India PM Suggests Incentives and Disincentives for Smaller Families
The Press Trust of India reported April 11 that Deputy Prime Minister L. K. Advani Suday called for "incentives and disincentives" to create a nationwide two-child norm. "It is not a question of majority and minority. If it is an educated family, it would adopt two-child norm irrespective of its religious belief," he said. "I re-assert my earlier suggestion of debarring those who violate the two-child norm from holding public office." He also asked the Finance Minister �to consider extending tax breaks for those who keep to the two-child norm,� and asked the Finance Commission and Planning Commission to make adherence to population targets a criterion for allotment of development funds. �Success in checking population must be rewarded,� he said. Read: Xinhua General News Service

Korea�s 3-3-35 Family Planning Campaign
In 1966 the Korean Family Planning Association launched a �3-3-35� campaign: �Bear three children with intervals of three years between each child, and stop having children at the age of 35.� An April 14 column by Andrei Lankov in The Korea Times noted that this might seem a moderate target today, but it was ambitious when the average Korean woman had six children. Now the rate is only 1.42 births per woman. Lankov said this has raised new issues: �One of the first side effects is the �graying of the population.� This danger is fully felt in Korea. But that is another story���Read: Korea Times, CNN.com

Philippines Fatwa Says Every Child Should Be a �Planned Muslim Child�
Inter Press Service reported April 1 that more than 200 Muslim religious leaders in the Philippines declared a national 'fatwa,' or religious decree, on family planning, to assure that every infant is also a "planned Muslim child." The story said the fatwa dates to 1997, when the U.N. Population Fund began working with local health officials and religious leaders. In January, a party of religious leaders, physicians and government health officials traveled to Egypt and got an endorsement of the fatwa from the grand mufti there. Read: Inter Press Service

SAVING WOMEN�S LIVES
Empowering Women in Bangladesh
Reuters reported April 4 that women have occupied top positions in Bangladesh, but most women in this Muslim country of 130 million remain traditionally backward and poor. Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia and her rival, opposition leader Sheikh Hasina, are familiar to almost everyone, but their contribution to raising the status of other Bangladeshi women is not immediately apparent. "Khaleda and Hasina have been in power for about one and half decades," said a female teacher who asked not to be named. �The only difference I have from my mother is that I have some education and a teaching job in a primary school," she said. "But back at home, I do exactly what my mother did, and thanklessly carry the burden of the whole family." Two other village women are barely aware of political moves in Dhaka to reserve 45 seats for women in parliament, which the government says is a great stride toward empowering women. "I know nothing about empowerment. What is it?" asked Suraiya, 37. The teacher said she was aware of the move. "But frankly speaking, we are not interested�because many things have happened in the past, yet have made no impact on our lives." Read: Reuters

Unsafe Motherhood in Iraq
IRIN reported April 8 that many hospitals and clinics in Iraq were looted last April as doctors and nurses struggled to deal with the unexpected violence, and maternal and infant mortality rates have suffered. According to a November 2003 report by UNFPA, maternal deaths tripled since 1990. The study found that bleeding, entopic pregnancies and prolonged labor were among the causes of the reported 310 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2002, up from 117 deaths in 1989. Miscarriages also rose, partly due to stress and exposure to chemical contaminants, the report said. Read: IRIN

ABORTION WORLDWIDE
Abortion in Egypt Illegal yet Common Form of Contraception
An April 12 Women�s Enews story on the illegal status of abortion in Egypt reported that pregnant women regularly find a way to end unwanted pregnancies, often at great personal risk. Attempts to reduce the rate or make abortion safer routinely run up against religious, cultural and sexual barriers. Iman Bibars, head of the Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women, a nongovernmental group that conducts health awareness programs for Egypts poorest women, said, "The problems we have with abortion, the problems with promoting contraception and womens health, these are all symptoms of this obsession with honor. The only way for this to be settled is to have a transparent, open, public debate about what honor means and who ultimately controls a womans body.� He added, "People say if we make it legal, it will be used as birth control�But look�it already is and it will be forever." Read: Women�s Enews

Abortion Statistics Suggest Teen Sex on Rise in China
The South China Morning Post reported April 9 that sexual activity has surged among the mainland's secondary school students, accompanied by a rise in the number of teenage girls undergoing abortions, according to a study by the Chongqing Family Planning Research Bureau. The study said that in Chongqing's family planning institute, for example, teen abortions were 13 percent of the total in 1998 but rose to 33.6 percent last year. The research bureau said the rise in teenage sexual activity was "a serious social problem� and blamed it in part on children�s earlier sexual maturity and in part on more liberal attitudes in Chinese society. Due to the surge, a special clinic opened last year in Chongqing to offer free contraceptives and abortions to teenage girls.

