Recent reports confirm that global warming is caused by humans and their consumption. One answer to reduce global warming is voluntary family planning.
In choosing politics over women's health, Justice Kennedy affirms Roe and Justices Scalia and Thomas were alone in a more conservative adjoining opinion.
"Was there ever any domination that did not appear natural to those who possessed it?"—John Stuart Mill
This is a Moment with a capital "M." The opportunity for fundamental social change doesn't come often, so let's take full advantage of it.
Shock jock Don Imus's racist and sexist remarks about the Rutgers University women's basketball team didn't go beyond his typical bottom feeder discourse, but in this age of YouTube and internet rapid response capability, his sleazy pot shots against a target so clearly undeserving of epithets have captured the nation's attention. We've been riveted to the story and it has brought us together. Interest soon turned to outrage; the outrage continues to mushroom into new social expectations. Suddenly it is Imus who's shocked. Even Oprah is talking about it, and when a story reaches that level, you know Imus had better head for rehab fast because the times, they are a-changing.
Suzanne Petroni is a Senior Program officer for the Summit Foundation in Washington, DC, where she manages the foundation's Global Population and Youth Leadership program.
It's been interesting to read the exchanges here on PAI's latest report, while at the same time researching the history of U.S. international family planning policy.
I'm back in school to take what I've learned in ten years in the population field, add some knowledge and skills, and ultimately—hopefully!—come up with a way to help move our field out of its current political morass. My hypothesis is that, as a field, we're using the same arguments and strategies that we've used for decades, and as a result, we're not gaining ground; rather, we're losing it.
Pat (not her real name) had been living with HIV for seven years—five of which she was taking life prolonging ARVs—when she suddenly became pregnant. Her doctor referred her to a clinic with explicit instruction to get the pregnancy terminated.
Like most women in Thailand and around the globe, there was very little Pat could do to avoid or keep the pregnancy. She says lack of access to appropriate contraceptives left her vulnerable to the unintended pregnancy. Also, little knowledge about what a woman can do to prevent transmitting HIV to the child left her with very little choice.
Editor's Note: Today we welcome Danielle Toppin, writing from Jamaica. She has experience with gender and development, and will be covering reproductive health issues in the Caribbean and Latin America.
On November 4, 2004, I discovered that I was pregnant. In that moment, my life began to change. The ways in which I saw myself; and in which society perceived me shifted. It was as though I had finally fulfilled my role as a woman. I had proven my worthiness.
In the Caribbean context, ideas of motherhood are inextricably linked with ideas of womanhood. In Barbados, meanings are attached to fertile and infertile female bodies; with value being attached to those women who reproduce, and withheld from those women who, either by choice or by nature, do not. Mothering has become synonymous with "becoming a woman", achieving an almost mythical status as the natural path that women's lives should take.
I remember being with several colleagues in 2002 preparing for a hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives. About ten minutes before the hearing was supposed to start, a knock at the door of a small office in which we had huddled brought an interim report from Mathematica Policy Research. Mathematica had been funded by the federal government to conduct an entirely voluntary evaluation of programs receiving funding under Title V. The hearing was centered on the reauthorization of the Title V abstinence-only-until-marriage program which delivers $50 million in federal funds each year to states. Of course, we thought the timing was highly suspect to say the least, but this interim report (PDF) said nothing of import. It reported out on a great deal of process but included no data whatsoever on behavioral impacts.
The release of the 10-year evaluation of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs on Friday (if you can call the posting of the report on an obscure government website on a Friday afternoon a "release"), puts a big, bright spotlight on Democrats in Congress, particularly the appropriators.
Congress asked for this evaluation back in 1997. Do these programs work to protect young people? Ten years and over $1.5 billion dollars later, they got their answer. No, they don't. Period.
Now, you might be wondering why Congress went ahead and spent all that money over all those years with no evidence of effectiveness? You might wonder why Congress didn't halt these programs after the Institute of Medicine, the nation's leading authority on public health, called for their elimination back in 2000 or when the Society of Adolescent Medicine reported that the efficacy of abstinence-only programs was "near zero."
