Moving Beyond Words

My vision for a broad prochoice/prolife movement to reduce abortion:

http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/commonground/2010/02/03/moving-beyond-words

Action Alert: Pregnant Women & Unborn Babies in Haiti

Pregnant women and their babies are highly vulnerable to death and injury in disaster situations. Please give to Americans for UNFPA in its work to aid the pregnant women and babies of Haiti.

Foster Human-Friendly Prenatal & Childbirth Care Options

The Big Push for Midwives seeks to increase mother- and baby-friendly prenatal care and childbirth choices in the United States, where these choices remain scarce, especially for poor people & people of color.

The Big Push encourages good citizens to:
--Ask your Congresspeople to co-sponsor H.R. 2358/S. 1423, the Medicaid Birth Center Reimbursement Act.
--Ask then to include Certified Professional Midwives in Medicaid and any health care reform proposals.

You can contact your US Representatives and senators here.

Take a Stand for Pregnant Women & Their Children

Pesticides *still* endanger pregnant farmworkers and their unborn babies. Please read the personal testimonies and take action here, with the United Farmworkers union:

http://www.ufwaction.org/campaign/drift709/7isxgn4r73e3xej

Maternity Care in the Czech Republic

The organization Normalni Porod, Normal Birth, is sponosoring a petition to improve the largely substandard maternity care in the Czech Republic, including the dishonoring of the midwife profession.

Anyone from any country can sign. All you need to be is concerned that Czech women and babies have the most life-affirming pregnancy birthing alternatives they can have, like women and babies everywhere.

The petition appears in both English and Czech versions. Please click here.

Tokophobia: It's Dreadful, But Treatable

Tokophobia (sometimes spelled tocophobia) is a phobia of pregnancy and childbirth that may affect as many as six to ten percent of women. It is a dread far, far more intense and disabling than the anxiety that non-tokophobic women routinely feel about pregnancy and labor. And because pregnancy and childbirth are everywhere, women with tokophobia find it very difficult to avoid the triggers of their fear and panic.

Tokophobia afflicts women across lines of race, class, culture, religion, sexual orientation, and marital status. It saps the psyches of women who have never been pregnant or given birth and those who have. It happens to women who wish to be or are biological mothers and those who wish to be childfree. It befalls the prochoice and the prolife alike.

Yet many women do not feel free to be open about this phobia because it is so often met with trivializing or shaming responses. The cultural demand for women to become mothers, whether they wish to or not, only compounds the suffering of those with tokophobia, often generating feelings of severe guilt, inadequacy, helplessness, or rage. This demand is one important reason why tokophobia is so often driven into crippling secrecy.

Despite the pressures to keep tokophobia invisible and inaudible, it often has longlasting, profound, and negative consequences for women’s lives and wellbeing. These include but are not limited to:

• Aversion to sex, especially sexual practices that have any risk of conception.
• Loss of sexual pleasure.
• Conflicts within and breakups of relationships, even relationships with loved and cherished partners.
• Risktaking with contraception...
• ..Or its opposite—hyperanxious use of contraceptives with fixation on their failure rates, no matter how small, beyond the usual caretaking involved in successful family planning.
• Avoidance of pregnancy even though one would prefer to have biological children.
• Difficulty healing from past pregnancy traumas.
• Abortions, self-induced or performed by health care workers.
• Pregnancies which are carried to term and birthed at overwhelming, excruciating psychological cost to the mothers.
• Preventable Caesarian sections.

Any phobia can cause a profound sense of helplessness. No matter how much one would rather be rid of it, it can feel inevitable and impossible to change. Yet the good news is that phobias, tokophobia included, are very highly treatable kinds of mental distress.

There are well-established, quite effective treatments for phobia, including certain kinds of talk therapy, in combination with anti-anxiety medications or without them (an important consideration, for instance, for women who are currently pregnant and may hesitate to take drugs).

Any responsible mental health worker will work with you to create a treatment plan that fits you and your unique needs and circumstances. It is very important to your healing that you are comfortable with your therapist and can trust him or her. If you are concerned about the costs of treatment, there are many ways to bring them down (see below).

