Women’s Equality Day Features Celebration and Protests Against Proposed HHS Regulation WASHINGTON, Aug. 26 — Women’s Equality Day today will feature both celebrations and protests: a reminder to Democrats gathering in Denver of the year’s milestones for women’s rights, and renewed protests against a regulation being published today by the Department of Health and Human Services that activists say would restrict those rights.
A “Women’s EquiTea” hosted by the National Organization for Women (NOW) and 15 women members of Congress will honor Sen. Hillary Clinton’s achievement in winning 18 million votes for her presidential candidacy in the Democratic primary elections. “Eighty-eight years after women won the right to vote…we have much to celebrate,” said NOW President Kim Gandy. The organization is also petitioning both party nominees to “make closing the equality gap a centerpiece” of their presidential campaigns.
On the protest side, advocates said they will renew a nationwide outcry that succeeded earlier this month in stripping a proposed HHS rule of controversial language that would have directly threatened women’s access to hormonal birth control. More than 325,000 people signed a petition circulated by Planned Parenthood Federation of America urging HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt to drop the section. The final rule, to be published soon for a 30-day comment period, omits that language but still jeopardizes women’s health, advocates said.
“These regulations would allow doctors, nurses and other health care personnel...to refuse to provide services to any patient,” said Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families. “They would not even be obligated to give patients information on other options for their care.”
Leavitt said he sought only to enforce existing “conscience” laws allowing health care providers to refuse to participate in or facilitate abortions. Ness said, however, that the rule would “still leave the definition [of abortion] open to individual interpretation that could include contraception.” She called the rule “a transparent attempt to impose one set of religious and moral views on all of us” and urged women to continue to make their feelings known during the comment period.
Women’s Equality Day, established in 1971, marks the passage on Aug. 26, 1920, of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that gave women the right to vote.
CLICK HERE to read a press statement from the National Partnership for Women & Families.
CLICK HERE to read a press statement from the National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association.
CLICK HERE to read a statement from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Global Inequalities Deepening, PRB Says in Fact-Filled Report
WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 — Inequality is deepening between rich and poor countries in nearly every way as global population continues to grow by more than 80 million people every year, according to a new study from the Population Reference Bureau.
Focusing on disparities in countries’ maternal mortality rates and age structure, the 2008 World Population Data Sheet, released yesterday, said less-developed countries will be home to virtually all the 2.6 billion additional people between now (at 6.7 billion) and 2050 (to 9.3 billion). Africa’s population will double, to about 2 billion, while Europe’s population will actually decline, from 736 million to 685 million.
“The large number of young people in the less developed countries, the ‘parents of tomorrow,’ ensures substantial population growth there,” said the report, co-authored by Carl Haub and Mary Mederios Kent. “Exactly the opposite is true in the more developed countries.”
In Italy, for example, 20 percent of the people are over 65; in Haiti only 4 percent are. Fully 40 percent of people in Japan will be age 65 or older in 2050, while in sub-Saharan Africa, 43 percent of the population is under 15. Taiwan holds the world’s lowest fertility rate, at 1.1 births per woman, with Japan and South Korea close at 1.3. Women in Sub-Saharan Africa continue to have the most children, averaging 5.4 births each.
Such rates pose serious dangers for mothers in that region. Around the world, one in every 92 women will die from pregnancy-related causes, but in Canada the rate is one in 11,000 and in Niger it is one in seven, the report noted. Basic medical care, skilled care during labor and emergency care in case of complications makes the difference in saving mothers’ lives, the report said.
Access to family planning and responsive government policies are key to population issues in every country, the study added. Many countries have lowered or raised their birthrates as desired toward the so-called stable population “replacement level” of 2.1 children per woman through such comprehensive population plans. Sweden, for example, has gone from only 1.6 children per woman in 1996 to 1.9 in 2006. “Generally, countries that offer support to couples for paid parental leave and child care have seen increases in fertility rates,” the study said. “Another alternative would be increased immigration, although that alternative is not widely accepted.”
