January 29, 2009 9:07 AM
Seattle Times
by Kristi Heim
While U.S. bailout funds will help pay $18 billion in holiday bonuses for Wall Street executives, the U.S. has broken its promise to fund a global health program that saves millions of lives.
That was the scathing assessment of Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and special adviser to the U.N. Secretary General, speaking on a conference call this morning.
The economic crisis has resulted in a $5 billion funding gap for the Global Fund because countries, led by the U.S., are falling short on their pledges, Sachs and others said.
The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB & Malaria is the main source of finance for programs to prevent and treat the three diseases. The fund gathers money from donor countries and provides a quarter of all international financing for AIDS, two-thirds for tuberculosis and three quarters for malaria.
"I would suggest the U.S. reclaim those bonuses, which are absolutely unjustified and completely unconscionable, and put the money in the Global Fund immediately," Sachs said.
The $5 billion shortfall is less than one-half of one percent of what G8 countries have approved to bail out failing banks in the last three months, he added. The Merrill Lynch bonuses alone would be enough to close the gap in U.S. contributions, Sachs said.
The Fund projects it will need $8 billion to continue its work in 2009 and 2010, yet current pledges total only $3 billion. The U.S. and other donor countries pledged to support all valid Global Fund programs by committing about 0.7 of 1% of GNP in aid.
Despite a 2002 pledge made by the Bush Administration to honor that commitment, "the United States is not only not on track; it's fallen back to become the donor with the smallest donation as a share of income of all the rich countries," said Sachs. "We're at 0.16 of 1% of our income for development assistance. It's the lowest level of all 22 donor countries."
As a result, the Fund is delaying programs and cutting costs, and using this week's World Economic Forum to call attention to the issue.
The world shouldn't squander progress on major diseases for short term gains, said Peter Chernin, president of News Corp. and chairman of Malaria No More.
Goals include guaranteeing global access to antiretroviral drugs for HIV by 2010 and reducing malaria deaths to near zero by 2012.
Malaria control is an example of a good return on investment, Chernin said.
Programs are showing real results such as a 66 percent drop in malaria-related deaths in Rwanda in one year following increased use of bednets to prevent bites and treatment with effective medicine.
"In today's uncertain marketplace," Chernin said, the Global Fund "delivers proven results in both economic and humanitarian terms." Malaria alone costs Africa $12 billion a year in lost productivity, he noted.
Chernin said he's working to boost donations to the fund from the private sector.
Chevron was the first private company to step up, with a $30 million donation, said Rajat Gupta, a McKinsey senior partner who chairs the Global Fund. The (Product) Red project has raised about $150 million.
Tomorrow, Chernin will join with Exxon Mobil and Standard Charter Bank to launch a campaign to raise $100 million from private companies, primarily for malaria programs funded through the Global Fund. The campaign will also ask companies to provide technical and business assistance, such as logistics for bed net delivery and marketing efforts to increase the use of bed nets.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Millions to get malaria help by 2010
January 31, 2009
AFP
AFP
DAVOS, Switzerland (AFP) — Hundreds of millions of mosquito nets and anti-malaria kits are to be distributed by 2010, officials behind a campaign to halt about one million malaria deaths a year said Saturday.
But they urged donors not to ditch the campaign because of the economic crisis, saying there was a real chance the malaria epidemic could be eliminated in coming years.
"The resources to attack this problem -- to eliminate malaria deaths -- is there. We can achieve universal distribution of bed nets, of malaria medicine, of indoor spraying within 2010," said Rajat Kumar Gupta, who chairs the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
In sub-Saharan Africa alone, some 600 million people are said to be at risk from the disease. Scott Case, a campaigner, said this means 300 million bed nets are required in the region.
Corporate leaders from Standard Chartered Bank, ExxonMobil and News Corporation have come together to launch a 100-million-dollar (78-million-euro) fund-raising campaign.
"We had a good start ... 40 million dollars of the 100 million dollars has been committed," said Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil chairman and chief executive officer.
He said he thinks funding can be found despite the economic crisis, if the campaign can "demonstrate to donors that their investment for eradication has a return."
______________________________
Pfizer faces NY lawsuits over human medical tests
IHT
Friday, January 30, 2009
NEW YORK: Nigerian families can sue Pfizer in U.S. courts with claims that the giant drug maker violated international law banning involuntary medical experimentation on humans when it tested an antibiotic to treat meningitis, an appeals court ruled Friday.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned rulings by a lower court judge who had tossed out the lawsuits in litigation that began in 2001.
