SAVING WOMEN’S LIVES

Safe Motherhood

“Do you choose to accept money from a sugar daddy who will pay your tuition if you have sex with him without a condom? Or do you leave school because you can't afford the tuition? That is the kind of choice millions of girls face every day in many parts of the world,” said Jill Sheffield, head of Family Care International, in a March 27 story by The Atlanta Journal and Constitution. The Journal and Constitution also reported that in Peru it is not uncommon for a Mestizo woman to have as many as 15 children by the time she reaches 30. "By their 10th, 11th or 12th child, they often die from postpartum hemorrhaging because they are anemic," said Eleanor Smithwick, a biomedical research consultant who works with Emory University and the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center. "You simply cannot make their blood clot. Here, they give you drugs to make your uterus contract. There, they have nothing."

Similarly in Afghanistan, “The deplorable quality of women's health is tied largely to the number of children they have and the lack of reproductive health care. The average Afghan woman is married at 16, lives to the age of 44 and has eight children,” said Thoraya Obaid, Executive Director of the UN Population Fund, in a March 27 story by The Chicago Tribune. “It will be critical to empower the women of Afghanistan as the international community helps rebuild a nation torn by war and religious extremism.” The Associated Press reported March 20 that public health officials have drafted a plan of action to tackle Afghanistan's health crisis this year, focusing on communicable diseases, maternal health, nutrition and mental health. In Bangladesh, up to 15,000 women die every year from pregnancy-related complications, said UNFPA representative Suneeta Mukherjee at a March 20 press briefing for the UNFPA-funded project, "Strengthening Health Programmes through Advocacy."

In The Atlanta Constitution and Journal, both Smithwick and Sheffield pointed to education as a way to save women’s lives. "Education results in sustainable improvements," said Smithwick. "And reproductive health has repercussions in everything." Sheffield said, "An investment in education promotes smaller family size, a delay in first pregnancy, lowers infant mortality rates and increases family income levels.” Read in: The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, The Chicago Tribune and Associated Press

Educating Girls

In Afghanistan, “The new year dawned in this war-weary country in more ways than one,” reported The Boston Globe on March 17. “Among the students heading back to school after the winter break will be thousands of Afghan girls, the first time they have been free to do so since this country's former Taliban regime banned women's education five years ago.” Edward Carwardine, a UNICEF spokesman in Kabul, said the effort was the agency's most ambitious logistics challenge. "It involved packing almost 25 kits with 50 different items every minute, day and night, for more than three weeks," reported The Los Angeles Times March 21. Read in: Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Dallas Morning News and The New York Times

In Mozambique, Candida Jose, a shy, 15 year-old girl in a Mickey Mouse t-shirt and bare feet, is the youngest of 21 children and the only one of her siblings to make it to the fifth grade. Most girls in this rural outpost don't go to school at all, reported The Christian Science Monitor March 18. "In terms of educating women, Mozambique is really going through a process that other Southern African countries went through years ago," said Cooper Dawson, chief of UNICEF Mozambique's education section. "The question is: Why is Mozambique so delayed? The answer is that the civil war absolutely destroyed the education sector." Read in: The Christian Science Monitor

Women’s Rights

The Associated Press reported on March 19 that the Nepalese government proposed a 20-fold increase March 19 in the punishment for anyone convicted of trafficking women to India for prostitution. “The main purpose of this bill is to control trafficking of women and to protect and rehabilitate those who have already been victims of this crime,” said Minister for Women and Social Welfare Rajendra Kharel. “Nepalese girls and young women are sold into prostitution by brokers who lure them with promises of a better life in the cities or marriage and comfort. Instead they end up working as prostitutes in India's many red light districts. Prostitution is illegal in India, but is tolerated in certain districts of large cities and on roadsides.”

In other policy news in Nepal, the New York-based Center for Reproductive Law and Policy “demanded that the Nepalese government release all women in jail for having abortions or performing them,” according to a March 21 story by the Associated Press. "We are calling for release of all the women who are currently in prison on abortion-related charges. Their imprisonment violated international and national standards of human rights," said Laura Katzive, an attorney for the New York group. To reduce the number of deaths of women and allow doctors to perform abortions, Parliament approved a bill last week that would make most abortions legal. It will become law once King Gyanandra approves it, which is considered a formality. The law does not address women already serving sentences of one year to life in prison for abortion-related convictions. Read CRLP’s statement.

