SAVING WOMEN’S LIVES

Support for UN Population Fund

“In a sincere, well-meant and tragic political maneuver, President Bush is blocking $34 million meant for the United Nations Population Fund,” wrote Nicholas Kristof in an April 26 New York Times commentary. Kristof stressed: “The United Nations Population Fund supports precisely the kind of third-world maternal health care programs that can save women's lives in childbirth and avoid medical complications like fistula. Yet the White House for now is crippling the fund by withholding the 13 percent of its budget that the United States provides.” "This is a 100 percent preventable problem," Dr. Abdullah Kannan, a gynecologist in Khartoum, said of fistula. Kristof concluded, “Sitting beside these women, like Ahnis Tigaina, who has suffered from fistula for nine years and received her divorce papers when she was still in the hospital for the first time, it seems unbelievable that the United States is cutting off funds to one of the few organizations that helps them.” In an May 13 interview with In These Times, UN Population Fund’s Thoraya Obaid responded to Bush’s decision to withhold funds by saying, "Everything we have learned shows that when women are empowered -- through better laws, health care and education – the benefits go far beyond the individual. Families are better off, and so are nations." Read: The New York Times and recent letters in: The New York Times, The Providence Journal-Bulletin

The Deseret News (UT) reported April 20 that it called a dozen or so Muslim women in its area and found that while most had not heard of the debate about the $34 million, all knew of the high mortality rate for Afghan mothers and infants. All agreed that the Quran forbids sterilization but not birth control. These women were willing to talk about women's clinics in Afghanistan, but they also wanted to talk about other issues of moral and religious significance in their lives. Sevilay Kosebalaban said, "Family planning programs are important in Turkey (where she and her husband are from) because economics are really bad." It is important for Islam to increase in numbers and the Quran says God will provide, but also says quality of life is important. She said her mother, who came to stay recently for the birth of Kosebalaban's baby, was surprised at how many Utahns were pregnant and how happy they seemed about it. In Turkey, said Kosebalaban, people are worried about how to feed the children they have. They think parents are crazy to bring more children into such an unsettled world. Regarding the UNFPA money and the fact that some of the funds for Afghanistan would buy childbirth kits, which include a sterile sheet, soap, twine and a sterile razor blade, Asha Katyal said: "In Islam the issue of cleanliness is a huge issue. We do an ablution before each prayer. Maintaining the body in a clean state, a woman's health in a clean state, is very, very important." Read: The Deseret News

Women in War and Conflict

The Chapel Hill Herald of North Carolina reported April 16 that International Training and Health, known as Intrah, the international health development arm of University of North Carolina’s medical school, had shifted from its traditional work on health care quality and accessibility to providing emergency response assistance to the West Bank and Gaza. The Herald noted that family medicine specialists are focusing on obstetric care training in an attempt to prevent pregnant women from dying for lack of medical attention while detained at checkpoints in Gaza and the West Bank. "We've had a number of fatalities where [pregnant] women are held at checkpoints and are not able to get to hospitals," said Doris Youngs of Intrah. "We're trying to bring the services closer to the people in need." For the next six months, Intrah personnel in Gaza and the West Bank plan to focus on improving obstetric care, increasing availability of medical supplies to civilians and using distance-learning programs to give quick support to health care providers on the front lines. Read: Chapel Hill Herald

Violence against Women

“Violence at home, in police custody and in society at large is widespread in Pakistan,” London-based Amnesty International said in its fifth report on women's rights in the country, according to an April 17 story by the Associated Press. This is the same violence Agence France Presse’s April 25 story described: a young Pakistani woman was convicted of adultery and sentenced to death by stoning despite pleas that she had been "forcefully raped." Amnesty said so-called honor killings of women continue to be reported daily and few of their murderers are ever convicted. AP noted that the Pakistani government has also done little to restrict the sale of acid or to punish those who use it to injure women, Amnesty said. While acid burns rarely kill, they result in serious disfiguration and suffering, frequently confining women to their homes. Reuters reported April 17 that an unidentified man threw acid on an Afghan woman teacher in Kandahar after threatening pamphlets appeared in the former Taliban stronghold. Reuters reported the hand-written pamphlets in Kandahar warned men not to send their daughters to schools or their women to work. Read: Associated Press, Reuters