The lawsuits sought unspecified damages on behalf of children and infants who were part of a 1996 study of the oral antibiotic Trovan. The testing occurred during a meningitis epidemic that killed more than 15,000 Africans.
The lawsuits claimed Pfizer violated international law, federal regulations and medical ethics by rushing to test the experimental antibiotic without their consent or knowledge — an assertion Pfizer denies.
Pfizer said it "remains confident that it will prevail in these cases, and is weighing its options on how to best respond to this decision."
Peter Safirstein, a plaintiffs' lawyer who argued the appeal, called the ruling "very, very important."
The lawsuits were dismissed on grounds they could not be pursued under the Alien Tort Statute, an 18th century law that allows foreigners to sue in U.S. courts over international law violations.
The appeals panel ruled 2-to-1 Friday that the statute can be used.
It cited international law banning the nonconsensual medical experimentation on humans that was established with the war crimes trials at Nuremberg, where 15 doctors were convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity for conducting medical experiments without consent. Seven of the doctors were sentenced to death and eight were sent to prison.
In 1996, Pfizer sent three American physicians to work with four Nigerian doctors to experiment with Trovan on children who were hospital patients in Kano, Nigeria.
The lawsuits say the two-week experiment on 200 sick children led to 11 deaths and left many others blind, paralyzed or brain-damaged.
The plaintiffs said Pfizer, working with the Nigerian government, failed to secure the informed consent of either the children or their guardians and failed to disclose or explain the experimental nature of the study or the serious risks involved.
In its statement, Pfizer said the 1996 clinical study was conducted with the approval of the Nigerian government and consent of the participants' parents or guardians and was consistent with both international and Nigerian laws.
"Pfizer has great sympathy for everyone who suffered during the devastating meningitis epidemic in 1996," it said. "The company has said all along that all clinical evidence points to the fact that any deaths or injuries were the direct result of the illness, and not the treatment provided to patients in the Pfizer study."
The company said Trovan helped save lives with a survival rate of 94.4 percent, compared to a survival rate of slightly less than 90 percent for those who did not participate in the study.
In ruling, the appeals court said pharmaceutical companies had greatly increased the number of drug trials in poor countries in the last two decades, allowing life saving drugs to be developed faster and at less cost while providing developing countries with cutting edge medicines and treatments.
However, it said large-scale drug trials without informed consent "threatens these efforts because such conduct fosters distrust and resistance to international drug trials, cutting edge medical innovation and critical international public health initiatives in which pharmaceutical companies play a key role."
See also "Suits Saying Pfizer Experimented on Nigerian Children"
Friday, January 30, 2009
NEW YORK: Nigerian families can sue Pfizer in U.S. courts with claims that the giant drug maker violated international law banning involuntary medical experimentation on humans when it tested an antibiotic to treat meningitis, an appeals court ruled Friday.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned rulings by a lower court judge who had tossed out the lawsuits in litigation that began in 2001.
The lawsuits sought unspecified damages on behalf of children and infants who were part of a 1996 study of the oral antibiotic Trovan. The testing occurred during a meningitis epidemic that killed more than 15,000 Africans.
The lawsuits claimed Pfizer violated international law, federal regulations and medical ethics by rushing to test the experimental antibiotic without their consent or knowledge — an assertion Pfizer denies.
Pfizer said it "remains confident that it will prevail in these cases, and is weighing its options on how to best respond to this decision."
Peter Safirstein, a plaintiffs' lawyer who argued the appeal, called the ruling "very, very important."
The lawsuits were dismissed on grounds they could not be pursued under the Alien Tort Statute, an 18th century law that allows foreigners to sue in U.S. courts over international law violations.
The appeals panel ruled 2-to-1 Friday that the statute can be used.
It cited international law banning the nonconsensual medical experimentation on humans that was established with the war crimes trials at Nuremberg, where 15 doctors were convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity for conducting medical experiments without consent. Seven of the doctors were sentenced to death and eight were sent to prison.
In 1996, Pfizer sent three American physicians to work with four Nigerian doctors to experiment with Trovan on children who were hospital patients in Kano, Nigeria.
The lawsuits say the two-week experiment on 200 sick children led to 11 deaths and left many others blind, paralyzed or brain-damaged.
The plaintiffs said Pfizer, working with the Nigerian government, failed to secure the informed consent of either the children or their guardians and failed to disclose or explain the experimental nature of the study or the serious risks involved.
