Gender Across Borders

The Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) Situation Report is a monthly column highlighting policies and issues around the world.  This month, I’m taking a closer look at maternal death in Kenya.

The East African Caravan for Maternal Health launches in Kenya

Because of it’s relative stability, Kenya is a popular travel and study abroad destination, and has loads of international players working there– including USAID.  Contraceptive prevalence in Kenya hovers around 30%, and the fertility rate is between 4 and 5 children per woman. 

Maternal mortality rates in Kenya are among the world’s highest; a Kenyan woman has a 1 in 39 lifetime risk of dying because of pregnancy or childbirth.  Something like 15,000 women a year die this way– more than a third from unsafe abortion. 

Direct medical causes for maternal death include hemorrhage, infection, obstructed labor, and unsafe abortion.  As in all poor countries with high maternal mortality rates, the severity of these problems is driven by social factors.  In Kenya, health systems are lacking and infrastructure issues make it difficult to access existing resources.  Moreover, women often lack decision-making power during the entire spectrum of their reproductive lives.  Abortion is illegal, heavily stigmatized, and responsible for the deaths of thousands of Kenyan women every year. Read the rest of this entry →

Toronto has a traditional association of being known as one of the safer cities to live in. For one week, however, we were shown what life would be like if we lived in George Orwell’s famous dystopia. Security in this city was so tight that giant fences were erected around the proverbial meeting spot in the Metro Centre. Police were lining the streets and IDing pretty much everyone they thought needed to be IDed and the protesters who were hanging around the sidelines were starting to get anxious.

The most surreal experience that I had was when one citizen who was commanded to show identification by a small group of police officers, got so offended and rowdy that he whipped out a video camera and actually started live video blogging the whole experience, with gaping police officers and all. Thank you Youtube generation.

Now I have to admit, I wasn’t sure at first how to cover these two conferences. I had picked up my press pass but security was so tight that they were only letting certain circles of the media into the actual convention centre where the talks were taking place. Instead, we were placed into what is known as the Allstream centre to attend various press conferences and watch whatever discussions were taking place on a big screen in the press room. It was also an event with no clear schedule—it really did seem like it was going to be a free-for-all as far as the issues on the table were concerned. Considering that I was primarily focused on gathering information on maternal health (and we all know about Canada’s controversy here), I wasn’t exactly sure where/when to follow in what was shaping up to be a 20+ hour conversation among the top eight world leaders. I was also interested in attending the various protests that were taking place—one in particular called the All Out for Gender Justice! march seemed very intriguing.

In the end, I decided to just go with the flow and see to what my journey surmounted; with that said, I’ll mostly be writing short summaries or snippets of the different activities (as opposed to GAB’s more in depth coverage from the Women Deliver conference). So with some good advice from my buddy Russ to leave the vuvuzela at home, I took off to cover the most important summit in the world (theoretically anyways).

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The Sexual and Reproductive Rights Situation Report is a monthly column devoted to international policy issues and current events around these critical rights.

At last week’s Women Deliver conference (covered by Gender Across Borders), Melinda Gates announced that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would devote $1.5 billion to maternal and child health over the next five years.  They will not, however, fund abortion services.  Gates said in her remarks that she couldn’t imagine being denied the “basic right to decide how many children to have.” she also said that the Gates Foundation would focus it’s efforts “upstream,” explaining that with proper family planning abortion will not be necessary.  I don’t even think I have to address that little doozy, but if you’re interested, Columbia’s Gender and Sexuality Law Blog does a good job of taking on the problematic nature of that reasoning.

The Women Deliver Conference is part of  a swelling tide of awareness about maternal health.  Access to safe abortion is one of Women Deliver’s “Three Core Strategies to Save Lives.”  In the broader conversation, however, there is rarely an explicit recognition of the role of unsafe abortion in maternal mortality.  Because of the politicization of a public health issue, a major factor contributing to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of women every year is swept under the rug.  As The Lancet’s editor, Dr. Richard Horton, pointed out in response to the Gates Foundation’s pledge, “unsafe abortion contributes to one in seven maternal deaths across the world.”  Sadly, international donors are being allowed to turn  their faces from the issue because it is politically difficult. Read the rest of this entry →

The Women Deliver conference (www.womendeliver.org), is running June 7-9 2010 and the GAB team is present! It is a global meeting on maternal and reproductive health and the advancement of women and girls. Tune in today, tomorrow, and Wednesday for live updates directly from the conference floor.

By Erin Rickard and Kyle Bachan

Lunch With Melinda Gates

After a busy morning with press conferences and transcripting, we sat down with our lunchboxes to hear Melinda Gates discuss the Gates Foundation’s involvement in maternal health. She called on leaders of the developing world to give more funds and that “we have the momentum now”. She deplored the acceptability of death in childbirth and stressed that this normalization of death must go and that family planning is the key to ending maternal mortality. With a $1.5 billion promise of funding from the Gates Foundation (in addition to what they are already funding), she ended the luncheon with a well deserved standing ovation from the audience.