HIV/AIDS: SEN. HELMS SUPPORTS HIV/AIDS FUNDING

As he ends a 30-year Senate career, Jesse Helms has changed his mind about AIDS and has started to push for much more federal spending on the problem around the world, reported The New York Times March 26. In an op-ed article in The Washington Post on March 24, Helms wrote that his conscience was "answerable to God" and said, "perhaps, in my 81st year, I am too mindful of soon meeting Him." Helms called for using $500 million in the pending $27 billion supplemental appropriations bills to help eliminate mother-to-child transmission of the AIDS virus in Africa. The Washington Post reported March 24 that most of those funds go to bilateral programs run by the USAID, CDC and the UN’s global AIDS fund. Read in: The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. Also read editorials and opinion pieces addressing Helms’ support for HIV/AIDS funding in: The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Akron Beacon Journal

DEMOGRAPHICS

Aging Population

Reuters reported March 28 that “In too many countries the old are neglected and abused, even if still productive, and have few health means or pensions to live properly,” according to UN preparatory documents for the second World Assembly on Aging, to be held in Madrid April 8-12. ''In Africa, when an old man dies, a library disappears,'' said UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. ''Without the knowledge and wisdom of the old, the young would never know where they come from or where they belong.'' In the next 50 years, the number of people above 60 years of age is projected to grow from about 600 million to almost 2 billion people. The Associated Press reported March 27 that Nitin Desai, the U.N. Undersecretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, said, "The pervasive implications of the aging of the world population [constitute] a profound demographic revolution, whose impact has been compared to that of globalization. Within the next 50 years, people over 60 will outnumber people under 15.” Read in: Reuters

Urbanization in Central America

The New York Times reported March 17 that Central America has long been seen as a region of sleepy rural towns. But in recent decades it has experienced a surge in urban growth, as peasants have abandoned the countryside because of civil wars, natural disasters and plummeting agricultural prices. “By 2010, 55 percent of Central America's population will live in cities, international development groups estimate,” reported The Times. The World Bank, seeking strategies to lessen the burden on cities, is preparing a report on the urban poor in Central America. Alexandra Ortiz, the author and an urban economist, called for more services for the poor in cities and help for them to legalize longtime squatter communities. She also suggested that governments grant smaller rural towns more resources and authority, so that residents won’t feel they have to move to the city to satisfy basic needs. Read in: The New York Times. Also read the letter by Stephen Bornemeier, Director of Planned Giving for Save the Children, responding to The Times’ article.

ENVIRONMENT

The Mail & Guardian of South Africa reported March 22 that a meeting of women leaders on the environment, held in Helsinki March 7-8, produced a draft environmental position to ensure that women won't be left out of the picture at the World Summit next August in South Africa. The main themes of the discussion were globalization and poverty in relation to the environment and gender. The meeting was arranged in cooperation among the Finnish Ministry of the Environment, the Council of Women World Leaders at Harvard University and the Swiss-based NGO, IUCN-World Conservation Union. Read in: The Mail & Guardian

[See also the Population Reference Bureau’s notice, “Opportunity for Influential Developing Country Journalists to Attend and Cover the Upcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development Aug. 26-Sept. 4.”]

The Associated Press reported March 22 that in a report marking World Water Day March 22, the UN Environment Program warned that an estimated 1.1 billion people have no access to safe drinking water, 2.5 billion lack proper sanitation and more than 5 million people die from waterborne diseases each year - 10 times the number of casualties killed in wars around the globe. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a statement, “Fierce national competition over water resources has prompted fears that water issues contain the seeds of violent conflict." Reuters reported March 24 that "Water scarcity and quality will be the biggest threat to food security in the 21st century," said Godwin Obasi, Secretary General of the U.N. World Meteorological Organization. Read in: Reuters

