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.
"It supplemented factual information with a value judgment."
With that one sentence, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals not only struck down a South Dakota law dictating values to doctors and patients, but also summed up social conservative ideology, their campaign tactics and their governing majority that makes social conservatives responsible and accountable for every branch of government today.
The South Dakota law would have required doctors who perform abortions to tell women that they are about to "terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being.” The Federal Appeals Court wrote, “Unlike the truthful, nonmisleading medical and legal information doctors were required to disclose” in the Supreme Court’s 1992 decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, “the South Dakota statute requires abortion doctors to enunciate the state’s viewpoint on an unsettled medical, philosophical, theological and scientific issue, that is, whether a fetus is a human being.”
While Rewire likes to be ahead of the curve in terms of our use of technology, we certainly haven't mastered it all. We are glad to report about good use of technology for reproductive health advocacy, even when it isn't us.
