Real religious freedom gives everyone the right to make personal decisions – including whether and when to use birth control – based on our own beliefs. It doesn't give one group the right to impose its beliefs on others by denying employees access to critical health services.
To be at the International AIDS Conference in Washington, DC would mean a lot to me. I would’ve wanted to share our issues with the delegates and I’m sorry that the US immigration policy restricts entry into the country for people like me.
I dreamed of coming to Washington to speak at AIDS 2012 to deliver a message to those with the financial and political means to turn the tide of the epidemic: For millions of us, repressive drug policies and stigma stand in the way of treatment and prevention. But I am barred from participating.
Freedom from abuse and violence is a human right that we will continue to fight for at every forum, including the Sex Worker Freedom Festival, which is on at Kolkata at the same time as the International AIDS Conference takes place in Washington DC.
In July, Washington, D.C. will host a conference on HIV/AIDS, where participants will gather to discuss to the latest science and policy of HIV treatment and prevention. Yet the country’s immigration policy denies entry to those disproportionately affected by the pandemic—people dependent on drugs—because of their medical condition.
Drug users and sex workers represent the majority of people living with HIV in many countries, and are among the most at-risk of infection everywhere. The irony of allowing people living with HIV to the conference while refusing those likeliest to be—or become—infected has not been lost on everyone.
It’s time to set aside politics and recommit ourselves – as a city, a state and a nation – to family planning and sexual health. As recently as the 1980s, these were civic ideals that united us. If the global community can revive them in 2012, so can we.
Dear Representative Trent Franks and other anti-choice politicians: Stop claiming you care about women and babies. You didn't care about me when I was raped, and you don't care about the suffering of American people. How dare you suggest otherwise.
A federal judge today dismissed the lawsuit filed by seven states attorneys general seeking to block the birth control mandate, the requirement under health reform that all insurance policies provide contraception without a co-pay.