Teenage Abortions on the Rise in Kyrgyzstan
IRIN reported April 5 that teenage abortions are on the rise in Kyrgyzstan, with young rural women particularly prone to unwanted pregnancies because of lack of awareness about the risks of unprotected sex combined with traditional upbringing. The story said� UNFPA is working in Bishkek to combat the problem. "We explain to young people how to use contraceptives, how to avoid getting pregnant unnecessarily and how to manage family planning," said Gulnara Kadyrova, project coordinator for UNFPA. Read: IRIN

U.S. Abortion Debate: Bush Signs Unborn Victims of Violence Act
President Bush signed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act that elevates the rights of fetuses, making it a separate offense to harm an "unborn child" while committing a violent federal crime against a pregnant woman, reported The Washington Post on April 2. The law is entangled in the politics of abortion, but Bush sidestepped the larger controversy, portraying the measure as a matter of criminal justice. Democrats, civil liberties groups and abortion-rights lobbyists regard the law as part of a conservative strategy to lay groundwork for a challenge to Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that established a womans constitutional right to an abortion, by establishing that fetuses have separate rights. The president and congressional Republicans deny any link. Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said the law ignores the problem of violence against women and "is part of a deceptive anti-choice strategy to make womens bodies mere vessels by creating legal personhood for the fetus." An April 5 New York Times editorial criticized the bill: �The administrations defense of its �partial birth� ban and the new �unborn victims� law have a common theme: profound disrespect for women.� Read: Washington Post, New York Times

SELECTIVE ABORTIONS CAUSE SEX RATIO IMBALANCE IN INDIA
United Press International reported April 8 that India is short 35 million girls, and is blaming the desire by families for boy children, which leads to selective abortions. According to the 2001 census, the sex ratio among children 0-6 was 927 girls per 1,000 male children compared with 945 girls to 1,000 boys in 1991, Indo Asian News Service reported. India has banned sex determination tests and selective abortions, but social activists and health officials at a New Delhi workshop on sex selection said girl children were being selectively killed and female feticide was common nationwide. "Women are the feeder population of tomorrow. If we do not have a fair number of girls in our country, soon we will be left without wives for our sons," social activist Satish Agnihotri said.

HIV/AIDS WORLDWIDE
Botswana Urges Men to Help Stem HIV/AIDS Transmission to Women
The Daily News (Botswana) reported April 6 that the effect of men's attitude and behavior on women's health is perhaps most obvious in the pandemic of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections. Speaking at a national workshop on male involvement, UNFPA representative Agathe Lawson said programs that "educate, test and treat only one partner will not be effective in safeguarding the continued health of both people.� She said men need to share the responsibility of disease prevention as well as the risks and benefits of contraception. "All over the world, women find themselves at risk of HIV infection because of their lack of power in determining where, when and how sex should take place," she said. Read: Daily News, IRIN

Experts Urge Reducing HIV/AIDS Transmission by Reducing Sexual Partners
More needs to be done to persuade people to have fewer sexual partners, according to leading HIV experts, reported BBC News on April 8. The experts, who include officials from the Global Fund for AIDS, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID, said little effort has gone in to tackling the issue in recent years, while the message appears to have been lost, as campaigns put the emphasis on abstaining from sex or using condoms. The findings in the British Medical Journal reveal HIV infection rates have fallen from 15 percent to 5 percent in Uganda over the past decade, in part because of a nationwide campaign encouraging people to stick with regular partners. They said similar campaigns in Thailand, Cambodia, Ethiopia and the Dominican Republic have shown similar results. Read: BBC News

EDITORIALS AND OPINIONS
Marking the 10^th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, an April 10 New York Times op ed by Lindsey Hilsum, international editor for Channel 4 News in Britain, urged readers to remember the women. �The majority of women who survived the Hutu attacks on Tutsis were gang-raped, sometimes for weeks on end, by the thugs who murdered their families. Many of them are now dying slow, painful deaths from AIDS.� She concluded: �These women require support in other areas, too. They need housing, jobs, counseling and medical assistance for life. International organizations are already committed to helping Rwandans; programs designed specifically for these women are essential.� Read: New York Times, IRIN

A column by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times on April 14 addressed the welfare of refugee children in Sudan. �For example, who should fetch water from the wells? The Arab Janjaweed militia, armed by Sudans government, shoots tribal African men and teenage boys who show up at the wells, and rapes women who go. So parents described an anguished choice: Should they risk their 7- or 8-year-old children by sending them to wells a mile away, knowing that the children have the best prospect of returning?� Kristof concluded, �In the last 100 years, the United States has reacted to one genocide after another�Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Bosnians�by making excuses at the time, and then saying, too late, �Oh, if only we had known!� Well, this time we know what is happening in Darfur: 110,000 refugees have escaped into Chad and testify to the atrocities. How many more parents will be forced to choose whether their children are shot or burned to death before we get serious?�

---

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