Sarah M. is a college student working in Washington, D.C. this summer. We're excited to have her working with us on Rewire for the month of August!
Currently there are an estimated 750,000 people displaced in Lebanon, with no end to the violence in sight. Of those 750,000, statistics suggest that slightly over half are women and girls.
Those of us who have watched popular medical dramas, or those of us who have followed humanitarian crises in the past, know that babies do not stop being born when there is an upheaval—natural or man-made. Women do not suddenly stop needing reproductive health care. People still have sex and family planning is still necessary. Miscarriages still happen and complications in birth do not wait.
The HPV Vaccine is the topic of an opinion piece today by James Waggoner of Advoates for Youth in the Washington Post. He calls for a common sense approach, based on sound science, that would vaccinate young women with this cancer preventing, thus life-saving, medicine. He writes in opposition to the Family Research Council, which argues the "pro-life" position is not to encourage vaccination, but keep it voluntary.
One would think all parents could agree on vaccinating their children against one common cancer, as the HPV vaccine does. But social conservatives oppose this because they fear it will make young people more likely to have sex. Hypocrisy abounds. Some experts have suggested making the vaccine mandatory and we agree.
The word was that the Bush Administration would make it’s decision last month about whether to release the money Congress intended for UNFPA this year. But they seem to be on the slow boat to China determining if the dollars should flow. Maybe that is because UNFPA has been slow to spend any money in China this year, which gets in the way of the Administration’s excuses. The Administration uses UNFPA’s program in China as the reason to not fund voluntary reproductive health programs in over 140 other countries. Makes it sort of tricky to dress your political act in policy clothing if there aren’t any threads to wear.
Ian recently wrote about the Teen Endangerment Act, and as the New York Times points out today, the act will endanger many young women ... though it is doubtful that's what its supporters intended when naming the bill. In addition to calling the bill "mean" the editorial states:
The underlying intent of the bill’s sponsors was to score pre-election points with social conservatives who are looking for reassurance that the Republican majority still cares about the abortion issue, and to do it in a way that would not alarm moderate voters who believe that parents should know if their child is pregnant and considering an abortion.
Not only did the Senate endanger young women with this bill, but as Ellen Marshall wrote, they also turned down an amendment that would have promoted medically accurate sexuality education that has been proven to delay sexual activity and thus reduce abortion. Double whammy, keep kids uninformed and uneducated, then limit their options when they find themselves in trouble.
Monday was my quintessential intern experience. Advocates for Youth rounded up interns from organizations across the city and had us join forces to lobby for the Protection Against Transmission of HIV for Women and Youth Act of 2006, better known simply as PATHWAY.
I was excited as Monday approached. I was going to lobby. I was going to talk to the representatives. I would persuade them with jargon like PEPFAR, socially responsible spending, micro-lending, and female-initiated methods of prevention. I would reason with them on a personal level and try to show them what I considered to be the error of their ways. For a second, I think I probably convinced myself that my group would simply have to educate them on the scope of the epidemic in order to convince them to co-sponsor. It never occurred to me that lobbying would be hard and probably unsuccessful.
As public health professionals and AIDS prevention advocates prepare for next month's International HIV/AIDS Conference in Toronto, Janet Fleischman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, writes in today's Baltimore Sun about the need for integration of family planning and HIV services. This same notion, long supported by those working in the reproductive health field, was also recently promoted in a major new study arguing for the inclusion for reproductive health in the Millennium Development Goals, as a means of of reaching the goal for HIV treatment and prevention.
Good news from Missouri, where a federal district judge ruled last week that the state is required to provide transportation to women prisoners seeking to exercise their legal right to an abortion. Transportation is a critical detail, since both state women's prisons are over two hours away from the nearest abortion provider, and to the best of my knowledge, incarcerated women (35 to 50 of whom are pregnant in any given month in Missouri) can't exactly hop in a cab when they need healthcare. In honor of the ruling, I want to devote a little space to the reproductive rights of female prisoners in the United States, a topic first brought to my attention by the incredible women of Justice NOW, an Oakland-based organization that "works with female prisoners and local communities to build a safe, compassionate world without prisons."
Advocates for Youth intern Lylyana offers her reflections on the PATHWAY Act Intern Lobby Day on Monday, July 24.
As a 25 year-old female interning with Advocates for Youth, I have received many unrecognized privileges accessible to those of us in the United States and other developed countries. I have the ability to seek out education and resources that can protect me from HIV. I have learned the ability to negotiate during sexual encounters; much of which is not afforded to women and youth in developing nations. During my internship this summer, I have focused on international HIV/AIDS and how youth are affected. My passion has grown tremendously for this area. To hear that of the seventy-six percent of the young people infected in sub-Saharan Africa are girls can be disheartening. Yet I know that one person’s voice, story, and action can make a difference towards global HIV prevention.
Once again – trying to stop abortion by limiting access, rather than preventing unwanted pregnancy...
A bill to limit access to abortion for young Americans is being debated in the Senate.In an effort to strengthen the bill, both Senators from New Jersey offered an amendment to provide funding for medically-accurate sex education that helps to delay sexual activity and give young people the information they need to make healthy decisions. They also tried to get support for programs to help parents learn how to talk with their kids about sex.But unbelievably, I mean really unbelievably, this common sense provision could not get a majority of support in the Senate.I honestly just do not get it – what is so terrifying about this information?Boggles the mind.Kudos to Senators Lautenberg and Menendez for trying.
Today the Senate confirmed ardently anti-choice and anti-woman judge Jerome Holmes to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.This means one more anti-choice individual who thinks that “no issue of our time is more important, not the economy, not the deficit, not health care, not foreign policy, as important as those matters are” will be a sitting judge.A believer that a wife is to subordinate herself to her husband and former president of a state-wide “right to life” coalition, Holmes believes that Roe v. Wade is contrary to the principles of natural law he finds in the Constitution.Holmes was “promoted” from the US District Court to a court that sets binding precedent.No doubt he’s hoping to have some opportunities to set new precedents sometime soon.