Featured Women

The Washington Post’s April 24 Style section featured Sima Samar, Afghanistan’s minister for women’s affairs. "During the 23 years of war, there were no women in any decision-making, in any policy roles," she said. "The political parties had no women. So they were not used to a woman's face, a woman's presence. We had to make a space for ourselves." Samar expressed her wish: "to give [women] education. We would like to have a lot of vocational training -- find them a job opportunity and let them stand on their own two feet. Of course, to be practical, we need money to fund. In most provinces, we can't find a building to use, we have to build them." Read: The Washington Post

The New York Times reported April 22 that in scores of countries, Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of UNICEF, is a celebrity among the poor as well as among the powerful, and a tough advocate for kids, millions who are battered by war, poverty, malnutrition and disease, forced labor and sexual abuse. From May 6 to May 10, Ms. Bellamy will bring the world home to New York when the United Nations holds a special General Assembly session on children. It will be almost 12 years since the first and last time the organization took stock of children at a world summit. That was before a decade of nasty civil wars created hundreds of thousands of child soldiers and the AIDS epidemic orphaned millions of African and Asian children. "I don't approach child rights as a soapbox issue, or a finger-pointing issue," Ms. Bellamy said. "From my perspective, it's the right to health, it's the right to education." Read: The New York Times

NEWS ON HIV/AIDS

Global Fund Releases First Grants

The Wall Street Journal reported April 26 that the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria announced its first round of grants to disease-ravaged countries, including millions to buy commodities, from condoms to AIDS drugs and other medicines. “The initial grants total $378 million over two years and will go to a range of programs in 31 countries, from the expansion of anti-retroviral AIDS treatment in Nigeria, to controlling malaria in high transmission regions of China, to accelerating the prevention and treatment of tuberculosis in Ghana,” according to WSJ. “Another round of not-quite-acceptable proposals will be revised with help from Fund officials, and by year's end, organizers say, total cash grants will reach $616 million over two years or $1.6 billion over 5 years. However, adopting the sort of strict, results-oriented performance standards that are taking hold among many charities, fund officials say that money after the second year will be doled out only to countries that have demonstrated success.” On April 25, The Boston Globe reported that Richard G.A. Feachem, a longtime public health leader from Britain, was named the first head of the Global Fund. Read: Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe: April 26 and April 26, Reuters

AIDS Policy Change in South Africa

The Associated Press reported April 18 that “after more than two years of despair over South Africa's stubborn AIDS policy, activists and critics expressed guarded optimism over the government's announcement of major changes to its controversial program.” The government will now provide anti-retroviral drugs at no cost to its millions of AIDS sufferers, ending its public questioning of the drugs’ effectiveness. The Treatment Action Campaign, an organization of AIDS activists, said in a statement that the change "has given us hope after months of despair. We can now move past long-settled and time-wasting debates, such as whether HIV causes AIDS and whether antiretrovirals are effective, on to more pertinent matters." UNAIDS head Peter Piot welcomed the government's "new sense of urgency" toward fighting AIDS.

WELFARE OF CHILDREN

Educating Children

“Global financial leaders gave broad backing to a World Bank plan, called ‘Education for All,’ aimed at ensuring that by 2015 all children in poor countries get at least a primary-school education,” according to an April 22 story by The Washington Post. “Getting nearly all of 125 million primary-school-age children to attend class and complete five years of primary education is widely regarded by development experts as one of the most achievable and important of the goals set two years ago by the world's governments for 2015. Reducing illiteracy among women generates benefits in poor societies, including improved child health and nutrition.“ "What I hoped to get today on education…I got," said World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn. "It was a whole-hearted endorsement." The British aid group Oxfam International hailed the plan as "a major breakthrough in the campaign to get every child in the world into school," while adding the admonition that rich nations must now back up their words with billions of dollars in funds. Read: The Washington Post

