Marianne Mollmann is Advocacy Director for the Women's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch.
It's easy to get discouraged if you support women's right to decide over their bodies and choices, what with the blanket ban on abortion in Nicaragua passed last week, the imposition of demonstrably harmful "abstinence-only" sexual education in the United States and elsewhere, and the lack of access to comprehensive reproductive and sexual health care for women generally. But this month I am getting a much-needed injection of "it's possible."
I am not talking about the U.S. elections, though some electoral campaigns have given me hope that not all politicians have sold out to focus group research.
I am talking about Verónica Cruz.
Verónica Cruz is the co-founder and leader of the organization "Las Libres" (The Free Women) in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato. She is also one of only three recipients of this year's Human Rights Watch annual award for exceptional human rights activists. Part of the prize is a three-week speaking tour of the United States and Canada, where I, as her Human Rights Watch host, get to accompany her. Our trip only started Monday, but I am already energized by her enthusiasm and inherent belief that justice is possible. Even for women. Even for poor women. Even for poor, indigenous, illiterate women.
Dr. Connie Mitchell is a nationally recognized expert on the health care of victims of violence and abuse. She serves on the AMA National Advisory Council on Violence and Abuse and is a member of the Board of Directors of Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health.
I grew up as one of four daughters in a middle-class family. As sisters, we shared everything: bedroom, clothes, cars and double dates. It was a loving and lively home and one, I thought, of few secrets. But recently, after one of my sisters was killed in a tragic accident, another sister told me of the secret the two of them had kept for many years. At age 16, my deceased sister was pregnant and wanted to terminate the pregnancy. She sought the counsel and support of the sister now disclosing the story and got the reproductive health care she needed.
Later, I asked my mother about her reaction to the story, as I too was raising teenagers and would appreciate her perspective. My mother began to cry, but she quickly let me know that these were not tears about the abortion. Her tears flowed because the story made her feel so inadequate. She said, "I wish that I could ask her what I might have said or done differently so that she would know, really know, that I understood life provides challenges, that I loved her no matter what, and that I respected her as a young woman."
The first sentence of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 is a lie. It's also an appalling run-on sentence, but we won't get into that. The Act, signed into law by President Bush in 2003; challenged and struck down by three separate federal judges in 2003 and 2004; and now, amazingly, making its way onto the Supreme Court docket for November 8; starts like this:
A moral, medical, and ethical consensus exists that the practice of performing a partial-birth abortion - an abortion in which a physician deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living, unborn child's body until either the entire baby's head is outside the body of the mother, or any part of the baby's trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother and only the head remains inside the womb, for the purpose of performing an overt act (usually the puncturing of the back of the child's skull and removing the baby's brains) that the person knows will kill the partially delivered infant, performs this act , and then completes delivery of the dead infant - is a gruesome and inhumane procedure that is never medically necessary and should be prohibited.
Here's how you can already tell that the framers of this bill are already lying: the term "partial-birth abortion" is not recognized by the medical community (as Scott pointed out in his overview of the case's main issues yesterday, the first sentence of the American Medical Association's statement opposing the legislation reads, "The term ‘Partial birth abortion' is not medical terminology.").
Naina Dhingra is the Director of International Policy at Advocates for Youth and serves on the Developed Country NGO Board Delegation of the Global Fund.
After two days and nearly twenty-two hours of deliberations, the Board of the Global Fund Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria was unable to select a candidate for Executive Director and decided to reopen the search. The Board of the Global Fund is unlike any multilateral institution. There are twenty voting board seats divided equally between donors and recipients. There are also seats for foundations and the private sector (counted in the donor block) and for developed country NGOs, developing country NGOs, and people living with the three diseases (counted in the recipient block). In order for a candidate to be selected, a two-thirds majority in both the donor and recipient block was needed. Unfortunately, this consensus was not achieved.
When state legislatures are passing abortion bans; when women are being denied access to birth control; when laws are enacted to criminalize pregnant women's behavior, it is easy to understand why some advocates and strategists believe the way to regain momentum is to focus on prevention of unintended pregnancy and abortion to highlight the extremism and hypocrisy of our political opposition.
