Pro Female Condoms, Anti Mandatory HPV Vaccine for Immigrant Women

Nonviolent Choice has signed on with Prevention Now, a coalition that wants to expand global access to female condoms in order to address the spread of HIV/AIDS as well as unintended pregnancies.

We are also an organizational endorser of a letter to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum. The letter protests mandatory HPV vaccinations for immigrant women. These are not mandatory for citizens, so why single out immigrant women? The policy also plays into a long history of demeaning immigrant women as supposed bearers of sexually transmitted diseases into the country.

Want to sign on as an individual? By 5 PM Eastern Time (US) on January 30, 2009, please sign the petition
here.

Another Way to Grow One's Own Food Security

The global crisis in food costs is hitting the poorest of the poor the hardest. Fortunately, there are many eco-friendly, high-yield gardening and farming methods now that can help people, including pregnant and nursing mothers, take their own nutrition and their own food security into their own hands. These methods can be adapted to a wide variety of climates.

The Nonviolent Choice Directory covers some of these methods in our section on Help With Crisis Pregnancy and Beyond: Food & Nutrition: Nutritious, Nonviolent, Eco-Friendly, and Low-Cost Eating.

In the tiny Southern African nation of Lesotho, "keyhole gardens" are catching on. Residents of the arid highlands cannot afford imported food, yet local conditions make farming very difficult.

Keyhole gardens are a blessing because they yield large amounts of nutrient-rich vegetables. And because they are in raised beds, people who are pregnant, sick, or elderly can easily tend to them. This is very important in Lesotho; it has been hard hit by HIV/AIDS, and many grandparents are raising their grandchildren.

To learn more about keyhole gardening, please check out:

--This BBC World Service Report (mostly text).

--This video from Send a Cow:

http://www.graspr.com/videos/Making-a-Keyhole-Garden

For an Even Bolder Reproductive Health Agenda, Why Not.....

To mark International Women's Day, RH (Reproductive Health) Reality Check and UN Dispatch are teaming up for the salon A New Agenda for Girls's and Women's and Health and Rights.

The salon includes and responds to a (.pdf) report by Adrienne Germain of the International Women's Health Coalition. It urges and contemplates a much improved role for the United States in promoting global reproductive health.

Although the US government has yet to catch up to them, the salon commentators demonstrate just how far global reproductive health advocacy has progressed over the years and decades. No one reductively blames and scapegoats poor women of color's fertility for starvation and environmental destruction; quite the opposite. The agenda is broad and comprehensive and thoroughly feminist, solidly grounded in the human rights and needs of women and girls. In other words, it represents an aspiration to reproductive justice for all.

While Germain's report and all the salon panel members appear to take an abortion-rights stand, they do not fixate on that issue, let alone to the detriment of all the others. They attend to the "other" issues--measures which, incidentally, whether in effect or by intent have the power to reduce abortion, such as improved contraceptive access and expanded, comprehensive HIV/AIDS prevention programs.

Former and longtime Catholics for a Free Choice leader Frances Kissling does pose this question of Germain's report: "Is This a 'Bold' Plan?" She concludes: "It is a good plan for the 20th century, but I say let's be really bold and move to the 21st."

Why doesn't she does consider Germain's a bold and current enough plan? In part:

Adolescent sexuality is not just "going to happen"; it has its place in adolescent life. Birth control and sex education for adolescents should not just be there as an antidote to the disease of adolescent sexuality but as an aid to healthy and responsible adolescent sexual expression. Ditto on abortion. I note the word appears once in Germain's agenda while we all know anti-abortion moralizing is one of the key problems in including abortion services and information in sexual and reproductive health programs.

I agree with Kissling that access to birth control and comprehensive sex education should not be simply looked upon in terms of a zeal to avert catastrophe. Of course it is essential for them to protect young people (and not-so-young people) against negative or undesired outcomes. But birth control access and sex education at the same time should at the same time actively address the very real and human--yet too often neglected-- need to cultivate the nonviolent giving and receiving of sexual pleasure.

