UNFPA FUNDING STILL IN JEOPARDY

"President Bush is heading toward a decision to cut off millions of dollars of funds for an international family planning program opposed by abortion foes, according to people familiar with the plans," reported The Washington Post on June 29. An adviser to the Bush administration said senior administration officials "expect [the funds] to be permanently withheld." A three-person State Department team investigating the allegations returned from China several weeks ago but has not released its findings. The Post reported, "White House officials have made it clear that they expect Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to make the announcement when Arthur E. Dewey, Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration, issues a recommendation sometime after July 15." Read: The Washington Post, The Observer (London) and Glamour Magazine's July 2002 issue.

Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje of The San Antonio Express-News asked in her June 23 column, "Why should Americans care if poor women in developing nations have access to family planning and maternal care services?" She responded, "The compassionate argument is we're all part of one human family. But if compassion doesn't do it for you - apparently, it's not doing it for Bush - consider self-interest." Peter Purdy, President of the United Nations Population Fund, agreed: "You cannot disconnect the plight of poor women from the issue of security," he said. "Recent events show us you cannot raise families in societies where women are disempowered without it eventually ending up in your own back yard, like it did last fall." A June 22 editorial in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MO) asserted that "Hunger and starvation can also be reduced by providing family planning to help poor women limit the size of their families." Studies show that a $50 million investment in contraception and family planning would mean 1 million fewer abortions and 100,000 fewer infant deaths, noted The Post Dispatch. It said the UNFPA's $34 million was now being "held hostage to abortion politics." Read: San Antonio Express-News

[NOTE: Go to PLANetWIRE's feature story: UNFPA Funding to Save Women's Lives in Jeopardy.]

HIV/AIDS: China's Titanic Peril

The United Nations issued a stinging public criticism of China's lackluster efforts to face its rapidly accelerating epidemic of HIV infection and AIDS, saying the country is 'on the verge of a catastrophe,' reported The New York Times on June 28. In a new report, "HIV/AIDS: China's Titanic Peril," the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS criticized Chinese officials on many fronts, from the lack of adequate education programs to the absence of treatment for people infected with HIV. "We are now witnessing the unfolding of an HIV/AIDS epidemic of proportions beyond belief, an epidemic that calls for an urgent and proper but as yet unanswered quintessential response," the report said, noting that the lack of action meant China could have the largest number of people infected with HIV in the world within a few years. A day after the report, U.S. Heath Secretary, Tommy Thompson announced that the U.S. National Institutes of Health is awarding Chinese scientists a $14.8 million grant to expand AIDS research, according the Associated Press ' June 28 story. Thompson signed the agreement with China's health minister, Zhang Wenkang, on Friday to promote U.S.-Chinese cooperation in researching ways to prevent and treat the AIDS virus. Read: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Associated Press: China AIDS Epidemic and U.S. Funding for China

SAVING WOMEN'S LIVES

UN Report on Arab Women

According to the United Nations Arab Human Development Report 2002 released on July 2, "Arab societies are being crippled by a lack of political freedom, the repression of women and an isolation from the world of ideas that stifles creativity," The New York Times said on July 2. The report found that Arab women are almost universally denied advancement. Half of them still cannot read or write. The report also noted maternal mortality rate is double that of Latin America and four times that of East Asia. On July 2, The Washington Post reported that little correlation was found between development levels in individual Arab states and their empowerment of women. While Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates were the most developed overall, Iraq, near the bottom on the development index, scored highest in women's empowerment. Read: The New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today

Policy: Violence against Women

"Mexico is struggling to modernize its justice system, but when it comes to punishing sexual violence against women, surprisingly little has changed in a century," reported The Washington Post on June 30. In many parts of Mexico, the penalty for stealing a cow is harsher than the punishment for rape. Although the law calls for tough penalties for rape -- up to 20 years in prison -- only rarely is there an investigation into even the most barbaric sexual violence. Women's groups estimate that perhaps 1 percent of rapes are ever punished. Patricia Duarte, President of the Mexican Association Against Violence Against Women, said exams, routinely conducted in the prosecutor's office, are often carried out with little sensitivity or privacy. The exams, she said, are an obstacle to reporting rape that contributes to "impunity of rapists" in Mexico. Read: The Washington Post