Reuters reported April 26 on a Population Action International report titled, “In This Generation: Sexual and Reproductive Health Policies for a Youthful World,” that said Iran may let 9-year-old girls get married, but it could still teach the United States something about sex education. The report found that well-meaning adults trying to protect children and teen-agers from sexual activity are actually keeping vital knowledge from them, which is true around the world. “The problem in most countries is that they do not respect the ability of adolescents to make wise decisions for themselves,” said James Waggoner, President of Advocates for Youth, which supported the report.” Many studies have shown that open sex education that includes information about contraception and that also attempts to build self-esteem can lower sexual activity rates and result in fewer pregnancies and cases of disease, the report says. "We have over 87 percent of Americans who believe there should be comprehensive sex education in schools and we have a Congress that does not support this in their legislation," said Population Action International’s president Amy Coen . For more information, see PLANetWIRE’s feature story, “Young People’s Reproductive Health Needs Neglected.”

Trafficking Children

"Bangladesh is considered one of the most vulnerable spots on the global trafficking market, a product of the desperate poverty here and the demand for cheap labor elsewhere,” according to The New York Times’ April 29 story. “Boys, some as young as 4 or 5, are mostly put to work as camel jockeys in the Persian Gulf. Most girls are sent to India and Pakistan to work as prostitutes and maids.” The Times noted, “Sometimes, parents are compensated for their labor; sometimes, the money dries up in a few months. Children are known to have been ferried away for as little as 3,000 Bangladeshi takas, less than $75.” Read: The New York Times

EDITORIALS AND OPINIONS

After the U.N. World Assembly on Aging in Madrid, The Washington Post ran an April 17 op ed by Phyllis Oakley, former Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration, that warned, “We need to remember that those future seniors are only 10 years old or teenagers at the moment, and their short-range needs threaten to destabilize the planet right now.” Oakley said, “On the table in Madrid was a good strategy to help cope with an aging society: Raise the status of women. The bonus: The same strategy will help us cope with what looks more and more like a youth crisis today. She concluded, “Government investment in education, especially for women, is the best start to coping with both aging populations and restless youth.” Oakley’s op ed also ran in The Orlando Sentinel, The Albany Times Union, The San Jose Mercury News and The International Herald Tribune (France). Read: The Washington Post

“The decision of the South African government to acknowledge the viral origin of AIDS is long overdue,” stated The Boston Globe April 26 editorial. “President Thabo Mbeki and his government need to make their country the world leader in treating a disease that is ravaging the population.” The editorial noted: “The government released a statement last week accepting the essence of a court ruling that public hospitals must offer drug treatment to new mothers infected with the HIV virus.” It concluded, “The new realism in South Africa gives the government an opportunity to become the advocate for all societies afflicted with AIDS epidemics. It needs to remind the more affluent nations of their moral obligation to combat the devastation this disease is causing among the world's poorest people.” The announcement of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria’s first grants totaling $387 million over the next two years spurred The Washington Post’s April 29 editorial that noted, “Every year, some 5 million people are newly infected with HIV. The world needs to fight back urgently.” Read: The Boston Globe and The Washington Post

“Today, [Ireland] is as vibrant as the Internet on which the "Celtic Tiger" economy has thrived,” wrote Ellen Goodman in her April 28 Boston Globe column. “But there is one segment of the Irish population that still has to emigrate: Every year about 7,000 women with crisis pregnancies travel to England to have abortions.” "The situation of unplanned pregnancy is not going away. We persist in refusing to acknowledge that reality," said Sherie de Burgh of the Irish Family Planning Association. "If we were in a place where women couldn't go to England, we'd have back street abortions." Goodman concluded, “For now, in the midst of the most extraordinary changes, Ireland still exports its most personal problem. Twenty women a day make the round-trip voyage. On the return home, the welcoming candle in the Irish window casts a very dim glow.” Read: The Boston Globe

The above analysis was written by Elena M. H. Cabatu and Kathy Bonk at the Communications Consortium Media Center, 1200 New York Avenue, NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20005, 202/326-8700.

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