The session starts simply: eight young men stand at the front of a room in Minna, Nigeria. Each young man holds up a large piece of paper with a word written on it, each word a type of sexual activity.
From there it becomes more complicated.
First, the youngest boys are asked to leave. This is not a lesson on birds and bees and community leaders, though supportive, need to be reassured that this workshop is only for those who are mature enough. The 50 or more young men, ranging in age from 16 to 19, are learning how to stay safe from HIV. That will require frank conversation about what will put them at risk and what they can do to protect themselves and their sexual partners. In other words, this is a life-saving conversation.
As a mother, I know that parents rightfully want to be involved in the lives of their teens. As a Planned Parenthood doctor, I counsel teens to speak with their parents, to seek their support and guidance in all situations...when they are thinking about becoming sexually active, when they are seeking birth control or when they want to terminate an unintended pregnancy. Unfortunately, the reality is that not all teens can safely turn to a parent in these situations. And that's why I'm voting No on proposition 85.
The irony of President Bush’s "National Character Counts Week" has not gone unnoticed amidst the flurry of scandal in our nation’s capitol... But another – and more substantive – scandal is that the GAO (Government Accountability Office) found that that the federal health agency under the President’s authority is knowingly trying to skirt the law and is putting the health of American citizens at risk.
The non-partisan GAO found that the Department of Health and Human Services is failing to enforce the law requiring that organizations receiving federal grants to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases to provide medically accurate information about the effectiveness of condoms. Somehow HHS doesn’t think that organizations receiving our tax dollars to provide abstinence-only-until-marriage programs need to provide this medically-accurate information.The GAO disagrees.
A study from Oxford researchers was released this week that once again concluded that there is no data to support the claim from radical anti-choice activists that abortion (induced or spontaneous) causes breast cancer.This research only further bolsters the arguments from the American Cancer Institute (a federally-funded branch of NIH), the Mayo Clinic, a US Congressional report and others that say there is conclusive evidence that there is no link between abortion and breast cancer.But for some reason, the far-right Canadian website, LifeSite, was quick to write that this new research is flawed, and to reaffirm their claim that there is a link between abortion and breast cancer.What on earth is going on here?How can they keep making these claims?Some people are inclined to think that it’s just because they’re so ideologically constrained that they can’t see the science sitting right in front of them.But if you read their article, you get an even more comical picture: they have absolutely no ability to logically evaluate the science, and (why is this typical of the far-right?) they will continue on message regardless of the research and regardless of how ridiculous they look.
Supporters of anti-choice legislation have sunk to new lows this week. The anti-choice campaign in South Dakota used to rely on distorting the facts, but now they are getting desperate and resorting to bald-faced lies.
We're excited to report that Rewire has been cross-posting featured content from our editorial staff on two other prominent blogs: Daily Kos (www.dailykos.com) and Political Cortex (www.politicalcortex.com). We took a couple days to alert our readers because we wanted to see how things would work out... They've worked out great!
We have created "diaries" at both sites that feature content from our site and that make that content available to the hundreds of thousands of readers going to those two sites each day. This effort is part of our Campaign 2006 project: on this site, we're bringing political news related to reproductive health advocates, and on those sites, we're bringing relevant reproductive health news to political buffs. This way, we're reaching far more readers than we would on our site alone with important news about how reproductive health & rights stand to be influenced this election season.
While debating changes to the laws overseeing bankruptcy filings in March 2005, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) offered an amendment that would have made it illegal for violent protesters, whether at abortion clinics or any other lawful business or service, from using bankruptcy law to avoid court-ordered financial consequences of their actions. The Senate defeated the amendment by a vote of 53 to 46, allowing anti-abortion protesters to file for bankruptcy instead of paying fines incurred from performing or threatening violent actions against reproductive health clinics, clinic workers, or patients. Opponents argued that it was unnecessary and organizations would not use the system to get out of their obligations.
But low and behold, the "organizations" using this kind of loophole are Roman Catholic Dioceses - filing for bankruptcy to avoid their obligations to individuals who were sexually abused by priests.
Just my opinion, but I'd rather have a conversation about what our society is really willing to do to support women and their children, rather than whether you have to get raped to deserve a safe abortion.
Remember that post about David Kuo's new book Tempting Faith? People have been wondering out loud after its release this week if the Religious Right would freak out and live up to the titles given them by some in the Bush Administration ("whackos," "nuts," etc.) Well, whether they've read the book or not, check this out...
Referring to Mark Dybul, the Bush Administration's appointee to direct the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council (FRC) had this to say:
The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the United States population reached 300 million this morning. (Check their population clock to see the current projection for this very minute; stay on the page for a bit and you can watch the numbers continue to increase.) You've probably been hearing about how this relates to immigration, the environment and the economy - but how does this affect reproductive health?