In its statement, Pfizer said the 1996 clinical study was conducted with the approval of the Nigerian government and consent of the participants' parents or guardians and was consistent with both international and Nigerian laws.
"Pfizer has great sympathy for everyone who suffered during the devastating meningitis epidemic in 1996," it said. "The company has said all along that all clinical evidence points to the fact that any deaths or injuries were the direct result of the illness, and not the treatment provided to patients in the Pfizer study."
The company said Trovan helped save lives with a survival rate of 94.4 percent, compared to a survival rate of slightly less than 90 percent for those who did not participate in the study.
In ruling, the appeals court said pharmaceutical companies had greatly increased the number of drug trials in poor countries in the last two decades, allowing life saving drugs to be developed faster and at less cost while providing developing countries with cutting edge medicines and treatments.
However, it said large-scale drug trials without informed consent "threatens these efforts because such conduct fosters distrust and resistance to international drug trials, cutting edge medical innovation and critical international public health initiatives in which pharmaceutical companies play a key role."
See also "Suits Saying Pfizer Experimented on Nigerian Children"
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Women Are Not “Pork”
Religion Dispatches
January 28, 2009
by Ruth Rosen
Responding to President Obama's request, House Democrats cut a provision from the stimulus package that would expand contraceptive family planning for Medicaid patients-usually poor women and girls.
Why did this happen?
For years, reproductive justice activists have argued that the religious right's real agenda is not just to eliminate abortion, but to end the historic rupture between sex and reproduction that took place in the 20th century.
I understand why that rupture is unsettling. Ironically, I was on my way to lecture about Margaret Sanger in my history course at UC Berkeley when I heard the news. Sanger was vilified for wanting to give women the choice of when or whether to bear children. In short, she challenged all of human history by proposing an historic rupture between sexuality and the goal of reproduction. But if reproduction ceased to be the goal, sexuality might become yoked to pleasure.
That is the legacy the religious right has fought against, and it's that agenda that cut funding for family planning.
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) said, "How you can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives? How does that stimulate the economy?"
Well, here's the answer. Consider the teenage girl who's sexually active. What happens to the economy when she bears a child without the means to support it? Conversely, what happens when she finishes her education, enters the labor force, earns a salary, and pays taxes? Do we want an unemployed poor woman to have more children than she can already feed, or do we want her to have access to contraception, get her life back on track, and hopefully find work instead of raising another child she cannot afford at this time?
The Congressional Budget Office also reported that by the third year of implementation, the measure would actually save $200 million over five years by preventing unwanted pregnancies and avoiding the Medicaid cost of delivering and then caring for these babies. The same CBO report found the House version of the stimulus would have a "noticeable impact on economic growth and employment in the next few years, with much of the mandatory spending for Medicaid and other programs likely to occur in the next 19 to 20 months." During the first three years, the CBO report said, the cost and savings are negligible.
This decision was an unnecessary political capitulation to Republicans. According to the AP and the Austin American-Statesman, the president was "courting Republican critics of the legislation" who had argued that contraception is not about stimulus or growth. Unfortunately, too many people have uncritically accepted that argument. But many others have noted that the package is filled with provisions for health care, which certainly includes family planning. Many other provisions, moreover, are also not growth-oriented, and yet it was poor women's bodies that Democrats bartered for the approval and votes from Republicans that they don't need and will seldom get.
That same morning, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert asked "Why anyone listens to [Republicans]?" Why, indeed. They want the Democrats to fail. They want the new president to fail. And so they described women's bodies as "pork" and asked that the funding be cut for contraception.
Women's groups are legitimately outraged at what has happened. The Planned Parenthood Federation of America called the measure a "victim of misleading attacks and partisan politics." Mary Jane Gallagher, president of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, said: "Family planners are devastated that President Obama and Congress have decided to take funding for critical family planning services out of the stimulus. Their willingness to abandon the millions of families across the country who are in need is devastating."
"The Medicaid Family Planning State Option fully belonged in the economic recovery package," said Marcia D. Greenberger, co-president of the National Women's Law Center. "The Republican leadership opposition to the provision shows how out of touch they are with what it takes to ensure the economic survival of working women and their families."
While Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) defended the measure as recently as last Sunday, President Barack Obama and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, bowed to Republican pressure and agreed to drop the measure. And although the Senate has not yet voted, it's unlikely that funding for expanded family planning will be approved. In short, the Democrats decided it just wasn't worth fighting about. According to the Washington Wire, one House Democratic aide said, "It ended up being a distraction and it will be removed."