EDITORIALS AND OPINIONS

The New York Times’ March 28 editorial on the UN Population Division’s expert group meeting on fertility, held in early March, noted that “The surprising new development is that, from the late 1970's to the mid-1990's, women in countries that remained poor also had fewer and fewer children, even in rural areas.” It concluded, “Financing for family planning worldwide covers only about half of the $10 billion need. The world now knows that population growth can be checked. But a continued decline in fertility depends on maintaining a commitment to family planning.” Ellen Sweet of the International Women’s Health Coalition responded to The Times’ editorial by writing: “[The editorial] emphasized the importance of sustained funding for family planning. But equally fundamental to any declines in fertility is the right of women to determine when and under what conditions they bear children.” The San Francisco Chronicle’s March 18 editorial also noted, “It turns out there is no great mystery about how to control the world's population.” “The problem is that the solution -- granting women access to education and contraception -- is still not a universally accepted idea.” Read in: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle and The Providence Journal-Bulletin (RI)

“For years upon years, the United States has been downright cheap, letting foreign assistance be used as a political football for anti-family-planning, anti-United Nations, America-Firsters who turned "nation-building'' into a concept for suckers,” wrote Glenda Holste in her March 15 Pioneer Press (St. Paul, MN) commentary. “So why is the administration, for example, playing politics with $32 million in appropriated money for the UN Population Fund — $25 million of which Bush asked for in last year's budget?” Ellen Goodman raised a similar question in her March 24 Boston Globe column: “Have you noticed something missing in our government's role as defender of international women's rights? It has talked about the right to work, the right to education, the right to walk freely on streets. But not a word has been said about the whole galaxy of rights that have to do with sex and childbearing.” Read in: Pioneer Press and The Boston Globe

“Some very conservative members of Congress and their supporters are using China once again as a scapegoat to block funding for the United Nations Population Fund. From long experience in China, I can testify that this stance ignores recent change there and is hugely unfair both to China and to the population fund,” wrote Karen Hardee of The Futures Group International in an op ed that ran in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer March 31. Hardee concluded: “Thank goodness agencies such as the population fund have continued to work in China over the past 20 years; their influence has been profound. Cutting off funding for this fund should never have started in the first place and should certainly not continue now.“ Read in: Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Also, read letters by Charles Sample of Audubon (Venice, FL) in The Herald Tribune (Sarasota) and UNFPA’s Alex Marshall in Newsday.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MO) addressed the fact that “Family planning and reproductive health were not high on the agenda at last week's U.N. conference on international development in Monterrey, Mexico. Yet when it comes to fighting poverty and fostering development, these issues are critical.” It continued, “Mr. Bush shouldn't allow his opposition to abortion to blind him to the Population Fund's good work. Thanks to this agency, birth rates in Bangladesh have been halved in 20 years. Women in India now have an average of three children, compared to five some 20 years ago.” In conclusion: “family planning can help create the preconditions for the faster economic growth that Mr. Bush and other industrial leaders want poor nations to achieve.” Read in: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Kofi Annan wrote in a March 19 op ed in The New York Times that “[Development] is not abstract. It is real change in the lives of real people eager to improve their own conditions, if only they can get a real chance.” Annan described one program: “Since 1993, girls attending secondary school receive a small stipend while the school receives tuition assistance. The pilot program, sponsored by Bangladesh and financed by the World Bank, is now to be expanded, to affect up to 1.45 million girls.” He concluded, “If the new global deal is clinched in Monterrey this week, many more girls, in Africa, Asia and Latin America, could have the chance to go to school as girls in Narshingdi do. Millions of children could grow up to be productive members of their societies instead of falling victim to AIDS, tuberculosis or malaria. As their lives improve, the world will become a more prosperous and stable place.” Read in: The New York Times

“Can Microcredit Fight Terrorism?” asked The Boston Globe’s March 18 editorial. “One place to spend more money is Afghanistan, where terrorism breeds and people are smothered by poverty.” In conclusion The Globe wrote, “This is sound foreign aid. It is not a handout. It reaches urban and rural areas. The money goes to people, not governments, so its benefits are easy to see. Microcredit deserves a larger investment from the United States.” The Los Angles Times’ March 23 editorial also agreed that Rep. Roemer’s proposed bill to earmark $200 million in annual aid for successful microcredit programs would create “sound investments in a more stable world.” Read in: The Boston Globe and The Los Angeles Times

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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