Of the world’s 191 million international migrants in 2005, almost as many went from one less-developed country to another as moved to a more-developed country: 61 million vs. 62 million. The United States receives a million immigrants per year and is home to 38 million people born elsewhere, the world’s highest number. They send home at least $42 billion every year, and with their higher birth rates, they also keep the U.S. fertility rate at the stable-population level of 2.l children per woman. As a result, non-Hispanic whites will lose their majority status in the United States by 2050, when the population will be 438 million.
“Immigration is the most volatile demographic variable, and the most difficult to predict,” the study said.
In other inequalities, poor areas see many more children stunted from malnutrition, with resulting lower IQ rates, fewer years in school and less income as adults, the report said. In eastern Africa, half the children under five are stunted; in some Indian states the rate is 60 percent. Environmental damage is also distributed unevenly. Global water consumption rose sixfold during the 20th century, twice the rate of population growth, and a third of all people (2.3 billion), most of them already poor, now live in areas “stressed” for water. It will be 3.5 billion by 2025.
The report is stuffed with thought-provoking facts: Half of all people now live in cities; 70 percent will by 2050, including 90 percent of those in North America. In East Asia, 85 percent of married women use modern contraception; the rate in middle Africa is 7 percent. In Luxembourg the per capita annual income is $64,400; in Liberia it is $290. Nigeria has one vehicle for every 1,000 people; the United States has 787.
Federal Judge Finds Anti-Prostitution Pledge Still Unconstitutional New York, Aug. 14 – Yesterday a federal judge rejected a government attempt to win approval for a modified version of the so-called “anti-prostitution pledge” that he ruled unconstitutional in 2006. Judge Victor Marrero of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York also extended his protection from the pledge to two more public health organizations.
Judge Marrero denied a claim by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Health and Human Services that their new enforcement guidelines preserve the First Amendment free speech rights for groups receiving funding under the government’s programs against HIV/AIDS, while still requiring them to denounce prostitution.
The judge said the new guidelines continue to require independent organizations to adopt the government’s point of view condemning prostitution as a condition of receiving funding, a stance he found unconstitutional in May 2006. He said the guidelines also impose an undue burden on the organizations by requiring them to set up legally and physically separate affiliates with separate board, staff and management in order to use their private funds to speak freely.
“The Court finds that the Guidelines require more separation than is reasonably necessary to satisfy the Government’s legitimate interest . . . and that the Guidelines are not narrowly tailored to achieve Congress’s goals,” the judge wrote.
He extended his injunction against enforcing the rule to members of InterAction, an alliance of United States-based humanitarian groups, and to U.S.-based members of the Global Health Council. The 2006 ruling protected the Alliance for Open Society International and Pathfinder International.
AIDS Conference Offers Rhetoric, Little New Action for Women MEXICO CITY, Aug. 8 – The 17th Annual International AIDS Conference wrapped up here today with renewed calls for action on behalf of women and others whose needs are still largely unmet or ignored in the long hard fight against the pandemic.
Peter Piot of the sponsoring UNAIDS organization told the 22,000 participants at the opening session that “The end of AIDS is nowhere in sight.” Later he noted disappointing results in vaccine development. “The consensus is we have to go back to the drawing board,” he told CNN. HIV infection rates are still rising in Europe and Asia, although at slower rates, and although three million people are now receiving treatment in the developing world, three more become infected for every one treated, he said, and six million need medicine and can’t get it.
Studies at the six-day gathering reported that more than 7,000 women become infected every day and account for nearly half the world’s 33 million people living with HIV, and 75 percent of those in sub-Saharan Africa. “Girls and young women face double vulnerability, and double efforts are needed to protect them,” said Purnima Mane, deputy executive director of UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund.
