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."
I just returned from Malaysia, where I attended the International Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecology (FIGO) triennial congress. I traveled with some of my colleagues from Family Care International (FCI) to present results from the final evaluation of FCI's Skilled Care Initiative, a three-country project to increase the proportion of women who deliver with a "skilled attendant" - a trained and properly supported health care provider - in rural Africa. I'll be writing more about this initiative in my next posting.
In Kuala Lumpur, thousands of obstetricians and gynecologists gathered to share data from new studies, learn about new surgical techniques, and vote on their leadership. Among so many dedicated doctors who have made a lifelong commitment to promoting the latest and greatest in women's health, one could be lulled into thinking that women's health must be in good shape.
Sadly, over the past 20 years, maternal mortality rates have barely budged in much of the world. In some African countries, as many as one in 10 women will die of a pregnancy-related cause. Nicholas Kristoff's twocolumns in the New York Times (published in September) about the death of Prudence Lemokouno described the factors that contribute to maternal mortality. Ms. Lemokouno had a pregnancy complication which could have easily been dealt with had she received prompt obstetrical care, and when she and her family sought care, they encountered a range of barriers - financial, geographic, and cultural - that resulted in unacceptable delays, poor service, and ultimately, her death.
Last week, the citizens of South Dakota, California, and Oregon sent a clear message to their elected representatives: stop restricting safe abortion at the state level. All of the victories were terrific news for supporters of women's reproductive freedom, since in the 33 years since Roe v. Wade guaranteed American women's right to a safe and legal abortion, hundreds of state-level restrictions that disproportionately target poor women, young women, women of color, and women living in rural areas, have slowly been eroding that right. The ballot victories were also significant because they came from the people themselves - so whining about "judicial activism" is strictly off-limits this time.
Of course, just when I was getting all psyched about how state legislators might just sit up and listen to their constituents, Republicans in the Missouri legislature had to go and write the most messed-up report ever. The report, authored by a Special Committee on Immigration Reform, concluded that high rates of illegal immigration in Missouri can best be attributed to...why, abortion, of course! Actually, I'm being unfair. Illegal immigration is not just abortion's fault. Here's what the report says:
The lack of traditional work ethic, combined with the effects of 30 years of abortion and expanding liberal social welfare policies have produced a shortage of workers and a lack of incentive for those who can work.
Despite the public outcry last week for our government to work together and make progress, the White House steered clear of governing from the middle and bipartisanship in a new staffing move. Today the White House named Eric Keroack, MD as the new government official overseeing Title X, the program that provides contraceptive and other reproductive health services in every state of the nation to those in need. He'll start work on Monday.
This Keroack has had a career dedicated to abstinence-only programs and is an ardent anti-choice Ob-Gyn. He serves on the Medical Advisory Council for the Abstinence Clearinghouse and is a member of the Federal Expert Panel commissioned to define the guidelines for most governmental funding of abstinence education in our public schools -- programs that have grown over recent years and have yet to be proven effective. He is the Medical Director of A Woman's Concern crisis pregnancy centers, an organization that posts only negative -- and in some cases incorrect -- information about abortion. Now, no Title X funds are used to provide abortion services. But is a man who misleads women in crisis pregnancies the kind of person who should be heading a program that is supposed to help people be informed about how they can decide if and when to have children?
The goal of achieving reproductive health equity for women around the world gained currency last week with the release of a World Health Organization-sponsored report citing unprotected sex as the second leading cause of disability and death in the developing world. What was refreshing for many of us in this field was the bold way in which the WHO called it like it is: "declining financial support, increased political interference and an overall reluctance to tackle threats to sexual and reproductive health" are threatening the very existence of strong family planning programs. That trend must end.
During a recent trip to Ethiopia, I heard time and time again just how difficult integration of family planning and HIV services is in light of funding cuts to family planning programs in many African countries. While U.S. support for HIV/AIDS is at an unprecedented level, our decades-long support for family planning is dangerously low and the repercussions for women, men, and their families are deadly. How much have we truly accomplished in a country where HIV infection is coming down if maternal and infant mortality rates are still high and on the rise?