A Pakistani tribal council ordered an 18-year-old girl to be gang-raped in order to punish her family after her brother was seen walking with a girl from a higher class tribe, police said, according to a July 2 story by The Associated Press. The next day, a July 3 story by The New York Times reported, "The police raided the Punjab village of Meerwala and arrested several rape suspects and some onlookers," said a district police officer, Farman Ali Chaudhry. "Culprits involved in the case will not go unpunished." Read: Associated Press, Agence France Presse and The New York Times

Afghan Women: Politics and Health

According to The Dallas Morning News on June 26 and other major coverage, "The cabinet that President Hamid Karzai appointed doesn't include Sima Samar, who had served as minister for women's affairs in the emergency cabinet. She had been the target of death threats and criticism from religious fundamentalists, and she had reportedly asked for a lower-profile role in the new government." Women's advocates and some U.S. politicians say the pressures brought to bear on Karzai and Samar show that "The reign of terror against women continues, leaving the Taliban in power over women when they are no longer in power over the rest of the country," in the words of Ritu Sharma, Executive Director of Women's Edge. A bill proposed by Sens. Olympia Snowe (Rep.-ME) and Richard Durbin (Dem.-IL) would earmark an undetermined percentage of the $366 million in aid appropriated for Afghanistan to bolster women's programs. A July 3 story by the Associated Press also mentioned a $10.1 million Canadian aid package for programs in women's rights, education and HIV-AIDS care for Pakistani women and Afghan refugees. Read: The Dallas Morning News, The New York Times, USA Today; Associated Press: June 24 and July 3

"Women are the forgotten patients of Afghanistan, the most neglected section of society, discriminated against not only under the former Taliban regime, but by the conservative culture of their society, which puts women last," reported The New York Times June 23. "They are also in danger of coming last in line for foreign assistance, as needs like children's health seem to be drawing the bulk of public health aid." Dr. Peter Salama of UNICEF noted, "Despite the need for women's health, there is a terrible lack of international assistance. While UNICEF has been given $20 million for its vaccination program and $10 million for children's nutrition, it has received only $2 million for women's health programs this year." With few women knowing or obtaining help in recognizing danger signs in pregnancy, Salma stressed, "The solution is to train women to provide health care for women." Read: The New York Times

HIV/AIDS WORLDWIDE

International AIDS Conference in Barcelona

Twenty-one years into the epidemic, AIDS has yet to peak, according to a UNAIDS report in advance of the International AIDS Conference in Barcelona July 7-12, reported MSNBC on July 2. The epidemic is still in its early stages, warned UNAIDS, with HIV being transmitted in almost every part of the world, including countries where rates had been very high and others where they had been stable. The New York Times reported July 3, "The alarming extent of spread is disproving theories that the number of infections might reach a plateau in heavily hit countries as the number of individuals at risk for HIV declines," said Dr. Neff Walker, a United Nations epidemiologist. "We've constantly underestimated the kind of levels the epidemic can reach." Walker cited mass migrations, economic upheavals and other social factors as increasing the number of people at risk of HIV, making accurate predictions difficult. Read: MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe

[NOTE: Go to PLANetWIRE's feature story: AIDS Funding Grows, But Insufficient to Global Crisis.]

The largest global study of AIDS awareness ever compiled by the U.N. Population Division has found that most people in developing nations have now heard of the disease but that a significant number have only limited knowledge of how to avoid it, reported The Associated Press on June 23. Most people questioned in more than three dozen countries believed that AIDS could not strike them and, as a result, were not changing their sexual habits enough to meet the threat, according to the report, "HIV/AIDS: Awareness and Behavior." Joseph Chamie, Director of the U.N. Population Division, said in an interview that this was the first time the organization had tried to measure behavior patterns as well as the statistics of the disease's spread. He added, "The results pointed to the need for greatly enhanced prevention efforts, including substantial habit changes that may challenge long-held cultural practices." Read: Associated Press and The New York Times

