Please Sign Safe Motherhood Demands to the G8 Leaders

The White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood is sponsoring this petition to the leaders of the upcoming G8 summit, the conference of the world's biggest economic powers.

Noting that one woman dies from unsafe motherhood *every minute*, the petition calls upon the summit leaders to:

--grant "an additional 10 billion dollars annually for maternal, newborn and child health."

--"increase the number of trained health workers by 4 million."

--"acknowledge that maternal mortality is one of the best indicators for judging the success of a health system."

Please sign! Lives are on the line!

Health Care for All US Residents!

I'm late with this, but...better late than never...although really I have no excuse, as a multiply health-impaired and often financially impaired US citizen. Well, come to think of it, my recent hospital stints, followed by much sorting through and weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth over labyrinthine, obscurantist, yet all too clearly threatening!! piles of insurance paperwork, do account for some of the delay. Yeah, I know, I know, I'm the Lucky One, the one who does have coverage...Things could be worse---however---need they be this bad?

Michael Moore, director of the somehow hilarious (given the subject matter) "Sicko," has a list of simple but powerful action steps that US residents can take to stand up and be counted for nationwide health care.

Just Do It! And please put in a good word not simply for us sickos, but for pregnant women who can't get affordable prenatal, labor & delivery, or postpartum care, and that's just the beginning of their troubles.

In creating the Nonviolent Choice Directory's Mother Child Health Care Access by Country section (direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/motherchildhealth-careaccess.html), I have learned a lot of things about other nations' commitment to real (nonabortion) reproductive and other basic health care that simply put the US to shame...well beyond what Moore shows in the film.

Did you know, for example, that all women in Ecuador are entitled by statute to free maternity care? Ecuador, where per capita income is about $4500/year, as opposed to the US per capita of over $20,000/year. Is the difference so much in the money, or in the social priorities of the two countries?

If it's a gap in social priorities, my fellow Americans, let's learn how to close it. Quick. We of all peoples cannot plead that money is foreign to our shores. We just aren't spreading it about properly.

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...

Maternal Child Health Care Access on Earth

The Mother and Child Health (During & After Pregnancy) section (http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/motherchildhealth.html if the link doesn't work)of the Nonviolent Choice Directory now includes a subsection on Access to Maternal Child Health Care By Country (http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/motherchildhealth-careaccess.html if the link doesn't work).

And no, the work is not done...for one, one of oh so many many!!!--we KNOW that, yes, we are unquestionably morally responsible to publish links to all the HIV/AIDS mother-to-child-transmission (MTCT) prevention programs we can possibly discover on the Internet...and we haven't done that yet, either, among so, so much else....

Support the Healthy Child Campaign (US)

Nonviolent Choice is one of over one thousand US-active organizations to endorse the Children's Defense Fund Healthy Child Campaign.

All one thousand-plus endorsers join with the CDF in backing "the All Healthy Children Act (S. 1564/HR 1688) sponsored in the Senate [by] Senator Bernard Sanders' (I-VT) and in the House by Congressman Bobby Scott (D-VA). Unlike other health care proposals, the All Healthy Children Act guarantees the nine million [US] uninsured children and pregnant women access to the health care they need."

It is violence to abandon women and children, born and unborn, to abortion or ELSE. This is a highly prolife bill. If you are a US citizen, please visit the Campaign website and urge your Congresspersons to support it. After you've sent your letter, you can notify your friends of this action alert with an attention-getting e-postcard.

Life begins at conception and continues after birth!