The Senate’s last vote before it headed home to campaign was an effort to push through legislation to limit young women’s access to abortion.But the procedural motion that required 60 votes failed by a vote of 57-42.Now, what surprised me is that the House had a chance last week to pass the Senate version of the bill, which would have sent it right off to President Bush to sign into law.They would have won.Case closed.But instead House leadership would only accept their own slightly more egregious bill than the Senate’s – forcing another vote in the Senate.
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.
There is no doubt that the outcome of the upcoming U.S. Congressional elections will have a major impact on the sexual and reproductive health of women and youth worldwide. Consequently, policy advocates are closely watching each race.
But these are not the only elections that will determine the future of sexual and reproductive health. Two of the most important international public health jobs are currently in the midst of highly-political selection processes: the Director-General (DG) of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and malaria.
Last Thursday night I had the privilege of celebrating the sixteenth anniversary of the September 28th Campaign to Decriminalize Abortion in Latin America and the Caribbean side by side with members of the Nicaraguan women's movement, who were gathered at the Rotonda de la Plaza Inter here in Managua for a candlelight vigil. The September 28th Campaign was born in Argentina in 1990 at the Fifth Latin American and Caribbean Feminist meeting, out of an urgent need to shed light on the public health crisis of unsafe abortion in Latin America. The campaign's rotating headquarters are currently located here in Nicaragua, where sex ed is practically non-existent, access to contraception is scarce, and the women's movement is in the midst of fighting a total ban on abortion.
Editor's note: Some of the links in this post are audio clips; click on them to listen to Lionel Tiger in a new window.
[img_assist|nid=598|title=Special Series|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=100|height=67]At "Contraception Is Not the Answer", Eric Scheidler of the Pro-Life Action League introduced Lionel Tiger (his real name, I swear) as "an honest scientist" who was NOT coming from a religious conservative perspective. Every other speaker at the anti-contraception conference was from a conservative group or religious institution and obviously pushing an ideological agenda. But Lionel Tiger (and bears - oh my!) is the Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. He was there because of his book "The Decline of Males", which Amazon describes as a counterpart to feminism ("masculinism") that chronicles the decline of men and the ascendancy of women - due to reproductive technology.
Brazil and the International Women's Health Coalition (IWHC) have a very long relationship, so I was eager to meet our colleagues in this enormous country which defies categories and has done so much to improve women's lives and to cut HIV/AIDS off at the pass. Arriving last Sunday to São Paulo, a city of 11 million people, I was struck by the stunning contrasts of the place: a blend of First World and Third World I have only experienced in India and South Africa.
The US Conference on AIDS (USCA) wrapped up this week on the sun-drenched Southern Florida coast with nary a mention in the press or elsewhere. This is a far cry from the extensive coverage of the "Bill and Bill" show at the international meeting in Toronto in August. There, news coverage documented the re-emergence of prevention and the global push-back against U.S. dogmatism on key issues like abstinence-until-marriage programs, the lack of support for condoms and the prostitution pledge. In Florida, the conversation could not have been more different.
Ellen Marshall blogged earlier today about the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act (CIANA), and Nancy Keenan of NARAL did as well. (See also: Feministing.) It went through a vote yesterday in the House in a way that left us wondering if it was a purely political stunt. As Ellen pointed out, by passing the bill with slightly different language than the Senate version, House conservatives appeared to have killed their own initiative. There was little presumed chance that the Senate would be able to return to it in time to approve it before this session of Congress ended, and failure to act would have left it dead until next session.
There has been a lot of news lately about declining birth rates and changes in population in various countries.Pro-population groups have used this opportunity to predict doom and gloom if people don’t start having more babies.Taking that approach, a demographer named Andrew Pollard discussed “Societal Suicide: The Profound Demographic Impact of Contraception” at the Contraception is Not the Answer conference. In contrast to the friendly, cheerful demeanor of the other speakers, Pollard sounded angry and vehement.He made some of the most outrageous statements I heard during the entire conference, which you can listen to in the audio clips at the end of this post.
[img_assist|nid=598|title=Special Series|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=100|height=67]Last week, while American anti-contraception activists gathered in Chicago to discuss how contraception (a.k.a. the "taproot" of abortion) is destroying America, a group of African health ministers and other African Union leaders met in Maputo, Mozambique to discuss how ensuring women's access to contraception and related sexual and reproductive health services might help Save Africa. Apparently, the African Union has not gotten the memo about how contraception is NOT the answer. But, in the great tradition of the Pro-Life Action League, it's time to take a closer look...
Jen Heitel Yakush is Public Policy Associate at SIECUS, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the Untied States
In early June 2006, just over 200 organizations launched No More Money in an effort to stop funding for harmful and ideologically driven abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. The list of supporting organizations, representing all 50 states and the District of Columbia, has now reached close to 300 and ranges from HIV/AIDS organizations to pro-choice organizations, from organizations committed to GLBT rights to organizations committed to disability rights, and from education organizations to medical, scientific, and public health organizations. The Campaign exists because over $1 billion has thus far been spent on these programs. The medical community has never supported these programs and polling consistently shows that the American public agrees that abstinence-only-until-marriage programs are failing our nation's young people and thatgovernment funding spent on these ideologically driven programs is a waste of valuable resources and the wrong direction for health education.