So, poor women who want reproductive health care and contraception are both "pork" and a "distraction." Is this the change we have dreamed about?
President Obama certainly believes in contraception for poor women and girls on Medicaid. He won the election, as he recently pointed out. He doesn't have to cave in to Republican demands to restrict women's choices and health care.
The best way he and Democrats can handle this terribly misguided decision is to pass legislation to fund expanded family planning as soon as possible, before half the population wakes up and realizes that once again, women have been treated as expendable, and that their bodies have been bartered for political expediency.
January 28, 2009
by Ruth Rosen
Responding to President Obama's request, House Democrats cut a provision from the stimulus package that would expand contraceptive family planning for Medicaid patients-usually poor women and girls.
Why did this happen?
For years, reproductive justice activists have argued that the religious right's real agenda is not just to eliminate abortion, but to end the historic rupture between sex and reproduction that took place in the 20th century.
I understand why that rupture is unsettling. Ironically, I was on my way to lecture about Margaret Sanger in my history course at UC Berkeley when I heard the news. Sanger was vilified for wanting to give women the choice of when or whether to bear children. In short, she challenged all of human history by proposing an historic rupture between sexuality and the goal of reproduction. But if reproduction ceased to be the goal, sexuality might become yoked to pleasure.
That is the legacy the religious right has fought against, and it's that agenda that cut funding for family planning.
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) said, "How you can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives? How does that stimulate the economy?"
Well, here's the answer. Consider the teenage girl who's sexually active. What happens to the economy when she bears a child without the means to support it? Conversely, what happens when she finishes her education, enters the labor force, earns a salary, and pays taxes? Do we want an unemployed poor woman to have more children than she can already feed, or do we want her to have access to contraception, get her life back on track, and hopefully find work instead of raising another child she cannot afford at this time?
The Congressional Budget Office also reported that by the third year of implementation, the measure would actually save $200 million over five years by preventing unwanted pregnancies and avoiding the Medicaid cost of delivering and then caring for these babies. The same CBO report found the House version of the stimulus would have a "noticeable impact on economic growth and employment in the next few years, with much of the mandatory spending for Medicaid and other programs likely to occur in the next 19 to 20 months." During the first three years, the CBO report said, the cost and savings are negligible.
This decision was an unnecessary political capitulation to Republicans. According to the AP and the Austin American-Statesman, the president was "courting Republican critics of the legislation" who had argued that contraception is not about stimulus or growth. Unfortunately, too many people have uncritically accepted that argument. But many others have noted that the package is filled with provisions for health care, which certainly includes family planning. Many other provisions, moreover, are also not growth-oriented, and yet it was poor women's bodies that Democrats bartered for the approval and votes from Republicans that they don't need and will seldom get.
That same morning, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert asked "Why anyone listens to [Republicans]?" Why, indeed. They want the Democrats to fail. They want the new president to fail. And so they described women's bodies as "pork" and asked that the funding be cut for contraception.
Women's groups are legitimately outraged at what has happened. The Planned Parenthood Federation of America called the measure a "victim of misleading attacks and partisan politics." Mary Jane Gallagher, president of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, said: "Family planners are devastated that President Obama and Congress have decided to take funding for critical family planning services out of the stimulus. Their willingness to abandon the millions of families across the country who are in need is devastating."
"The Medicaid Family Planning State Option fully belonged in the economic recovery package," said Marcia D. Greenberger, co-president of the National Women's Law Center. "The Republican leadership opposition to the provision shows how out of touch they are with what it takes to ensure the economic survival of working women and their families."
While Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) defended the measure as recently as last Sunday, President Barack Obama and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, bowed to Republican pressure and agreed to drop the measure. And although the Senate has not yet voted, it's unlikely that funding for expanded family planning will be approved. In short, the Democrats decided it just wasn't worth fighting about. According to the Washington Wire, one House Democratic aide said, "It ended up being a distraction and it will be removed."
So, poor women who want reproductive health care and contraception are both "pork" and a "distraction." Is this the change we have dreamed about?
President Obama certainly believes in contraception for poor women and girls on Medicaid. He won the election, as he recently pointed out. He doesn't have to cave in to Republican demands to restrict women's choices and health care.
The best way he and Democrats can handle this terribly misguided decision is to pass legislation to fund expanded family planning as soon as possible, before half the population wakes up and realizes that once again, women have been treated as expendable, and that their bodies have been bartered for political expediency.
