With all the legitimately horrifying human trafficking occurring in the world, you'd think the U.S. State Department office dedicated to the subject would have better things to do than issue directives about politically correct language. Then again, I'm never surprised to hear how federal agencies under the Bush administration choose to interpret their jobs. So I was less than shocked to read that last month, the State Department office for combating human trafficking sent a directive to U.S. agencies and several foreign governments explicitly instructing them avoid using the terms "sex worker" and "child sex worker." What are the State Department's preferred terms? According to John Miller, the office's (now retired) director, "women used in prostitution" and "sexually exploited children" will do just fine, since by Miller's reckoning, those terms are "neither pejorative nor pretend that violence to women and children is ‘work.'"
In an opinion piece published last Sunday, Byron Calame (the New York Times' reader representative) wrote about a key component in a New York Times Magazine article on abortion in El Salvador: "Accuracy and fairness were not pursued with the vigor Times readers have a right to expect." The original article, written by Jack Hitt, had several interviews with women who had abortions in El Salvador - where the medical procedure is illegal and anyone who participates in one can get sentenced with up to 30 years jail time.
The controversy is over one of the women, Carmen Climaco, who is currently serving time in prison; the debate is whether she was punished for ending her pregnancy (as Hitt reported) or for killing her full-term baby after it was born (as court documents suggest). Calame contends that Hitt and his editors did not fact check thoroughly, and then denied their mistake when questioned about Climaco.
In 2006, "abstinence-only-until-marriage" programs celebrated their tenth year of receiving federal funding. Over the past decade, over $1 billion of our tax dollars have been dedicated to these programs, even though there is still no evidence that they work, any proof that they are effective as a means of preventing unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), or any indication that they contribute positively to young people's psychosexual development. Evidence of the contrary - that they don't work, that they fail to prevent unintended pregnancies and keep young people safe from STDs, and that they undermine young people's psychosexual development - continues, however, to pile up.
The latest study to throw on the pile comes from the Guttmacher Institute: "Trends in Premarital Sex in the United States, 1954-2003," published in the January/February 2007 issue of Public Health Reports. The study does not directly review the content or the effectiveness of "abstinence-only" programs (plentyofothers have already done that). Instead, it seeks to highlight scientifically what those of us still living in the reality-based universe know intuitively: the vast majority of Americans not only have premarital sex, but also have been having it for decades.
Gloria Feldt is a leading expert in women's rights, women's health, and politics from where the personal meets the political.
Part two of a small series in honor of the Oct. 16, 2006, anniversary of the first American birth control clinic, with the purpose of exploring why birth control is still at stake today and what we must do to secure the right and access to it:
Fresh out of ob/gyn residency at Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston in the late 1960's, a young physician went to Nigeria to teach obstetrics. Dr. Allan Rosenfield was distressed to his core by the state of health among the women he saw. So when the Population Council, a U.S. based nonprofit organization, offered him a position working with the Thai Health Ministry to help start Thailand's family planning program, he jumped at the opportunity.
He visited training programs for traditional birth attendants in rural Thailand, where he concluded maternal health would not be significantly improved unless women could also get emergency care for complications and contraception to prevent pregnancies from coming too close together. He saw the dire consequences of unsafe abortion.
If you didn't know this information, don't feel bad, because most people don't. According to the Women's Cancer Network, almost one-third of U.S. women feel they are not knowledgeable about gynecologic cancers, the majority (55%) feel they are only somewhat knowledgeable, and only fourteen percent say they are very knowledgeable about gynecologic cancers (PDF). But, hopefully, this will soon change.
I'm sitting at my desk in my office at Seattle's Aradia Women's Health Center (AWHC), one of only 16 feminist women's health centers left in the nation. I'll be the Communications Manager here at AWHC for four more weeks, when we'll permanently close our doors, ending a 34-year-long relationship with the women of the Pacific Northwest.