CHINA'S BALANCING ACT

China's one-child-per-couple policy and modern medical technology have combined to create a demographic nightmare-not enough girls and women--that threatens China's stability, reported USA Today June 19. According to China's latest census, 116.9 Chinese boys were born for every 100 girls in 2000 -- up from an already alarming "sex ratio at birth" of 111.3 boys in 1990. The New York Times reported June 21 that "In greater numbers than ever, China's villagers are using [illegal] inexpensive prenatal scans and then abortion to prevent the birth of unwanted daughters and to ensure that they will bear a son." A report by Valerie Hudson of Brigham Young University and Andrea Den Boer of Britain's University of Kent, to be published in the journal International Security, says growing numbers of lonely men in migrant shantytowns and isolated farm villages will pose a threat to social order and could force the Chinese government to tighten its grip on society or even seek military conflicts abroad to keep the restless bachelors occupied. "This is a seriously dangerous ratio," Ren Yuling of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Committee, recently told China Youth Daily. "The numbers mean that some people will never have their needs for a spouse met, so they move into dangerous territory." Read: USA Today, The New York Times and Time Magazine

EDITORIALS AND OPINIONS

In a July 3 op ed in The New York Times, UNAIDS' Executive Director, Peter Piot wrote that infection rates projected to kill 68 million people in the 45 most affected countries over the next 20 years, according to the new UNAIDS report, "need not happen." Piot noted a handful of developing countries prove that the AIDS epidemic can be controlled, citing the example of Uganda. Devastated by years of dictatorship and war, it has also been ravaged by HIV. "After infection rates in the capital city of Kampala reached more than 30 percent in 1990, leaders in Parliament, urban neighborhoods and villages began to talk frankly and publicly about HIV and AIDS," wrote Piot. "Today Kampala's HIV prevalence rate is 11 percent and falling." Piot concluded, "Uganda, Zambia, Cambodia, Brazil and other developing nations have demonstrated that AIDS is a problem with a solution. Now the world must match this leadership and commitment with the resources needed to get on with the job. Otherwise, the new spirit of hope and vigor in the AIDS fight will be dashed. The costs of that are too devastating to contemplate." Read: The New York Times

"Today marks World Refugee Day, a reminder that what happens in refugee camps can foreshadow what happens around the country when conflicts end," noted The New York Times' June 20 editorial. "It's in our best interest to ensure that women are prepared to help rebuild their homelands to avoid their descending into the kind of chaos that has typified Afghanistan." The Times' editorial concluded with a message: "A day when we commemorate the plight of female refugees should also be one to push for ratification of a treaty that's been stalled in Washington for years -- the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. The Justice Department is reviewing it and should move on it quickly. Doing so will show that we're serious about protecting women, be it here or in refugee camps." Read: The New York Times and a letter by Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children

In response to President Bush's June 19 announcement that Washington would spend $500 million over the next three years on programs to prevent mother-to-child transmission of AIDS, The New York Times' July editorial criticized, "That is a worthwhile endeavor, but the White House is taking the wrong approach. Its initiative sabotaged a Senate bill that was sure to pass - backed by the Republicans Jesse Helms and Bill Frist - that would have provided even more money to help these babies, all of it right away, without robbing other AIDS programs." The editorial concluded, "Although Mr. Bush and members of his cabinet speak as if they understand the catastrophic impact of AIDS worldwide, their willingness to help apparently stops at the point where it could cross key financial supporters or require real money." The Washington Post also chimed in its June 21 editorial, "Both AIDS and education are areas where action is urgent, where others are rightly pressing ahead and where the administration should be aiming to speed progress." The New York Times' July 3 editorial further urged, "President Bush, who has rightly made such an issue of education in this country, should seek substantially increased financing for it in next year's foreign aid budget. Other rich nations should do likewise. As Mr. Bush has said, no child should be left behind." Read: The New York Times June 21, The Washington Post and The New York Times July 1.

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.

If you would like your name to be added to their email service, please e-mail your request to popmedia@ccmc.org.