We need a world in which every birth is a promise, a promise for a better future.- Melinda Gates

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Today is an important day of remembrance for women worldwide. On the second Sunday of May, we in the United States as well as those in approximately ninety other countries, including Italy, Ethiopia, Brazil, Australia, Singapore and Venezuela, celebrate our mothers and the gift of motherhood. If we are lucky enough to be in the same city as our mothers, we may take them out to brunch or cook them a nice dinner, go to a movie with them or for a hike. Those of us less fortunate have to settle for sending a gift, a card or making a phone call. And for those of us whose mother has passed, we might spend the day reminiscing, either alone or with family and friends, whichever way feels right. Today is also important for a tangential but related reason. It is the fiftieth anniversary of the pill. On May 9th, 1960, the United States Food and Drug Administration approved the first birth control pill for the market. Since then, management of one’s own fertility and reproduction has been much easier, safer and carefree.

The pill has allowed women to not only decide if they want to have children but also when they do. This opportunity, in conjunction with Title IX, lead a steady rise of women in the United States attending graduate school and pursuing careers outside of the home. While many women would go on to have children, they could wait until after graduating from graduate school or securing a long-term position to get pregnant, and thus have the means and resources to both raise children and have a career, should they so desire. According to Nancy Gibb’s extensive study on the subject in TIME, “By the 1970s the true impact of the Pill could begin to be measured, and it was not on the sexual behavior of American women; it was on how they envisioned their lives, their choices and their obligations.” As she quotes Terry O’Neill, the President of the National Organization for Women, “In 1970, 70% of women with children under 6 were at home; 30% worked. Now that’s roughly reversed.” And according to Harvard economist Claudia Goldin, cited in the same article, from 1970 to 1980 the number of women comprising first year law school classes jumped from 10% to 36% and business school classes from 4% to 28%. As Erin Kotecki Vest, the Political Director of BlogHer, Inc. and author of the Queen of Spain blog, recently stated for a CNN survey on the subject:

“You see, like many women, I timed both of my pregnancies. I had control over the reproduction part of sex during my now 10-year marriage. I could decide at what point during my journalism career I was ready for children, and we could plan parenthood right along with my climb up the ladder.

Giving women control over reproduction means giving them control over their own fate. I am a wife, a blogger, a mother — when I want, how I want, and with the freedom to remain sexual. The pill means I can have it all, and sacrifice nothing. It has taken the dream of my Mother’s generation — that of “Superwoman” — and turned it into my reality.”

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Over here at GAB, we’re excited about an upcoming conference called Women Deliver, which several of us will be attending and covering, from the feminist beat.  It’s a big international women’s health and rights meeting planned for June 7-9 in Washington, DC, and that’s just a few weeks before the world’s G8/G20 Summits in Canada, where maternal health has also been marked a priority.

This is turning out to be a big year for issues of global women’s health and rights, at least within the global policy context.  Over the past year, there has been more and more attention to the issues of global maternal and reproductive health within the context of foreign policy. The UN has also made these issues a priority.

Her Madame Awesomeness Hillary Clinton has repeatedly stated that

Photo: Lynsey Addario

1) reproductive rights are human rights and 2) investing in women’s health and rights is a smart security and economic strategy, and the bedrock of her foreign policy.

The health and empowerment of a country’s women is a pretty accurate litmus test for the health and stability of that country overall.

Women produce the majority of food, transport the majority of goods, and provide the majority of labor in the developing world.  Without their freedom, rights, and health, communities — and economies — fall apart.

In honor of all the razamatazz going on, GAB will be posting a series of related posts – on everything from contraceptives, maternal mortality, gender equity, and the importance of girls’ education – over the next month through the conference.  We will also be liveblogging from the conference, reporting on what speakers like  Nick Kristof, Michele Bachelet, Nafis Sadik, Melinda Gates, Fred Sai, Dr. Ruth and  others have to say…and then listening to what YOU have to say.