I'm wiping my computer clean of all my files, shredding old AWHC newsletters and boxing up documents. I'm actively dissolving one of Washington State's most experienced and vocal voices on reproductive rights and health, and wondering how this happened and how we got here. While the answers to these questions may not be entirely clear, the leaders of both the past and present feminist health movement which gave birth to centers like AWHC have a lot to say about it.
As Marcy Bloom, AWHC's former Executive Director for eighteen years says, "The closing of AWHC is a dramatic sign of our times. The federal government has not funded abortion care since 1978. Our state Medicaid fiscal reimbursements do not cover the costs of providing care. Costs of medical supplies, malpractice insurance and rent have skyrocketed. Abortion is on the decline in the United States," she adds, "except for low-income women. A true societal commitment to quality, funded health care for poor and marginalized women (the majority of Aradia's clients) still eludes us."
Marcy Bloom does U.S. advocacy and capacity building for GIRE - El Grupo de Informacion en Reproduccion Elegida/The Information Group on Reproductive Choice.
>When I was in high school, I read "The Scarlet Letter" and was intrigued by its dark and stormy themes. Published in 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne narrates the story of Hester Prynne, the heroine accused of adultery in Puritan New England who is forced to wear the scarlet letter "A" as a symbol of her sin. Filled with alienation, secrecy, judgment, religious hypocrisy, and self-insight, it captured my interest.
It still does. ‘The Scarlet Letter" is all about hiding the truth.
Today the new scarlet letter is the alienation and stigma that still surrounds abortion. According to the Guttmacher Institute, thirty-five percent of US women will have at least one abortion before they are forty-five years old. This makes abortion the most common surgical procedure in the country. In addition, 52% of Americans know someone who has had an abortion. Yet, women still whisper when they talk about their abortion experiences - if they talk about them at all.
In the reproductive justice arena, 2006 has been a year of big wins and a few heartbreaking losses. For better and worse, the year has been a doozy. You know about some of the challenges already, but you also know that hard work pays off, and there were several excellentsuccesses, too.
Since these are the days that many folks are thinking and rethinking their New Year's resolutions, now's the perfect time for some guidance. Coming up with the perfect resolution requires a delicate balance: a combination of something that you really want with something that you can actually accomplish. I thought I'd take the liberty of helping out our incoming Congress by offering a few suggestions they might resolve to achieve this year.
1. We resolve to do something about the fact that more than 40 million Americans don't have health insurance. We will not get bullied by insurance conglomerates and private interests in this matter. People need health care and we can make it happen.
Many, many of the reproductive justice issues that we face today are matters of health care. For example, access to pre- and post-natal care can change the lives of thousands of women and children in the US each year.
Five weeks ago, some 8-10,000 of the world's obstetrician-gynecologists met in Kuala Lumpur for their triennial Congress. While the meeting paid more attention to the problem of maternal mortality and morbidity in the developing world than it ever has in the past, the fact is that much of the conference proceedings were about new technologies, innovative techniques, and drugs under development - many of which will have no impact whatsoever on the health of 95% of the pregnant women of the world, because they are unaffordable and inaccessible to those women.
This week, in Tunisia, about 100 maternal health advocates, health care professionals, and program planners met to talk about an approach that could have a tremendous impact on women's ability to go through pregnancy and childbirth safely, if it can generate the policy commitment, strategic thinking, and funding it needs and deserves: how to train, deploy, and support midwives in or close to the communities where women are living - and dying.
We did it! On November 7, Californians defeated a dangerous parental notification initiative for the second year in a row. Proposition 85 suffered an even greater defeat than last year's Proposition 73, proving once again that when voters understand the dangerous consequences of notification laws and the anti-choice motives behind them, they vote "No."
As a member of the Campaign for Real Teen Safety, PPGG was part of an incredible coalition of doctors, nurses, teachers, civil rights, labor and LGBT groups.
California was not alone. Pro-choice voters across the nation came out to protect women's health and rights.
