier decisions.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee ignored sound public health strategies and passed their version of PEPFAR with little debate -- so $50 billion will be spent without any attention to the facts. Some in DC will toast this as a political success while more African women and girls die.
"Finally, the women's movement needs to show the political will and courage to refuse to cede the moral high ground by showing itself able and willing to speak to the moral ambiguities around the issue of abortion."
This is so important, but it has proved incredibly tricky, because if we paint abortion as a "tragedy," a la Hillary Clinton several months ago, we buttress the anti-abortion movement in its creation of "post-abortion syndrome" as something women need to be protected from.
This is one of those areas where I really wish we could bring the international to bear more on the domestic debate. I want to scream every time some pundit, in contemplating her own ambivalence about choice, relegates back-alley abortion to the realm of ancient history. I wish politicians would say, loudly and repeatedly, that if you look around the world, there is no connection between abortion's legality and its incidence. I wish the staggering toll of unsafe abortion in the developing world was part of the conversation. Outside the world of public health and the global women's movement, very, very few people know that, for example, there are countries in East Africa where botched abortions are responsible for a third of maternal deaths. I don't even know how many people realize that the lowest abortion rate in the world is in the Netherlands.
Ross Douthat, an up-and-coming young conservative thinker, has sketched an utterly fantastical vision of what he sees a post-Roe America looking like in Imagining A Prolife America.
It's maddening for all kinds of reasons, but mostly for its utter ignorance of what's happening in countries where abortion is illegal. (Hint: the truth doesn't bear out his "assumption" that "a ban on abortion, by changing the incentives of sexual behavior and family formation, would actually end up reducing out-of-wedlock births, welfare spending, and all the rest of it.").
Obviously we're never going to convince people like him, but I think if there was some kind of basic knowledge of how this issue plays out in other countries, it could possibly change some of the faulty assumptions underlying the abortion debate here, and help people understand the connection between pro-choice policies and fewer abortions.
In India, women -- viewed as either the husband's or father's property -- cannot make decisions about their own marriages. But a new decision made by Muslim bodies and Islamic scholars says that under Sharia law, a woman cannot be married against her will.
How would AIDS service organizations in American cities respond if they had to sign the anti-prostitution pledge required of PEPFAR grantees? What impact would that pledge have on Americans at risk for HIV infection?
If Karl Rove was Bush's brain, Michael Gerson was his mouth. Now Gerson is mouthing misinformation that PEPFAR has something to do with abortion, and some strange bedfellows (Democrats) remain silent.
It is vital to show by deed as well as by word that the United States means to walk its talk on gender justice. This would go a long way in rebuilding the trust and goodwill that the past administration has squandered in the rest of the world.
Sen. David Vitter (D-LA), of DC Madame fame, will offer an amendment to PEPFAR to reinsert the abstinence-only earmark. What exactly does he know about either abstinence or being faithful?
What do European AIDS advocates have to say about PEPFAR? "The ab-only earmarked funding in PEPFAR goes against modern principles of effective aid ... ab-only approaches have no effect in the developing world where a significant percentage of sexual initiation among young girls is coerced or forced."