Here are the posts that ran leading up to the Women Deliver conference:

• Happy Mother’s Day/Pill’s 50th Anniversary by Roxanne Samer
• Reproductive Health and Environmental Dangers by Colleen Hodgetts
• Who will pay for accessible contraceptives in developing countries? by Kyle Bachan
• Afghan Girls Are Being Poisoned in Their Schools. Or Maybe They’re Just Hysterical. by Erin Rickard
• Drop in Global Maternal Death Rates by Colleen Hodgetts
• Canada pulls a blanket over the abortion debate by Kyle Bachan
• What Will Afghanistan’s Peace Jirga Mean for Girls’ Education, and What Will Girls’ Education Mean for the Country? by Erin Rickard

You may have seen the new PSA the Candie’s Foundation put out a few weeks ago, which features a glammed up Bristol Palin bouncing baby Tripp on her hip, saying that if she didn’t come from such a famous family, with lots of privileges, raising a baby as a single teen parent would be a drastically different experience.  True dat.  (watch for yourself, below)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpHlztPeHf8]

I kind of like the ad because it drew attention to the anomaly that Brisol Palin (and Jamie Lynn Spears) is as a teen mom – whenever we see her she’s perfectly coiffed, calm, baby is calm, fed, dressed, she looks together.  She’s on air, or on camera, or headed somewhere expensive.  This is night and day compared to what the vast majority of teen moms in the US – and worldwide – have to deal with.

I thought it was actually edgy and nuanced of the Candies Foundation to push this message.  So often the “role models” that teen moms have in the media are ones that are mostly wealthy, have lots of support, and we’re only seeing the happy side of teen motherhood.  So I was annoyed (though not surprised) when the ad was immediately harshed on by the femi-blogosphere. Take this post, for instance, on Feministing.  It sums up the ad as suggesting, “don’t get pregnant unless you’re privileged.”  It calls the Candie’s Foundation “abstinence pushing” and suggests that Bristol is telling girls that if they’re poor they shouldn’t get pregnant…almost suggesting some kind of terrible class-driven population control.

Other blogs like Bitch followed suit, criticizing Bristol’s “anti-poor” attitude, and calling her a hypocrite.  This post on Feminist Looking Glass was more judicious, but still criticized the Candie’s Foundation for its abstinence-only messaging.  Overall, coverage from the feminist blogosphere was a bit harsh, a bit alarmist, a bit misinformed overall, if I may say so myself. Read the rest of this entry →

This post is a part of the Blog for International Women’s Day BLOG

One women dies every minute of every day because of complications related to pregnancy and childbirth. About 75 million children who should be in primary school are not, and at least 55 percent of those – nearly 41 million children – are girls (all statistics via CARE). In the U.S., HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of death among black women aged 25-34 years (via cdc.gov). Around the world, women and children are more susceptible to HIV/AIDS than men (via thebody.com). Women are more poor than men in most parts of the world (via globalissues.org).

Those are just a handful of issues of why women are still not equal to men. Many people in the U.S. think that women are already equal to men, especially in developed countries in the U.S. But this is not so. As Jessica Valenti writes in the Washington Post, “For women in America, equality is still an illusion:” Read the rest of this entry →

Focus on the Family is planning to run an anti-abortion advertisement during Super Bowl XLIV. The ad will feature football player Tim Tebow and his mother, Pam, discussing Pam’s decision not to abort Tim even after learning that carrying her pregnancy to term could result in serious medical problems. Already, a petition has been started to ask CBS to stop the ad from airing during the Super Bowl. While this issue is certainly interesting on its own, what fascinates me the most is what this ad represents in terms of future commercial broadcasting possibilities.

Regardless of how one feels about this ad being broadcast (let alone how one feels about abortion), there is no denying that CBS has adopted a hypocritical stance. In 2004, CBS prevented an ad for the United Church of Christ from airing during the Super Bowl, citing their policy of “prohibiting advocacy ads, even ones that carry an ‘implicit’ endorsement for a side in a public debate.” Moreover, in recent years, the network has also rejected ads by PETA and MoveOn.org from broadcasting during the Super Bowl while instead airing ads with homophobic and sexist messages. It is in this context that we consider CBS’ decision to air Focus on the Family’s anti-choice ad during this year’s Super Bowl. This alone should be sufficient reason to demand that CBS pull the ad.

But I don’t think it’s that simple.

Read the rest of this entry →

The Vatican

I’m guessing this title might cause a knee-jerk reaction from some readers. It’s a conjunction I find equal parts fascinating and improbable. I do know some people, however, who identify as both, so I set about finding common ground between these two unlikely bed fellows.

This topic is best understood with the disclaimer that both identities are so historic, widespread and all-encompassing that within their large umbrellas there are many, many factions with which members of the group identify. It is easier to envision some overlap when considering that there are both pro-choice Feminists and pro-choice Catholics, for example. Granted, Church doctrine condemns abortion, so the latter is much rarer than the former, but the Church’s official stance has not kept members from assuming both identities.

Although I found more articles than expected about this topic online, they were all written by Catholics trying to convince their brothers and sisters in Christ to reconsider Feminism. “It’s not that bad, and really we have a lot in common!” seemed to be the underlying plea. All of the articles distanced themselves from “radical” or “neo” feminism. Nonetheless,  I was a bit surprised anyone had considered the idea, let alone written about it.

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