Three cheers for the Chilean Ministry of Health, which decreed on Saturday that all public health centers in that country are now required to provide birth control-including emergency contraception - free of charge to any Chilean woman over the age of 14 who requests it. The decree is part of a wider set of norms on sexual and reproductive health designed to bring Chile's health policies into better alignment with the international standards established at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development. Hip hip hooray!
It's a pretty progressive step for Chile, where laws and policies on gender and women's health tend to run from conservative to ultra-conservative - divorce was illegal until 2005, and abortion is still illegal under all circumstances (including cases where pregnancy threatens the woman's life).
Susan A. Cohen is Director of Government Affairs at the Guttmacher Institute, where she is responsible for facilitating and coordinating issue analysis and strategy development within the Washington, DC office.
The theme of the Toronto International AIDS Conference in August was "time to deliver." Indeed, while the U.S. deserves credit for ramping up the amount that it has been spending on the global AIDS effort, it is time-past time-to look more closely at how the U.S. is spending its money in addition to talking about how much it is spending overall. Luckily, a rare opportunity to ask just these questions of the person in charge of U.S. AIDS efforts will come on Wednesday, September 6, at 1 p.m. Under the chairmanship of Rep. Christopher Shays (R-CT), a Government Reform Committee subcommittee will hold a hearing examining the impact of the requirement that at least 1/3 of all U.S. global HIV/AIDS funding must be reserved for "abstinence until marriage" programs.
This hearing will be significant because it will be the first opportunity since Toronto for U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Mark Dybul to testify specifically on what kind of prevention programs the U.S. is delivering.
I owe the doctors at Colombia’s Simon Bolivar hospital an apology. Earlier this week I wrote that they initially refused, on the basis of conscience, to grant a legal abortion to an 11-year-old girl who had been raped by her stepfather. In fact, they hesitated to perform the procedure because they feared prosecution (given the newness of Colombia’s abortion law), and when the Constitutional Court gave them the green light, they performed the procedure without delay. My apologies for the misattribution of their motives: that’ll teach me to trust the Catholic Information Agency as a reliable source.
Abstinence-only education has been under fire frequently of late - in Toronto at the IAC, in Africa because of PEPFAR, and recently in Canton, Ohio. After learning last fall that one in seven girls attending TimkinHigh School were pregnant, the school board decided that maybe abstinence-only education wasn't working after all. Surprise! You can tell a teenager "NO", but do you really think that's going to work? Well, gee - when I was a young adult, being told not to do something just increased my desire to do it. Maybe adolescent attitudes have changed... but from the look of things... maybe not.
Big news from Colombia: the first legal abortion after the Constitutional Court’s May 2006 decision to legalize the procedure in cases where the woman’s life is in danger, in cases of fetal malformation, or in cases where the woman has been raped, took place at Simon Bolivar hospital in Bogotá last Thursday. Admittedly, I use the term “woman” loosely, since the case in fact involved an 11-year-old girl who was raped by her stepfather(or, according to Catholic World News, who was “reportedly” raped by her stepfather). Despite the new law, the case had to go all the way back up to the Constitutional Court before the abortion was permitted, since initially the doctors refused to perform the procedure as a matter of conscience. Nice consciences, guys.
Microbicides raised hopes at the recent International AIDS Conference for their potential to offer an HIV prevention technique that could be initiated by women.But many researchers and advocates who work on microbicide development have been quick to offer cautions to the public that excitement not build too fast because a marketable product could still be years away.
The news that a Pennsylvania firm, Cellegy, has stopped its stage 3 (human testing) trial of a microbicide gel only adds to that sobering reminder.After a year of studying over 2,000 women in a trial that compared the real drug against a placebo, they have concluded that there is no statistically significant data being derived from the study.In an area where the rate of HIV transmission was expected to be about 3.7% a year, the women in this study are experiencing a rate of transmission closer to 2%.Good news, except it means that researchers can’t tell the difference between the microbicide’s effectiveness and the effectiveness of the condoms and HIV-prevention counseling offered to all of the women as part of the trial.
If there was any shred of doubt left about where Rep. Katherine Harris (FL) stands on the political spectrum, there is none now. She has moved beyond conservative, beyond even far right, and set up camp somewhere in the exurbs of funny fringe land. She, the woman who presided over one of the great election debacles in all of US history, damaging people's faith in democracy, now says the founding fathers never intended for church and state to be separate.
She said that the separation of church and state is, "so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers. And if we are the ones not actively involved in electing those godly men and women," then "we're going to have a nation of secular laws (like abortion). That's not what our Founding Fathers intended, and that certainly isn't what God intended."
Let's check in with Thomas Jefferson on that:
Almighty God hath created the mind free ... No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship or ministry or shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion ...
Rep. Harris' comments are evidence of a larger rift within the nation, and in particular the Republican Party, as social conservative ideologues are increasingly being held accountable for their reckless rhetoric.
Concerned Women of America (CWA) held a meeting earlier in the month to express concern about a weapon that threatens the American way of life. Is it terrorism... missiles... drugs?? No. Prepare yourself. Are you sitting down? Ok, here goes - it's the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Terrifying, I know. The treaty (ratified by 184 countries, but not the U.S.) would involve the U.N. in "our homes, our families, our marriages," according to the conservative group. They even use the ‘F' word - yes, that's right: feminists. They say that the socialist feminists (*double shudder*) want to impose a radical liberal agenda around the world.
Never mind that one of the major focuses of the recent International AIDS Conference was that women and girls are a vulnerable population and have an increasing risk for HIV/AIDS... that this is often due to gender inequality, gender-based violence, economic disparity, being forced to obey their husband, and lack of education (to name just a few minor reasons)... Why would such a large women's group not want to acknowledge that a treaty is needed to protect women and stop gender discrimination around the world?
Any reflections on the XVI International Conference on AIDS are necessarily subjective, as each person reporting attended different sessions, had different goals and talked to different people at different times. Nevertheless, taking the various perspectives into account can give us a more comprehensive view of what transpired in Toronto.
Advocates for women’s and rights issues can rightly take pride in having focused at least some attention on topics that were relatively neglected, such as female-controlled (at least to some extent!) barrier methods (female condoms, microbicides, diaphragms and cervical caps) and violence against women.