Any kind of phobia, including tokophobia, can deter the sufferer from even thinking about treatment, let alone looking for it or going through with it. But the ultimate rewards of freedom from overwhelming fear may make it worth the effort and help you achieve the life you want, whether or not it includes motherhood.

To learn more about tokophobia:

• Extreme Fear of Birth Pain Forces Women to Miscarry (from The Guardian)



• Help for Women Suffering Years of Childbirth Trauma (from the Telegraph)
  
  
• Hard Labour (from the Telegraph)
  
  
  
• Pregnancy: “My Torment and Fear” (from the Belfast Telegraph)



• Mother's Natural Birth Phobia (from BBC News)



• PubMed.gov (put the terms “tokophobia” or “fear of childbirth” into the search box to find medical literature on the subject)

To help you find relief from tokophobia:

• Anxiety Disorders Association of America. Learn more about phobias and treatment options.




• How Do You Choose a Good Psychotherapist? (from Davis Mintun Professional Services)



• Mental Health Services Locator From the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration; see the FAQs for such topics as insurance and other ways to pay for your treatment; homelessness; and protection and advocacy for people with severe psychiatric problems. Not in the US? Maybe your country's chapter of the World Psychiatric Association or the Nonviolent Choice Directory's page on Access to Maternal Child Health Care (by Country, Territory, Etc.) (includes national Minstries of Health) can help you find the help you need.



• How Can I Get Help Paying for My Prescriptions? From Mental Health America.



• Birth Trauma Association
  

Ensure Access to Voluntary Sterilization (US)

Sterilization abuse--involuntary sterilization--of the poor, people of color, and people with disabilities is a dirty open secret of US and global history that still hasn't gone away.

It is also a form of reproductive coercion to deny sterilization procedures to people who want them. I wonder how many undesired pregnancies and abortions arise from this. In the US, there are (at least) two, sometimes overlapping groups of women who face considerable barriers to voluntary sterilization:

• Women under 30, no matter how durable, carefully considered, and thoughtful their decisions to become sterilized. Physicians may refuse them the services they need, claiming that they are too young to make such permanent decisions--especially if they are white, healthy, and/or not poor. The same physicians may still be all too eager to sterilize younger women from the traditionally coerced groups instead of exploring with them the full range of contraceptive options...eugenics is still with us...

• Women who cannot afford sterilization, which out of pocket can cost thousands of dollars--and who has that sort of cash lying around? A majority of private health plans cover sterilization procedures, but what about women covered by the minority of plans that don't? What about uninsured women? What about poor women who rely on Title X and other public programs, who are constantly threatened by funding cuts and anti-contraceptive politics?
  
  If you are from the US, please contact your elected officials and urge that they remove these barriers to voluntary, fully informed sterilization. You can point out both that (1) voluntary sterilization is a human right and (2) it is an effective way to reduce abortions.

Abortion No, Contraception Yes: Speak Up May 31

Are you one of the majority of prolifers (80 plus percent in the US) who advocate voluntary contraception and freedom of conscience in pregnancy prevention?

Turn the Clock Forward is instigating a prolife, pro-contraception blogswarm.

Please participate!

A CPC Director In Her Own Words

Prolife CPCs (Crisis Pregnancy Centers) often face sharp, unmitigated criticism from prochoicers that they have no public chance to answer or explain who they are and what they do on their own terms.

Nonviolent Choice does not necessarily agree with every aspect of every CPC. Among other differences, we are a secular/nonsectarian/interfaith initiative, and many CPCs are run by Roman Catholic or evangelical Protestant concerns. But we do recognize that many CPCs actually do make positive differences in the lives of women and children.

Nonviolent Choice talked with Angie Weszely, president of Chicago's Caris Pregnancy Clinics since May 2006. She joined Caris as development director in 2005. She has 11 years experience working with nonprofits, including a year outside the US, as well as a background in corporate training and sales.

As a mother in the paid workforce, Angie empathizes with women who struggle to both rear children and work their jobs, especially if they are single mothers. She brings this consciousnsess into her work with women facing difficult pregnancies.

MARYSIA: Please explain what Caris does.

ANGIE: Caris is a faith-based, nonprofit organization providing hope and support to womenf acing unplanned pregnancies. We have three program areas: Prevention, Intervention, and Connection.

