Ahead of this November’s elections, Rewire will increasingly be looking at issues in the political landscape and how they relate to reproductive health.This is one of those cases.
Tuesday’s LA Times ran an article that included a quote few of you are going to believe.Under the headline “Christian Coalition is Splintering,” John W. Giles of the Christian Coalition (CC) of Alabama is quoted: “The Christian Coalition is drifting to the left.”
Talk of microbicides was the pulse of the 2006 International AIDS conference in Toronto, Canada. Microbicides moved from the sidelines to center stage, a paradigm shift of bold proportions. All who have worked hard to articulate the need for user-controlled prevention should feel proud and savor this moment. Congratulations!
Reaching this tipping point also means that we now need to adjust our messages. For the past fifteen years, the microbicide movement has focused on building the enthusiasm and momentum necessary to gain the attention, respect, and commitment of world leaders. If we are concerned about the long term success of our enterprise, however, we must help individuals develop realistic expectations regarding this new technology. As advocates with advanced knowledge and training in the field, we have a critical role to play in shaping future discourse.
In the spirit of back-to-school week, here is a quick RH pop quiz:
Question: Which country just announced a five-year, $2.5 billion campaign against HIV/AIDS?
Answer: India, the second-most populous country.
Question: What is the focus of that campaign?
Answer: Prevention. Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss announced that 80% of a new national campaign will focus on condoms as the best defense against HIV/AIDS. This is especially significant for the country with more HIV-positive people than any other country.
Question: How does this compare to HIV prevention strategy in the United States?
SaveROE.com, the blog of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), has been re-launched with a new design and some neat tools.SaveROE digests news related to reproductive choice in America and provides access to many of the campaigns and initiatives of PPFA.
Three cheers for the Chilean Ministry of Health, which decreed on Saturday that all public health centers in that country are now required to provide birth control-including emergency contraception - free of charge to any Chilean woman over the age of 14 who requests it. The decree is part of a wider set of norms on sexual and reproductive health designed to bring Chile's health policies into better alignment with the international standards established at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development. Hip hip hooray!
It's a pretty progressive step for Chile, where laws and policies on gender and women's health tend to run from conservative to ultra-conservative - divorce was illegal until 2005, and abortion is still illegal under all circumstances (including cases where pregnancy threatens the woman's life).
Susan A. Cohen is Director of Government Affairs at the Guttmacher Institute, where she is responsible for facilitating and coordinating issue analysis and strategy development within the Washington, DC office.
The theme of the Toronto International AIDS Conference in August was "time to deliver." Indeed, while the U.S. deserves credit for ramping up the amount that it has been spending on the global AIDS effort, it is time-past time-to look more closely at how the U.S. is spending its money in addition to talking about how much it is spending overall. Luckily, a rare opportunity to ask just these questions of the person in charge of U.S. AIDS efforts will come on Wednesday, September 6, at 1 p.m. Under the chairmanship of Rep. Christopher Shays (R-CT), a Government Reform Committee subcommittee will hold a hearing examining the impact of the requirement that at least 1/3 of all U.S. global HIV/AIDS funding must be reserved for "abstinence until marriage" programs.
This hearing will be significant because it will be the first opportunity since Toronto for U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Mark Dybul to testify specifically on what kind of prevention programs the U.S. is delivering.
I owe the doctors at Colombia’s Simon Bolivar hospital an apology. Earlier this week I wrote that they initially refused, on the basis of conscience, to grant a legal abortion to an 11-year-old girl who had been raped by her stepfather. In fact, they hesitated to perform the procedure because they feared prosecution (given the newness of Colombia’s abortion law), and when the Constitutional Court gave them the green light, they performed the procedure without delay. My apologies for the misattribution of their motives: that’ll teach me to trust the Catholic Information Agency as a reliable source.
Abstinence-only education has been under fire frequently of late - in Toronto at the IAC, in Africa because of PEPFAR, and recently in Canton, Ohio. After learning last fall that one in seven girls attending TimkinHigh School were pregnant, the school board decided that maybe abstinence-only education wasn't working after all. Surprise! You can tell a teenager "NO", but do you really think that's going to work? Well, gee - when I was a young adult, being told not to do something just increased my desire to do it. Maybe adolescent attitudes have changed... but from the look of things... maybe not.
Big news from Colombia: the first legal abortion after the Constitutional Court’s May 2006 decision to legalize the procedure in cases where the woman’s life is in danger, in cases of fetal malformation, or in cases where the woman has been raped, took place at Simon Bolivar hospital in Bogotá last Thursday. Admittedly, I use the term “woman” loosely, since the case in fact involved an 11-year-old girl who was raped by her stepfather(or, according to Catholic World News, who was “reportedly” raped by her stepfather). Despite the new law, the case had to go all the way back up to the Constitutional Court before the abortion was permitted, since initially the doctors refused to perform the procedure as a matter of conscience. Nice consciences, guys.
Microbicides raised hopes at the recent International AIDS Conference for their potential to offer an HIV prevention technique that could be initiated by women.But many researchers and advocates who work on microbicide development have been quick to offer cautions to the public that excitement not build too fast because a marketable product could still be years away.
The news that a Pennsylvania firm, Cellegy, has stopped its stage 3 (human testing) trial of a microbicide gel only adds to that sobering reminder.After a year of studying over 2,000 women in a trial that compared the real drug against a placebo, they have concluded that there is no statistically significant data being derived from the study.In an area where the rate of HIV transmission was expected to be about 3.7% a year, the women in this study are experiencing a rate of transmission closer to 2%.Good news, except it means that researchers can’t tell the difference between the microbicide’s effectiveness and the effectiveness of the condoms and HIV-prevention counseling offered to all of the women as part of the trial.
