Produced for LMC-TV	by Fran Snedeker

Home Now on the air What's New on Future Choices

Current Issues Abortion Developing CountriesEmergency Contraception Family PlanninG & Politics Global Gag Rule HIV/AIDS Legislation & the Courts Obstetric FistulaPopulation, Health & Environment Stem Cell research Teens; sexuality education Westchester County

---

Show by show Distinguished guests Where to see Future Choices How to order copy of tape Pertinent links Inquiries

Women’s Health and Rights at a Crossroads – The Agenda for Our Next President

Adrienne Germain President International Women’s Health Coalition

 

The global community has failed in meet the commitment to women’s health and human rights made as an essential part of the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted in 2000. This assertion is the central theme presented by Adrienne Germain, President of the International Women’s Health Coalition, on Future Choices: “Women’s Health and Rights at a Crossroads – The Agenda for Our Next President.”

Introducing the Agenda, Ms. Germain contends:

We do not place enough emphasis on women’s lives to invest in very simple, basic services that most women take for granted. We don’t respect and value the human rights of women sufficiently to even recognize that violence against women is a violation of human rights. For many years the United States made very important contributions to advancing the health and human rights of women. Unfortunately, however,  in the last seven years we have seen a terrible regression. This is not a failure of science, not a failure of imagination. It is rather due to politics and ideology that has blocked us, the United States, from investing in those basic health services that women need, that has obstructed the possibility of educating young people about their bodies, about sexuality, about human rights, about how to treat each other with dignity and respect and equality such that we can raise new generations in a way that women will no longer be vulnerable to abuse and neglect.

The new American President will have a fresh opportunity and profound responsibility to re-energize
U.S. leadership on women’s health and human rights, Ms. Germain pronounces. The Agenda proposed for the new President by the International Women's Health Coalition consists of these concrete action steps:

• Protect the Human Rights of Women
• Invest in Reproductive Health
• Prioritize Prevention and Women in International HIV/AIDS Efforts

In June Ms. Germain focuses on the last point as she unveils her vision of what our next President must do starting in January 2009 to take to help the U.S. regain its moral authority in the fight against HIV/AIDS in the developing world.

The U.S. envisions spending $50 billion over the next five years mostly in sub-Saharan Africa to support the President Bush’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (“PEPFAR”). Ms. Germain contends that these funds are unwisely — perhaps even harmfully — invested because the program fails to promote and protect the health of women and children.

Ms. Germain's specific criticisms of PEPFAR ensue from her 39 years' experience promoting women's “HIV/AIDS is fundamentally a
sexual and reproductive health
and rights issue for women and
girls: they are vulnerable
because their rights are widely
violated, but they could be
protected if access to
reproductive health services and
comprehensive sexuality
education was expanded.”opportunities, health, and rights in developing countries, including 20 years with the International Women’s Health Coalition, a leading international advocate for women's sexual health and rights. PEPFAR purportedly embodies the United States' commitment to ending the suffering caused by HIV/AIDS in Africa, she notes. But because the current administration has permitted politics and wrong-headed ideology to subvert its effectiveness, it is likely that in five years we will see

• Greater access to anti-retroviral medication, but
• Greater numbers of people living with HIV/AIDS since those newly infected with HIV will continue to outnumber those on treatment, and most new infections will occur in women and young people.
• And, most reprehensibly, a dark age of "behavior change" propaganda

  "The promotion of abstinence as a viable HIV prevention strategy continues to deny the risks and realities of people's sex lives. It also ignores the U.S. government's own evidence that this approach has not been successful in delaying sexual debut or preventing the spread of HIV or other sexually transmitted infections." |MORE

The IWHC is by a long shot not the only analyst to fault PEPFAR for its neglect of a strong prevention component. Guttmacher's Susan Cohen puts it this way:

"As U.S. policymakers consider the future shape of the U.S. global AIDS program, known as PEPFAR, they should listen to public health experts and incorporate prevention into treatment programs, with voluntary contraceptive services as a core component of these prevention efforts." |MORE

Drawing from her extensive field experience, Ms. Germain introduces the audience to women from Nigeria to Uganda whose chance to escape the stranglehold of HIV/AIDS was squandered by the misguided PEPFAR policies.

 

 

 

---

This page last updated July 3, 2008 10:11 .