Last week, the Fordham Law School chapter of Law Students for Reproductive Justice held an off-campus clinic to provide access to birth control prescriptions and condoms to students of our Catholic University. It was a greater success than we had hoped for, but the University still refuses to clarify its policies, much less prescribe contraception.
December 1st marks World AIDS Day and this year’s theme is “Getting to Zero.” Much of this day will be focused on a celebration of new technology and science that can help prevent HIV through daily treatment and male circumcision. And we should celebrate those advances – but we should also not lose sight of women who need both family planning and HIV services.
Senegal provides a fascinating case study in how to work simultaneously to prevent the spread of HIV and meet the family planning needs of women and families. The country's successes also reveal why now, more than ever, U.S. investments in family planning are critical to empowering women, reducing poverty, reducing transmission of HIV and deaths from AIDS, and saving lives.
Millions of women in Africa and throughout the developing world suffer and die needlessly from unwanted pregnancy and unsafe abortion. But even the best contraceptive and postabortion services are not enough to prevent this. A third component that is often stigmatized and neglected even in the context of reproductive health programs is safe, legal abortion.
This week, millions of people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a war-ravaged African country, voted in their second ever presidential and parliamentary election. As Congolese (and Egyptians) cast votes, they speak out for all rights.
Many of the historical problems with adoption came from the desire to keep it secret, to allow adoptive families to “pass” as traditional, biologically related families. Fully embracing openness is key to our efforts to keep improving adoption and placing further distance between its dark and coercive past and its hopeful future.
Servicewomen rely on the military for their health care, but under current policy they are left to fend for themselves if they become pregnant after being raped.
