The San Francisco chapter of Pride at Work, an organization that seeks to mobilize mutual support between the Organized Labor Movement and the LGBT community, has taken on California's Proposition 85 this year. Proposition 85 is an anti-choice parental notification initiative on the ballot. It is a dangerous initiative that puts California's most vulnerable teens at risk, and seeks to undermine reproductive choice for all women. San Francisco's young LGBT activists are turning out across the city to do bar crawls and voter education against Proposition 85. Still more people are coming out to walk door to door in LGBT neighborhoods, and to call voters in these neighborhoods to talk to them about choice. But why is an LGBT organization organizing the queer community against Proposition 85? Why is this reproductive health issue also an LGBT issue?
Maria de Bruyn is the Senior Policy Advisor for Ipas.
On 9-10 October 2006, Addis Ababa University and the Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health organized an interesting conference for over 480 participants in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: "Linking Reproductive Health and Family Planning with HIV/AIDS Programs in Africa." As is often the case at such meetings, useful information was shared that led to more questions needing answers.
A number of presentations investigated the fertility intentions of people living with HIV/AIDS. Researchers reporting on studies from Botswana, Ethiopia, Malawi, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda indicated that HIV-positive women (and men) often want to continue having children. Not surprisingly, however, considerable numbers of women living with HIV also do not want (more) children - especially if they are already mothers, are somewhat older and not in a relationship with a new partner. Sadly, numerous studies also reported an unmet need for family planning among HIV-positive individuals, which is resulting in unwanted pregnancies. One study among people receiving antiretroviral therapy at a large clinic in Ethiopia, for example, found that unsafe abortion was a problem for their female clients.
No on Prop 85 released an unusual TV ad on Monday. Sponsored by the ACLU and the California Teachers Association (CTA) in the Bay Area, this ad was designed to cut through the election clutter and highlight vulnerable teens who would be endangered by Prop 85.
Editor's note: This blog post is coauthored by Rachel Benson Gold and Elizabeth Nash.
Rachel Benson Gold is the Guttmacher Institute's Director of Policy Analysis and Elizabeth Nash holds the position of Public Policy Associate. Both work in the Institute's Washington-based Public Policy Division.
Nothing is certain in life but death and taxes, and maybe the fact that the world of reproductive health can always be counted upon to generate plenty of excitement. For those of us who make a living following reproductive health issues at the state level, 2006 is no exception - with high-profile events like the referendum on South Dakota's abortion ban or the ballot initiatives on parental notification for abortion in California and Oregon only the tip of the iceberg.
So what all has been happening so far in 2006? By the beginning of October, just over 1,200 bills on topics related to sexual and reproductive health had been introduced in the 50 state legislatures-and 107 new laws had been enacted in 37 states.
But even as reproductive rights continue to come under attack in a number of states, state-level advocates and national organizations are working to protect and increase access to reproductive health care. As a result of their work we also have many positive developments to report.
Last week I had a painful experience. Casey Murschel, Executive Director for NARAL Pro-Choice SD, and I faced off at a forum against State Representative Roger Hunt, the prime sponsor of the abortion ban legislation, and Alan Unruh, the spouse of Leslee Unruh, long-time anti-abortion activist and manager of the campaign working to pass Referred Law 6, the abortion ban. The forum was held at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion; however, many people in the audience were not students but rather people from off campus sporting Vote Yes for Life (VYFL) shirts.
While it was not an actual "debate," we each gave opening remarks and then took questions from the audience for approximately forty-five minutes.
One of the unbelievable comments from the supporters of the bill was that there is a "provision" in the law for rape and incest victims because they can use EC up until the time they can get a positive pregnancy test through "conventional medical testing" - at least nine to ten days after sex. When we pointed out that EC is approved by the FDA for use up to 72 hours, Roger Hunt noted that he had drafted the bill to apply not only to current medical technology, but future technology as well. Always the forward thinker he is.
These days, I need some good news on abortion rights like it's my job. Back home in the United States, disingenuous doctors are lying through their teeth on TV about South Dakota's proposed abortion ban. Here in Nicaragua, the National Assembly - egged on by the Catholic and Evangelical hierarchies, the current president, and three out of four of the current presidential candidates - is on the verge of eliminating the therapeutic abortion provision from the Penal Code. Both proposed bans would condemn countless women - among them, those whores with life-threatening ectopic pregnancies, and those sluttish pre-teen survivors of rape and incest - to death. But hey, condemning women to death is just an unfortunate consequence of the culture of life. If you want to make an omelette...
Happily, rays of hope sometimes spring from the most surprising places, and I was thrilled to read last week that Portugal - one of the only countries in Europe where abortion is still illegal under most circumstances - will be holding a referendum this January that could legalize abortion up to ten weeks.
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.