But abortion? It's something different altogether. That pesky issue of taking early life--or potential life, in the estimation of some--is just too inescapable. Not to mention the reality that so many women resort to abortion because they have been denied sexual/reproductive choice to begin with...among other distressing facets of many women's abortion experiences.

It's not just that same-old same-old Bush administration "anti-abortion moralizing" that seeks to keep abortion advocacy out of a global reproductive health and rights agenda.


What would a really bold, 21st-century--and beyond--agenda be? One that joined both prochoice and prolife women's and girls' rights advocates in deliberately, consciously, seriously making abortion obsolete as possible, through social progress to alleviate its root causes.

This is precisely what Ms. Turn the Clock Forward evokes in the name of her blog.

So much that could be done in this area is going undone, overlooked, neglected.

Can we begin to imagine a world where abortion for the most part is regarded as a barbaric, violent, outmoded solution to human problems, where better solutions exist and are readily accessed?

I don't think it's a matter of whether that world can be made a reality. It's a matter of whether enough individuals and institutions will set their sights and their persistent deeds on it.

Who knew, forty years ago during my smoke-filled, ashtray-dumping childhood, that another life-denying practice--tobacco use--would be today so successfully reduced in the United States? Not simply through entreaties to individual behaviorial changes, but through institutional challenges to the tobacco industry, which are now being sought worldwide through instruments such as a global tobacco treaty.

So why not approach abortion in a parallel way, for real, not just in rhetoric? Dare I say that would make for a genuinely, radically bold 21st century reproductive justice agenda?

A World AIDS Day Message on Maternal Child Health & Life

This just in from South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign, or TAC, a grassroots, nonviolent force for justice in the world's most heavily HIV-infected nation and a global inspiration:

As we approach World AIDS Day a key goal must be to improve maternal health and prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission (PMTCT).

On World AIDS Day 1999, I stood with hundreds of other people in Cape Town's Company Gardens for the first unveiling in that city of the AIDS Quilt. We were blessed and moved to hear TAC activists in courageous "I Am HIV Positive" T shirts speak up for their own lives and the lives of all HIV-affected people, and lament those who were already needlessly lost. One of them was a young mother who lost her baby simply because they had been denied access to antiretroviral drugs and other lifesaving care. As she spoke, she made cradling motions in the empty air.

Why should any mother have to suffer like this?
And why, on a related matter, should any pregnant, HIV positive woman anywhere in the world have to face the "choice" between abortion or ELSE?

South Africa's notoriously denialist government was and still is slow to alleviate the crisis all around it. It did not roll out its first PMTCT programs until 2003, and TAC still challenges and challenges it to do right by its own promises to its own citizens, in the area of PMTCT and so much else. 800 human beings still die from HIV/AIDS every day in South Africa. And unfortunately this is but a more dramatic and concentrated example of what is happening in all corners of the planet every day.

Please do not let the sheer numbers numb you out...Each of us has something to give to the struggle against the pandemic. Here are some ways.

--Learn from the Global Coalition on Women and AIDS and endorse its Statement of Support. (The Nonviolent Choice Directory is a proud endorser of this statement.)

--Whether or not you are personally HIV positive, you can check out the Treatment Action Campaign's extensive treatment literacy resources, including a number on mother-to-child transmission. Please consider a gift of time, money, publicity, or expertise to this most necessary organization. ..There are too many ghosts already...

Expanded: Our Pages on Sexual/Reproductive Health Education & Male Responsibility

Please take a new look--or a look, if you haven't visited before--at the Nonviolent Choice Directory's page on Sexual/Reproductive Health Education (direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/completeeducation.html) We have added a lot of websites and little summaries and reviews. We have also added some on Male Responsibilitylately (direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/maleresponsibility.html). Let us know what you think! Thank you.