Abortion Rights Go Global
International courts begin to recognize them—and prompt a backlash.
By Michelle Goldberg
Slate
Jan. 29, 2009
In March 2007, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Poland had to pay 25,000 euros to a woman who was prevented from having an abortion she needed to save her eyesight. When Alicja Tysiac, a severely nearsighted Polish mother of two, became pregnant for the third time in 2000, a series of ophthalmologists told her that she risked going blind should she bring another baby to term. But Tysiac couldn't get the authorization she needed to get around Poland's abortion restrictions. She had the baby and, as predicted, lost nearly all of her eyesight. But in winning her case before a European forum, she became part of a small cadre of women who are helping to forge a definition of abortion as a human right under international law.
The overseas battle over funding for family planning is a familiar one: In what has become a kind of ritual marking the arrival of a new party in the White House, Barack Obama last week lifted the ban on American aid to family-planning groups involved with abortion abroad. Little noticed in the United States is that abortion jurisprudence—the court cases that define rights and restrictions for the procedure—has increasingly gone global.
In the last four years, in addition to Tysiac's case, women and their lawyers have brought abortion actions before the U.N. Human Rights Committee and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which investigates human rights violations in the Western hemisphere. Several times, women who've been denied abortions have won both compensation and an acknowledgment that their rights were violated. For feminists worldwide, this represents a great victory, since it elevates women's rights and safety above the often-sacrosanct principle of national sovereignty. Though back-alley abortions are largely a matter of history in the United States, botched terminations kill scores of women globally—nearly 70,000 annually, according to the World Health Organization. When governments don't respond, international courts can offer women another avenue of redress.
Yet as abortion rights go international, so does the anti-abortion backlash. The globalization of the abortion wars creates some of the same tensions—between universal human rights and community mores, between majority rule and the protection of individual liberty—as Roe v. Wade, on a larger scale. All over the world, in countries including Kenya, Poland, and Nicaragua, local anti-abortion movements (often working with American allies) rail against the meddling of powerful outsiders. In Poland, traditionalists who oppose abortion bemoan the loss of their country's Catholic values as it integrates into secular Europe. They speak about international human rights and the courts that enforce them with something of the frustrated anger that American conservatives sometimes direct at the federal government. "Abortion proponents cannot win elections on these issues, so they have to go through the least democratic bodies in the world, the United Nations, for instance, and the courts," says Austin Ruse, the president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, a pro-life organization active at the United Nations.
To be sure, no international court has ruled that countries must allow abortion on demand. These courts are, however, increasingly mandating that when countries restrict abortion, they allow a number of exceptions, grounding their findings in various human rights treaties. The cases date from 2005, when the U.N. Human Rights Committee ruled that Peru had violated the rights of a 17-year-old girl who was forced to carry to term an anencephalitic fetus, which was missing most of its forebrain and unable to survive outside the womb. The committee, which monitors countries' compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ordered Peru to pay reparations and to establish a framework for women to access therapeutic abortions.
In 2006, in the settlement of a case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Mexico agreed to pay a 13-year-old rape victim who'd been prevented from terminating her pregnancy—and was by then a 19-year-old single mother—$40,000, plus a stipend for her son's education. A few months after that, Colombia's Supreme Court struck down that country's total abortion ban on the grounds that it violated both Colombia's Constitution and international law. "Sexual and reproductive rights of women have been finally recognized as human rights," said the court. "As such, they have entered the realm of constitutional law, which is the fundamental ground of all democratic states."
Such reasoning is making its way into legal documents worldwide. Recently, an African Union treaty became the first human rights covenant in the world specifically to include abortion rights. Abortion is highly restricted in most African countries; still, the treaty calls on state parties to "protect the reproductive rights of women by authorizing medical abortion in cases of sexual assault, rape, incest, and where the continued pregnancy endangers the mental and physical health of the mother or the life of the mother or the foetus." When Kenya's vice president spoke out in favor of ratifying the African Union's women's rights treaty, however, an op-ed headline in the Sunday Standard newspaper called the agreement a "Blatant Case of Neo-Colonialism."
More such clashes are on the horizon. A group of Irish women is challenging their country's abortion ban before the European Court of Human Rights. And in a case that's likely to get lots of attention, Nicaragua, which banned all abortion in 2006, may soon find itself before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. It was Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, eager to return to power and hoping to co-opt his former foes in Nicaragua's Catholic Church, who championed the ban. Now, the same American conservatives who once backed the Contras insist that it's unfair for other countries to pressure the Sandinistas to change their ways.
