The world reaches seven billion people at a time of renewed debates about demographic changes, individual human rights and women's rights specifically, attacks on basic reproductive health care, and accelerated environmental disruption.
For decades, students’ likelihood of receiving sex ed in NYC public schools has come down to the luck of the draw. New York City’s universal standard for sex education, announced in August, seeks to put an end to the loose patchwork of programs across the city. But the usual suspects are using fear-mongering and falsehoods to push their agenda of ignorance.
When it comes down to it, these laws represent legal rape. If rape is the insertion of an object into the body of an unwilling person, then what else can you call laws insisting that a woman submit to pregnancy regardless of her age, the circumstances under which she became pregnant, her health, or her general well-being?
The UN Special Rapporteur's report calls for decriminalization of and the removal of legal barriers related to human rights abuses around abortion, conduct during pregnancy, contraception, family planning, and provision of sexual and reproductive health education and information.
Calling the program "graphic and explicit," three local politicians spoke out yesterday against the city's sex ed mandate at a protest rally (or maybe it was just a press conference) in Brooklyn.
Unlikely allies from both sides of the traditional “abortion” debate have come together in opposition to Prop 26, Mississippi's egg-as-person initiative.
Today, a CDC advisory committee recommended that the HPV vaccine become a routine part of health care for 11-year-old boys as well as girls. Public and political reaction to this could serve as an interesting gauge of our double standard when it comes to adolescents and sex.
It will take our collective knowledge, experience, energy and expertise to hold governments accountable for their roles in violating women’s and girls’ rights to health.
In Nicaragua, after a total ban on abortion was passed, a woman with an ectopic pregnancy was allowed to languis in a hospital, waiting for her fallopian tube to rupture before a doctor agreed to operate even though there was no doubt regarding the outcome of her pregnancy. This is the world that Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA) would like to bring to America with the passage of H.R. 358, the Let Women Die Act of 2011.
