The race for the Executive Director for the Global Fund finally ended after several months of uncertainty. The Board of the institution met Thursday in Geneva to review the second round of applications for the position at an emergency meeting that was called for last October after failing to select a candidate. Dr. Michel Kazatchkine, one of the two frontrunners from the first round, was selected.
In Iowa, Oregon and Milwaukee the sex-education tide's-a-turning. Each of these places is on the path to offering sex education in their schools that is based on truthful information about sex. Well, the statistics don't lie and it's about time that we started paying attention to the grand failure that is abstinence-only sex ed.
Well, the South Dakota legislature is at it again. Only a few short months after citizens of that state soundly rejected a law that would have made abortion illegal unless a woman's life was at stake, legislators have introduced a slightly more moderate version of the same bill. The new bill provides exceptions in cases of health-threatening as well as life-threatening pregnancies (though doctors seeking to perform abortions for health reasons must seek confirmation from a second doctor that the woman's health is indeed at risk—I wonder how that works in an emergency), as well as pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. The bill hasn't yet been approved by the legislature, but its introduction gives us an opportunity to survey the strategic landscape that currently lies before advocates for safe and legal abortion in South Dakota and nationwide.
Jennifer Pozner from WIMN's Voices discusses reproductive health in the media in her multimedia presentation called "Reproductive Wrongs: Exposing Media Misinformation About Abortion, Family Planning and Clinic Violence."
Media coverage of reproductive justice issues informs what the public believes is true about family planning, sex education, low-income women's access to health care, anti-abortion legislation, clinic violence and more. Yet all too often, our most influential media outlets play political football with these issues, reporting their impact on politicians' position in opinion polls, rather than on the women and girls whose lives they most affect.
Sounds intriguing and spot on. Unfortunately, I'm nowhere near Easton, Massachusetts -- but if you are, check it out on February 12th and let me know what you think.
On a related note, the television show Veronica Mars drew a lot of attention this week for an episode that referred to RU-486 (mifepristone) as "the morning-after pill" in the episode summary (which has since been changed) and title (which has not).
More good news from Chile, where President Michelle Bachelet has refused to bow to reactionary forces in the Church and in the State, choosing instead to stand up for the reproductive rights of young women. Last week, she signed a decree to reinstate a program that would allow adolescent girls aged 14 and over free access to the morning-after pill. Her reasoning was simple: when taken correctly, emergency contraception is highly effective at preventing pregnancy. This is a particularly important resource in Chile, since according to government statistics, adolescents in Chile have 40,000 unwanted pregnancies a year—in fact, 15 percent of all births in Chile are to mothers 18 or younger, most without the means to afford quality care. Even though abortion is illegal under any circumstances—including life-threatening pregnancies, health-threatening pregnancies, and pregnancies resulting from rape or incest—over 100,000 Chilean women seek unsafe, illegal abortions every year, and over 30,000 of them wind up in the hospital with complications.
Didn't we just finish an election cycle where voters made it clear they were tired of the Bush White House catering to the far right at every turn? I know that. You know that. Anti-choice lawmakers who lost their jobs to pro-choice newcomers on November 7 know that. But judging by President Bush's budget proposal, released yesterday, apparently he missed the memo from the American public.
For the sixth year in a row, President Bush chose to use his federal budget proposal as yet another opportunity to satisfy his own right-wing base rather than—oh, I don't know—tackle real problems in America like unintended pregnancy.
Lest there be any confusion, the Bush Administration has little values for and no understanding of the need for sexual and reproductive health services. The only question is whether that's due to a complete lack of understanding of human health needs or because undermining sexual health appeases his far-right political base. Need evidence? Check out Bush's budget request.
"AN ACT relating to the protection of life, including unborn life, from the point of fertilization." This is the opening sentence in the new abortion ban trigger bills filed recently in the 80th Texas state legislative session, which opened on January 9, 2007. The wording of this bill tells us a lot about the authors, as well as the state of the Texas legislature in general. The author of the House bill (HB175) is, not surprisingly, Rep. Warren Chisum from Pampa (R-District 88). Known for his anti-sex legislation, specifically for reinstating Texas' anti-sodomy law, Chisum also recently authored and filed HB 311, which requires parents to give written consent in order for their child(ren) to be allowed to participate in their school's human sexuality class. Requiring consent for a class on human sexuality is absurd when you take into account written consent isn't required, at least through legislation, for any other science class in public school. Additionally, a little required sexuality education might do Texas teens well considering we have the fifth highest teen pregnancy rate in the nation.
In the movie theatre, I pull out a pencil and a plain, brown notebook filled with lined paper. I arrive a few moments early and am, what can only be called subjected, to the preview for a soon to be released Samuel L. Jackson movie. The preview opens with a beautiful, young woman lying in the middle of a dirt road badly beaten and in her underwear. Bits of the story unfold revealing the female character as clearly wild and crazy, if not mentally unstable. Samuel Jackson's character "rescues" her from the dirt road where she had presumably passed out, he chains her up, I mean with metal chains and a padlock, and proceeds to inform her that he is going to cleanse her of her "wicked ways." I'm at the theatre to watch Children of Men so I can write about it for Reproductive Health Reality Check. My intention is to unearth and analyze the potential reproductive health components of the movie so I'm already feeling feisty. The Samuel L. Jackson film fiasco doesn't help. Spoiler Alert: this may give away parts of the movie, so read at your own risk if you haven't seen it yet!