Stephen Lewis, former UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa and now co-director of AIDS-Free World, said a new UN department focused on women, now under consideration, is needed to achieve that. “At the last [AIDS] conference, the UN promised a major women’s program and that hasn’t happened,” he said. Such a department would combine four small UN agencies now concerned with women into a major body led by an under-secretary general, with a starting budget of $1 billion, Lewis said.
“This is the most critical and overdue reform in UN history…nothing demonstrates the need for it more painfully than HIV/AIDS.” The virus, he said, “has exploited women’s lack of power at every level,” and the new department ”would put women’s voices where they belong, in the forefront of responses to the pandemic.”
One study showed that the percent of HIV-positive pregnant women receiving anti-retroviral drugs to prevent transmission to their children is up from 14 percent in 2005 to 33 percent in 2007. But less than one in 10 injecting drug users and only one in five sex workers has access to HIV-prevention methods, while men who have sex with men are an increasingly greater part of new infections. The Commission on AIDS in Asia reported that 75 million Asian men regularly use commercial sex workers, putting their wives at direct risk of HIV infection.
Stigma against all these groups is a major handicap, several studies said: 71 percent of countries have no information on the number of gay and bisexual men reached by prevention programs, and 86 countries criminalize sexual activity between males, discouraging testing and treatment. Circumcision, which many studies have found effective in cutting HIV infection rates up to 70 percent, is also still widely stigmatized and is not being promoted by any major agency, the reports noted.
“If we could freely talk about HIV like we freely talk about someone with diabetes or cancer, people would get the support that is so important to health care,” said Justin Goforth, director of the Whitman-Walker Clinic’s medical adherence unit in Washington DC.
A recent article in the respected British Medical Journal criticized the worldwide attention devoted to AIDS. It receives a quarter of global health aid but is only 5 percent of the disease burden in low- and middle-income countries, said Roger England Of the health policy charity Health Systems Workshop.
In response, Pedro Cahn, president of the conference sponsor International AIDS Society, said that countries offering HIV prevention and treatment have also shown “a general improvement in treatment of tuberculosis, sexually transmitted infections and other illnesses…it is time for collaboration, not competition.”
New Rules Would Threaten Right to Contraceptives
WASHINGTON, July 15 – Reproductive health advocates reacted with outrage today to a report in The New York Times that the Bush administration is proposing new rules that would discourage doctors and health-care clinics from providing birth control to women who need it. This proposed regulation deliberately confuses the definitions of contraception and abortion and could cause disarray in law, regulations, and policy.
The proposal would define “abortion” as "any of the various procedures — including the prescription, dispensing and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action — that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation."
Planned Parenthood Federation of America President Cecile Richards said she was “gravely concerned” that such language would “radically redefine abortion to include some of the most common and effective methods of birth control.”
Marilyn Keefe, Director of Reproductive Health Programs of the National Partnership for Women & Families, called the proposal “an ill-conceived political ploy designed to win favor from those determined to deny women basic health services.” She said it would “put politics ahead of women’s health” and “shows callous disregard for low-income women facing unplanned pregnancies.” She pointed out that 90 percent of women in America use birth control, and that the proposal to appeal to the remaining 10 percent would be “political pandering at its very worst.”
Mary Jane Gallagher, president of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, said the new rule would be “unprecedented” in “allowing individuals, institutions and programs receiving Health and Human Services funds to refuse to provide necessary health care services, including contraception.”
Recent research by the Women Donors Network has found that family planning opponents are only 9 percent of all likely voters, and that the rest overwhelmingly support policies and programs to expand access to safe and effective methods of birth control.
CLICK HERE to read a press statement from NARAL Pro-Choice America.
CLICK HERE to read a press statement from The National Partnership for Women & Families.
CLICK HERE to read a press statement from The Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
CLICK HERE to read a press statement from The National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association.
CLICK HERE to read a press release from The National Women’s Law Center.
CLICK HERE to read a press release from NARAL Pro-Choice America.
CLICK HERE to read a press release from Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health.
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