For liberals, the globalization of abortion law presents other contradictions. These cases pit feminism and multiculturalism, both cherished values on the left, against each other. The struggle is over abortion, but it's also over something bigger. When women's rights and cultural freedom collide, who prevails, and who gets to decide?
Michelle Goldberg is an author and journalist based in New York. Her new book, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World, will be published in April.
By Michelle Goldberg
Slate
Jan. 29, 2009
In March 2007, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Poland had to pay 25,000 euros to a woman who was prevented from having an abortion she needed to save her eyesight. When Alicja Tysiac, a severely nearsighted Polish mother of two, became pregnant for the third time in 2000, a series of ophthalmologists told her that she risked going blind should she bring another baby to term. But Tysiac couldn't get the authorization she needed to get around Poland's abortion restrictions. She had the baby and, as predicted, lost nearly all of her eyesight. But in winning her case before a European forum, she became part of a small cadre of women who are helping to forge a definition of abortion as a human right under international law.
The overseas battle over funding for family planning is a familiar one: In what has become a kind of ritual marking the arrival of a new party in the White House, Barack Obama last week lifted the ban on American aid to family-planning groups involved with abortion abroad. Little noticed in the United States is that abortion jurisprudence—the court cases that define rights and restrictions for the procedure—has increasingly gone global.
In the last four years, in addition to Tysiac's case, women and their lawyers have brought abortion actions before the U.N. Human Rights Committee and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which investigates human rights violations in the Western hemisphere. Several times, women who've been denied abortions have won both compensation and an acknowledgment that their rights were violated. For feminists worldwide, this represents a great victory, since it elevates women's rights and safety above the often-sacrosanct principle of national sovereignty. Though back-alley abortions are largely a matter of history in the United States, botched terminations kill scores of women globally—nearly 70,000 annually, according to the World Health Organization. When governments don't respond, international courts can offer women another avenue of redress.
Yet as abortion rights go international, so does the anti-abortion backlash. The globalization of the abortion wars creates some of the same tensions—between universal human rights and community mores, between majority rule and the protection of individual liberty—as Roe v. Wade, on a larger scale. All over the world, in countries including Kenya, Poland, and Nicaragua, local anti-abortion movements (often working with American allies) rail against the meddling of powerful outsiders. In Poland, traditionalists who oppose abortion bemoan the loss of their country's Catholic values as it integrates into secular Europe. They speak about international human rights and the courts that enforce them with something of the frustrated anger that American conservatives sometimes direct at the federal government. "Abortion proponents cannot win elections on these issues, so they have to go through the least democratic bodies in the world, the United Nations, for instance, and the courts," says Austin Ruse, the president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, a pro-life organization active at the United Nations.
To be sure, no international court has ruled that countries must allow abortion on demand. These courts are, however, increasingly mandating that when countries restrict abortion, they allow a number of exceptions, grounding their findings in various human rights treaties. The cases date from 2005, when the U.N. Human Rights Committee ruled that Peru had violated the rights of a 17-year-old girl who was forced to carry to term an anencephalitic fetus, which was missing most of its forebrain and unable to survive outside the womb. The committee, which monitors countries' compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ordered Peru to pay reparations and to establish a framework for women to access therapeutic abortions.
In 2006, in the settlement of a case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Mexico agreed to pay a 13-year-old rape victim who'd been prevented from terminating her pregnancy—and was by then a 19-year-old single mother—$40,000, plus a stipend for her son's education. A few months after that, Colombia's Supreme Court struck down that country's total abortion ban on the grounds that it violated both Colombia's Constitution and international law. "Sexual and reproductive rights of women have been finally recognized as human rights," said the court. "As such, they have entered the realm of constitutional law, which is the fundamental ground of all democratic states."
Such reasoning is making its way into legal documents worldwide. Recently, an African Union treaty became the first human rights covenant in the world specifically to include abortion rights. Abortion is highly restricted in most African countries; still, the treaty calls on state parties to "protect the reproductive rights of women by authorizing medical abortion in cases of sexual assault, rape, incest, and where the continued pregnancy endangers the mental and physical health of the mother or the life of the mother or the foetus." When Kenya's vice president spoke out in favor of ratifying the African Union's women's rights treaty, however, an op-ed headline in the Sunday Standard newspaper called the agreement a "Blatant Case of Neo-Colonialism."
