Today Rewire bids farewell to one person that each of us would happily describe as the most important part of our team. He is our new media wizard, an outstanding writer and thinker, brilliant teacher, good friend. Twenty years my junior, he and his generation are why I am so optimistic about the future of this country and the world. They are turning away from the politics of old and inventing something unlike anything we have seen, something they may not fully appreciate until much later in their own lives, perspective being what it is. Some of us have just enough perspective to glimpse it. The embrace of global diversity, interwoven acceptance of faith and science, not simple belief in true equality for all, but the real possibility of seeing it in their lifetimes as no one on the planet has ever before experienced it.
As you can tell, we're going to miss him and there simply are not enough superlatives to capture him.
Rewire would like to introduce Eesha Pandit as a regular weekly writer. Most recently, Eesha served as Associate Director of Programs at the Civil Liberties and Public Policy Program (CLPP) which is a reproductive rights organization that trains, educates, and inspires new leaders, organizers, and supporters nationwide. Prior to joining CLPP, Eesha worked with the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University and with Amnesty International USA's Women's Rights Program. She is currently a graduate student at the University of Chicago.
Last week, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard an appeal of a 2005 federal court ruling that mandated Union Pacific Railroad to cover contraceptives in its health insurance plan.
Planned Parenthood and two female employees of Union Pacific filed a lawsuit that would require the company to provide coverage for FDA-approved prescription contraceptives for female employees, as well as female family members of male employees covered by the company's health plan. Judge Pasco Bowman, who sits on the appeals court panel, says that if the ruling sticks, it could mandate ALL companies to cover birth control in their health-care plans. Let's hope.
November 25 is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and December 10 is International Human Rights Day. In 1991, the Center for Women's Global Leadership declared the 16 days between the two events "16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence." The campaign seeks to link violence against women - long seen as a "private matter" - to the public, global struggle for human rights.
A quick review of international news in the past month confirms what the world already knows - violence against women knows no borders, and despite progress made in the past few decades, there is still a "massive culture of neglect and denial" surrounding the issue. We know that violence against women takes many forms-from femicides in Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador, to hate crimes committed against women and girls in the United States, to street harassment in Egypt, to rape used as a weapon of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We know it's everywhere, but we also know that conflict, stress, and poverty make it worse.
Accountability, for you, for me, for us. That's the theme for World AIDS Day 2006 and there couldn't be a more appropriate time to spread a more important message. Twenty-five years into the HIV/AIDS pandemic, infection rates are at record levels and are still rising. We must hold ourselves accountable and we must take action.
The numbers are sobering, and worth repeating: Forty million adults and children are currently infected with HIV/AIDS around the world - that's the entire population of Spain. And in the last year alone, more than four million men, women, and children were infected, and three million died.
HIV/AIDS does not discriminate - that much we know. But it does destroy families, weaken communities, and affect economic growth and security. And right now, the rates of HIV infection are spiraling higher in certain populations, particularly women and youth, the most vulnerable among us. In countries such as Thailand or Uganda, where HIV/AIDS was thought to be on the decline, the epidemic is resurging. This is unacceptable, especially because we can prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.
The theme of this year's World AIDS Day on December 1 is accountability: Stop AIDS, Keep the Promise.
When it was first discovered in 1981, the virus that causes AIDS threatened to wreak havoc on the lives of millions worldwide, and today - with 40 million living with the virus and four million new infections this year - the virus has kept its dire promise.
On the other hand, the global community has fallen short of its promise to provide adequate funding for prevention, treatment and care. Our failure holds grave consequences for the world's youth. We promised to take care of our future generations, but do today's adolescents - tomorrow's adults - have the knowledge, skills and resources to have healthy relationships and protect themselves against diseases such as HIV/AIDS?
Our country's founders left us all many pearls of wisdom and word to live by. Ben Franklin of course was full of them, including "An ounce of prevention is a worth a pound of cure" and "Half the Truth is often a great Lie." These words couldn't be any more relevant than when they were furst uttered in the 18th century - yet policy makers reject this solid advice, particularly when it comes to public health, especially anything that has to do with sexual relations.
A concise and to the point SIECUS report lays out just how the Administration and their partners-in-crime in the Congress have actually prevented good prevention policies - leaving the United States stalled in reducing the number of new HIV infections. "Breaking the Promise: The Politics of Domestic HIV Prevention" describes some of ways opponents of practical, effective and evidence-based prevention measures have hijacked resources, vilified condoms, and redirected attention elsewhere.
World AIDS Day is tomorrow, December 1. Activists, organizations, and ordinary people around the world will recognize the day in myriad ways, all aware that the disease claimed 3 million lives last year and that over 4 million people were newly infected with the HIV virus.
Healy Thomspon of the Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE) blogged about some of the wider issues they will be bringing to people's attention tomorrow morning with For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Also, check back tomorrow for World AIDS Day coverage from Cecile Richards, President of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and Sharon Camp, President of the Guttmacher Institute.
Kathryn Joyce is working on a book about conservative Christian women's movements, to be published by Beacon Press.
Between 1985 and 1990, three books were published by small, independent Christian presses that would come to have a profound impact on Christian Right thinking on family planning, feminism and birth control. Charles Provan's The Bible and Birth Control, Mary Pride's The Way Home: Away from Feminism and Back to Reality, and Rick and Jan Hess's A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ. Together, these three books laid a comprehensive framework for the pro-natalist, anti-birth control movement today known as Quiverfull, wherein believers eschew all forms of birth control, natural and hormonal, and argue that Christian families should leave the number of children they have entirely in the hands of God.
In the Nov. 27th issue of The Nation, I profiled a group of Quiverfull believers who had broods of 8, 11, 13 and 14 children, and who spoke of their decision to have such large families as a form of spiritual warfare. That much is reflected in their name, taken from Psalm 127: "Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate." Quiverfull mothers think of their children as no mere movement, but as an army they're building for God.
Kate Bourne is IWHC's Vice President for International Policy and Regional Programs.
In the United States, we have long expected corporations to be accountable to their employees by providing health insurance for workers and their families. Recently, around the world, the framework of corporate responsibility has expanded to include not only a company's employees, but also surrounding communities.
Investing in women's health and rights is a key mechanism for promotion of corporate accountability, as well as one of the best investments that businesses can make.
More women are living with HIV/AIDS today than ever before - but HIV is only one factor in women's health. In total, sexual and reproductive ill health (which has been around for much longer than HIV/AIDS) accounts for an estimated one-third of the global burden of illness and early death borne by women of reproductive age, which basically corresponds with prime working age.
It's official: on Friday, November 17, outgoing President Enrique Bolaños signed Nicaragua's total ban on abortion into law, over the protests of women and their doctors. In Nicaragua, life-saving abortions are now punishable by six years in prison - substantially less than Bolaños's requested penalty (30 years) or the Catholic and Evangelical Churches' (20 years). Of course, the lighter prison sentence doesn't change the fact that countless women will wind up paying for their reproductive transgressions with their lives - as one woman already has.