Certainly, exposing the opposition's agenda will motivate some, but I believe we can and must do better. To really change the tone and direction of the abortion debate in this country, we have to acknowledge that most people are ambivalent about abortion. That's okay; uncertainty doesn't mean anti-choice. We should recognize - and indeed celebrate - that abortion is not the same lynchpin in women's equality that it once was. We must renew our efforts to build a policy agenda, organizing strategies, legal framework and long term message strategy that reflect the "pro-child" side of our "pro-choice" mission that will connect with people's hopes and aspirations for their future and their family's future.
According to a new series in Lancet, a well-respected, peer-reviewed, medical journal:
"Every year, 340 million new patients acquire gonorrhoea, syphilis, chlamydia, or trichomonas, more than 120 million couples have an unmet need for contraception, 80 million women have unintended pregnancies, and an estimated 19 million women undergo unsafe abortions; 70,000 of them die as a result."
There are cheap and effective ways to prevent unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, provide safe abortions, assist healthy pregnancies and delivery, and support children and families. With advances in medicine, access to health and education, why do these critical issues still threaten women's health? Politics. Clear and simple. Conservative ideology endangers women's health.
Yesterday, Lancet launched the new series on sexual and reproductive health worldwide. This study is based on the first ever global research of this kind - real data from researchers who took a fact-based approach to sexual and reproductive health and practices around the world.
"Here we are coming down the stretch of an election campaign, and it's on the front page of your newspapers. Isn't that interesting," President George Bush replied when asked about Washington's most recent sex scandal.
By contrast, the Supreme Court had complete discretion in the scheduling of oral argument in two cases important to "pro-life" ideological extremists: the cases of Gonzales v. Carhart and Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood.
The cases are scheduled for hearing the day after the election. That, Mr. President, is interesting timing. Is this a little red state red meat, some right wing judicial activism to motivate the base, or mere coincidence? The scheduling of these cases make the Supreme Court's sharp right turn with Justices Roberts and Alito look blatantly political and activist.
Rewire today begins a special series turning a spotlight on the issues that will be heard at the Supreme Court on November 8, explaining why these cases are political manipulations.
Naina Dhingra is the Director of International Policy at Advocates for Youth and serves on the Developed Country NGO Board Delegation of the Global Fund.
I had thought that my visits to Global Fund projects would show me what AIDS looked like in a middle-income Latin American country. In fact, they showed me much more. In a mere one day of visiting projects, I saw not only how AIDS impacts Guatemala, but how sexual exploitation, drug abuse, violence, rape, early fertility, and lack of economic opportunity are inextricably linked to the root causes of the disease.
We started our day by visiting the Hospital Roosevelt, which is one of the largest recipients of Global Fund money in Guatemala. It is a public hospital that provides free treatment and services, with a reputation for treating patients with respect and dignity regardless of socioeconomic class. Approximately sixty percent of its resources come from the Global Fund.
There is a misconception that AIDS in Latin America is a disease of men who have sex with men. But as I stood in the waiting room of the AIDS clinic at the Hospital Roosevelt, the faces that looked up at me were young women.
Not to show my age, but my first time was 1996. It was great and made me feel like a responsible adult. Now, some people have taken offense to the ad below, but I don't think there's anything wrong with implying that voting is sexy. That's the beauty of feminism - it encompasses such a wide variety of perspectives - the main point is equality. And when it comes to voting, women haven't been stepping up equally with men. 20 million women did not vote in the last election, which means that they chose not to make a difference on reproductive health, among other issues.
Last week New Jersey became the fourth state to pull itself out of the federal scheme to distribute abstinence-only-until-marriage money. New Jersey, like Maine and California before it, decided that in addition to never having been proven effective as a broad strategy, the federal abstinence-only-until-marriage programs ran contrary to its own state's laws regarding sexuality education. If the state chose to accept the nearly $1 million of federal funds it was entitled to, it would not only have had to follow strict federal rules, it would also have had come up with a match of three state-raised dollars to every federal dollar. New Jersey's decision was therefore not just principled, but fiscally responsible as well.