More such clashes are on the horizon. A group of Irish women is challenging their country's abortion ban before the European Court of Human Rights. And in a case that's likely to get lots of attention, Nicaragua, which banned all abortion in 2006, may soon find itself before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. It was Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, eager to return to power and hoping to co-opt his former foes in Nicaragua's Catholic Church, who championed the ban. Now, the same American conservatives who once backed the Contras insist that it's unfair for other countries to pressure the Sandinistas to change their ways.
For liberals, the globalization of abortion law presents other contradictions. These cases pit feminism and multiculturalism, both cherished values on the left, against each other. The struggle is over abortion, but it's also over something bigger. When women's rights and cultural freedom collide, who prevails, and who gets to decide?
Michelle Goldberg is an author and journalist based in New York. Her new book, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World, will be published in April.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Why Dybul Was Sacked: New Details Emerge
Why Dybul Was Sacked: New Details Emerge
Jodi Jacobson on January 28, 2009 - 3:52pm
RH Reality Check
A furor has arisen among some right-wing conservatives and some AIDS treatment advocates regarding the departure of Mark Dybul as the US Global AIDS Coordinator. And because the right-wing sees two basic causal factors in every problem (taxes and sex), it has now become the cause celebre to fault reproductive health and prevention advocates for causing Dybul's dismissal.
Dybul not only did not advance, he set back efforts to prevent HIV infection, especially among women and youth---the groups most at risk in the AIDS epidemic---so it would be hard to say we're sad to see him go.
But for those still mourning Mark's empty chair, consider this:
Last week--after the new Administration had made plain that it was putting a halt to development of new regulations and new guidance until it could review both law and policy--Dybul was found on the Hill lobbying for a more restrictive interpretation of the PEPFAR conscience clause than currently exists, with the intention of placating the Catholic Church.
In the first phase of PEPFAR, a conscience clause existed that was in itself onerous enough. This first clause was written by conservatives to allow groups receiving PEPFAR funds to refuse to provide certain kinds of services. So, for example, Catholic Relief Services (CRS) or the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB)--which rejects family planning, condoms for HIV prevention, GLBT people and....well many other things in the real world--could receive PEPFAR funding for prevention of sexual transmission but refuse to provide condoms.
The clause was, however, interpreted by saner heads still remaining somewhere in the Bush Administration apparatus to require some sort of referral on the part of these groups.
An example: Let's say that CRS or the Bishops were trying to prevent new infections within HIV-discordant couples (one spouse is positive, the other is not...they are married...we are not even talkin' unmarried people) under the original conscience clause.
Their answer would be: don't have sex. (Seriously...I was at a conference in Abuja, Nigeria where it was suggeted by PEPFAR-funded faith based groups that these couples, rather than using condoms, simply "find other means of expressing marital love than through physical affection....for the rest of their lives.")
Public health professionals within USAID recognized that increasingly it is women whose husbands are not down with this no-sex strategy who are getting infected all across Africa. So guidance was written to require groups "protected" by the conscience clause to offer referrals if they could not provide services. Under this interpretation, a group such as CRS would have to ensure that they were partnered with, or linked to, or could refer to an organization or program that would in fact counsel those discordant couples who desired to actually have sex on how to use condoms correctly and consistently, and actually provide condoms to them.
This "liberal interpretation" of the use of your taxpayer dollars irked the Catholic Church and many like-minded evangelical groups. So they fought for--and with Mark Dybul's help won--an even more restrictive policy in the PEPFAR reauthorization last year, guaranteeing for example that they need not even provide care to those people they did not like.
Now it appears that the groups in question, concerned that the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress would more flexibly interpret the new and more restrictive conscience clause, went into action, again with Dybul as their personal savior (speaking rhetorically).
Several legislators knowledgable about the clause and its adverse impacts had indicated their willingness to soften it in forthcoming legislative action, with the "insidious" purpose of ensuring that all people have access to the services, information, and tools they need to prevent the next new HIV infection.
The thought of this was again too much for CRS, USCCB, and apparently for Mark Dybul, who in the last few weeks was reportedly working on guidance that would have made the conscience clause even more restrictive than the law (as he has done with the abstinence-until-marriage provision, the prostitution pledge and every other element of PEPFAR criticized by experts across the globe).
To help his friends, not only did Dybul begin drafting more restrictive guidance, underscoring that groups would no longer need to refer to nor partner with other programs to ensure individuals got everything they needed to protect themselves, but he went to Congress several times this month to make a case for this!
Without permission from the White House!
(Was he on the ballot in November? I can't remember. Or is he just answering to a higher power?)
