There is so much media coverage and conversation going on about new Department of Health & Human Services appointee Dr. Eric Keroack that we figured it might be more helpful to provide a round-up than it would be to add to the fray. Read on to catch up on what's being said about the new director of the federal family planning program:
Editorials
The New York Times calls Keroack's appointment a "Family Planning Farce." The first line of the article: "It sounds like a late-night parody of President Bush's bad habit of filling key posts with extreme ideologues and incompetents." It could be, but this isn't SNL: the new director of Title X family planning dollars doesn't appear to believe in birth control.
The Boston Globe's "Not Family Friendly" asserts that while Keroack's appointment should not be a total surprise to anyone who has followed this administration, "to name an opponent of family planning to oversee the nation's family planning program is perverse even by the standards of a government that doesn't much believe in government."
On November 17, Nicaragua's congress passed a complete ban on abortion. The ban offers no exceptions for women's health, for victims of rape or incest - or even for women whose lives are at risk. By passing this outrageous ban, Nicaragua has joined the ranks of Chile and El Salvador, the only countries in the world to have imposed total abortion bans in the last 20 years.
This movement backwards comes at a time when Nicaragua already has an extremely high rate of maternal mortality, largely due to illegal and unsafe abortion. Yet, instead of acting to adopt measures that protect women, lawmakers have chosen to send the message that they don't care if women die. In Latin America and the Caribbean, 4,000 women die from unsafe abortions every year. In Nicaragua, where maternal death rates are among the highest in the region, unsafe abortions are responsible for 16% of all maternal deaths. Criminalizing abortion will not just increase maternal mortality and worsen the status of women's health - it will force women to carry their pregnancies to term in cases of, for example, anencephaly or ectopic pregnancy.
With its newest report on Title X, our federally funded family planning program, The Guttmacher Institute has practically handed our incoming congressional Democrats a plan for finding the "common ground" between reproductive rights advocates and foes.
Since 1970, Title X has provided contraception and other reproductive health care services and education to low-income women and men through its network of 4,600 clinics around the country. While the program is critical in serving the family planning needs of Americans who do not meet Medicaid's rigid requirements for eligibility it has been chronically under funded.
At a recent briefing by the folks at the Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator, Ambassador Jimmy Kolker asked about whether any PEPFAR funded programs were going to focus on providing the HPV vaccine to adolescents, given that this would also build capacity for rolling out other vaccines in the future. Kolker's response was a bit of an admonition to remember that this is the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (emphasis on AIDS). He said that OGAC is interested in integrating HIV/AIDS services into reproductive health services, but they won't be working to integrate reproductive health services into HIV/AIDS services. Hmmm.
Marcy Bloom does U.S. advocacy and capacity building for a Mexico-City based organization GIRE - El Grupo de Informacion en Reproduccion Elegida/The Information Group on Reproductive Choice. She was formerly executive director of Aradia Women’s Health Center.
Often your life can be transformed by people you have never met.
In 1962, when I was eleven years old, a Phoenix, Arizona woman named Sherri Finkbine was denied the ability to have an abortion in her hometown even after discovering that her pregnancy was likely to be seriously deformed. Mrs. Finkbine (there was no Ms. yet) had taken the medication thalidomide to alleviate her nausea before learning that the drug had been linked to serious fetal deformities in Europe. After being denied an abortion in Arizona, she flew to Sweden. I clearly remember the headlines: "Tearful Sherri off to Sweden." She and her family received death threats, the press hounded her, and when she returned home, the headlines blared: "Abortion mother returns home."
I wasn't sure what an abortion mother was. But I did understand that the pregnancy she was carrying was very sick, that she was very sad and upset, and that this operation called an abortion could only be obtained far away.
I didn't understand why her own doctors at home couldn't help her. I was eleven years old and I was also very upset.
Undeterred by last week's thumpin', President Bush is already up to one of his old executive tricks: tapping anti-abortion, anti-sex ideologues to oversee federal programs, especially those related to women's health. As Ellen reported Wednesday, Bush has recently selected abstinence-only champion and anti-abortion crusader Dr. Eric Keroack to oversee funding for Title X - as in the U.S. Federal Family Planning Program, designed to deliver sexual and reproductive health information and services to low-income Americans. Bush has been flatlining funding for Title X since he took office, but why starve a federal program when you can use it to promote your ideological agenda instead? Here's where Dr. Keroack comes in.
Things this week at Bush’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have once again exceeded the bounds of credibility.Early in the week, news came that prominent abstinence-only-until-marriage promoter Patricia Sulak had been asked to join the CDC’s Advisory Committee on HIV and STD Prevention.Sulak’s silly and self-congratulatory presentation at this year’s national STD conference, which can be heard here, should have been more than enough to disqualify her from the advisory committee.
On December 1, a church bell in downtown Washington, DC will toll every 5 seconds as people head to work. For most of the people who hear that bell and see people gathered outside of the church with signs and banners, it will be their first exposure to World AIDS Day. Even though World AIDS Day was first declared by the World Health Organization and the UN General Assembly in 1988, most people around the world have no idea that it exists, much less what day it is - and this is despite the fact that 4.1 million people were newly infected with HIV and 3 million people died of AIDS in 2005 according to UNAIDS.
The fact that most people have no idea that World AIDS Day exists makes it particularly difficult to live up to the theme of this World AIDS Day: Accountability. In order to hold the U.S. accountable for its promises to treat 2 million people, prevent 7 million new HIV infections, and provide care to 10 million in fifteen focus countries by 2008 (promises made as a part of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief--PEPFAR), we need people around the country to demand that the Bush Administration and the U.S. Congress implement the best prevention, treatment, and care strategies possible and make changes to the policy and legislation that stand in the way of this.
Marianne Mollmann is Advocacy Director for the Women's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch.
I am now in Los Angeles, on the last leg of my road-trip through the United States and Canada with Verónica Cruz, founder and director of the Mexican grassroots advocacy group, Las Libres (The Free Women). Las Libres works for access to safe and legal abortion in the conservative Mexican state of Guanajuato, so it is not surprising that social change - how to create and sustain it - is high on Verónica's agenda.
What might be surprising is that her reflections are universally applicable. Also to the groups that try to generate this change.
"You can't ever afford to get complacent with your work," Verónica told me Tuesday as we left a meeting with community based women's organizations in East Los Angeles. "We must all evaluate the impact our work has on creating durable social change - that's the key factor for doing things right."
In fact, setting priorities and planning for real change has been our main conversation topic throughout the week, from the panel discussion with Verónica and Dolores Huerta (the legendary founder of United Farm Workers) at the Feminist Majority's offices, over our visit to a model Rape Crisis Center in Santa Monica, to our lunch-time strategy session with latina and chicana women in East Los Angeles.
"Efforts by HHS and states to assess the scientific accuracy of materials used in abstinence-until-marriage education programs have been limited. This is because ACF - which awards grants through two programs that account for the largest portion of federal spending on abstinence-until-marriage education - does not review its grantees' education materials for scientific accuracy and does not require grantees of either program to review their own materials for scientific accuracy."