Dybul, who may have gotten a little full of himself up there at OGAC with all that money at his disposal, seems to have been free-lancing in trying to head off efforts in the new Congress to moderate the public health and human rights abuses inherent in a conscience clause that actually denies people at risk evidence-based information.
Secretary Clinton knew exactly what she was doing and why it needed to be done.
Dybul defenders?
_______________
More on Dybul
Jodi Jacobson on January 28, 2009 - 3:52pm
RH Reality Check
A furor has arisen among some right-wing conservatives and some AIDS treatment advocates regarding the departure of Mark Dybul as the US Global AIDS Coordinator. And because the right-wing sees two basic causal factors in every problem (taxes and sex), it has now become the cause celebre to fault reproductive health and prevention advocates for causing Dybul's dismissal.
Dybul not only did not advance, he set back efforts to prevent HIV infection, especially among women and youth---the groups most at risk in the AIDS epidemic---so it would be hard to say we're sad to see him go.
But for those still mourning Mark's empty chair, consider this:
Last week--after the new Administration had made plain that it was putting a halt to development of new regulations and new guidance until it could review both law and policy--Dybul was found on the Hill lobbying for a more restrictive interpretation of the PEPFAR conscience clause than currently exists, with the intention of placating the Catholic Church.
In the first phase of PEPFAR, a conscience clause existed that was in itself onerous enough. This first clause was written by conservatives to allow groups receiving PEPFAR funds to refuse to provide certain kinds of services. So, for example, Catholic Relief Services (CRS) or the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB)--which rejects family planning, condoms for HIV prevention, GLBT people and....well many other things in the real world--could receive PEPFAR funding for prevention of sexual transmission but refuse to provide condoms.
The clause was, however, interpreted by saner heads still remaining somewhere in the Bush Administration apparatus to require some sort of referral on the part of these groups.
An example: Let's say that CRS or the Bishops were trying to prevent new infections within HIV-discordant couples (one spouse is positive, the other is not...they are married...we are not even talkin' unmarried people) under the original conscience clause.
Their answer would be: don't have sex. (Seriously...I was at a conference in Abuja, Nigeria where it was suggeted by PEPFAR-funded faith based groups that these couples, rather than using condoms, simply "find other means of expressing marital love than through physical affection....for the rest of their lives.")
Public health professionals within USAID recognized that increasingly it is women whose husbands are not down with this no-sex strategy who are getting infected all across Africa. So guidance was written to require groups "protected" by the conscience clause to offer referrals if they could not provide services. Under this interpretation, a group such as CRS would have to ensure that they were partnered with, or linked to, or could refer to an organization or program that would in fact counsel those discordant couples who desired to actually have sex on how to use condoms correctly and consistently, and actually provide condoms to them.
This "liberal interpretation" of the use of your taxpayer dollars irked the Catholic Church and many like-minded evangelical groups. So they fought for--and with Mark Dybul's help won--an even more restrictive policy in the PEPFAR reauthorization last year, guaranteeing for example that they need not even provide care to those people they did not like.
Now it appears that the groups in question, concerned that the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress would more flexibly interpret the new and more restrictive conscience clause, went into action, again with Dybul as their personal savior (speaking rhetorically).
Several legislators knowledgable about the clause and its adverse impacts had indicated their willingness to soften it in forthcoming legislative action, with the "insidious" purpose of ensuring that all people have access to the services, information, and tools they need to prevent the next new HIV infection.
The thought of this was again too much for CRS, USCCB, and apparently for Mark Dybul, who in the last few weeks was reportedly working on guidance that would have made the conscience clause even more restrictive than the law (as he has done with the abstinence-until-marriage provision, the prostitution pledge and every other element of PEPFAR criticized by experts across the globe).
To help his friends, not only did Dybul begin drafting more restrictive guidance, underscoring that groups would no longer need to refer to nor partner with other programs to ensure individuals got everything they needed to protect themselves, but he went to Congress several times this month to make a case for this!
Without permission from the White House!
(Was he on the ballot in November? I can't remember. Or is he just answering to a higher power?)
Dybul, who may have gotten a little full of himself up there at OGAC with all that money at his disposal, seems to have been free-lancing in trying to head off efforts in the new Congress to moderate the public health and human rights abuses inherent in a conscience clause that actually denies people at risk evidence-based information.
Secretary Clinton knew exactly what she was doing and why it needed to be done.
Dybul defenders?
_______________
More on Dybul
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