Prevention involves reducing unplanned pregnancies through abstinence education and support groups. Intervention involves providing abortion alternatives to women through free services at our three clinics. Connection involves networking women to support and resources in the community – through social agencies, churches and individuals.

MARYSIA: Just to clarify, the particular faith basis of Caris is evangelical Christian. And today as well as historically, many evangelical Christians support women's rights. Although as with most groups of humans, there are others who still have a lot to learn and a long way to go, to say the least!

Now, CPC workers are widely stereotyped as hostile to the interests and wellbeing of women. Yet you not only object to that stereotype--you define yourself as a feminist. How did you arrive at your feminism?

ANGIE: Because “feminism” can be so controversial and is defined differently by many people, I define myself as a feminist only when I can clarify the definition.

I believe that women should be respected and accepted as women, and I believe in equality and nonviolence for all people. I don’t align with any strain of feminism that endorses the marginalization of any groups of people (unborn children, for example), legitimizes tasteless expression of sexuality, or would ask women to act like men.

For me, it was a gradual journey to feminism. I think it came from being shut out of opportunities because I was a woman, and realizing that all isn’t as equal as we would like to think it is.

I also became increasingly aware of and sensitive to the exploitation of women through pornography, sexual abuse, and abortion. Then when I had a daughter, I had an increasing desire to fight for a world where she would be protected, not asked to grow up too soon, and able to achieve her potential and dreams as a woman.

MARYSIA: How do your values and concerns as a feminist motivate and relate to your work as a CPC director?

ANGIE: At Caris, we hear women all the time say things like: “I don’t want to have an abortion, but I have to. I have no resources or support – I have no other choice.” How is that congruent with feminism?

If we aren’t offering women with unplanned pregnancies the emotional support and practical resources they need but instead offer them abortion as their only option, they really don’t have much of a choice. I believe that women don’t like abortion and don’t want to be in a place where they feel they have to make that choice.

So why settle for it? Why not work to build a society where women have access to everything they need to continue their pregnancy? To me, that is a feminist vision for the world.

MARYSIA: What do you feel feminism has to offer the CPC movement as a whole?

ANGIE: I think CPCs are doing a work that is very empowering to women, and that should continue to be our focus. I don’t think we should allow ourselves to be associated with other prolife efforts that can sometimes be insensitive to the pressures a pregnant woman can face.

At Caris, we advocate a “third voice” in the abortion debate – one that takes into account the best interest of the woman and the child.

MARYSIA: What stereotypes about CPCs concern you the most? If you had a chance to sit down and actually talk with prochoicers who level these criticisms, what would you say to them?

ANGIE: I’m concerned when I read articles describing CPCs as “fake clinics” out to deceive and manipulate women. It is my passion for women that drives me to provide them with real options other than abortion.

I would like the pro-choice community to acknowledge that not every choice for abortion is made from a place of also having access to other options. We exist for the women who don’t really want to have an abortion, but feel pressured to make that choice because of outside factors.

Many women tell us the father of the baby or their parents don’t support them continuing the pregnancy, or they don’t feel they have the practical resources for a child. Women in these situations aren’t really able to exercise a free choice without centers like Caris informing them and connecting them to all the support and resources that are available to them. What pro-choice advocate wouldn’t want women having real choices?

MARYSIA: Thank you, Angie.

Tell Bottle Manufacturers: Stop Poisoning Babies

Leading manufacturers put the compound BPA (bisphenol A) into plastic baby bottles. Never mind that BPA is an artificial sex hormone which, loosed into the environment, disrupts normal human development, particularly of unborn children and already-born infants.

Please sign this petition from the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice and tell these companies what you think!

Preventing Harm from Polyvinyl Chloride

Polyvinyl chloride, also known as PVC or vinyl, is a compound present throughout the environment, including everyday household products such as baby bottles. It is disproportionately present in communities of color. Yet it is complicit in such harms as various cancers, respiratory disorders, and fetal/newborn disabilities.**

The Center for Health and Environmental Justice runs a campaign against PVC.

PVC (polyvinyl chloride) products are everywhere and are dangerous to our health and environment from start to finish - in the factory, at home, and in the trash... The good news is that safe, cost-effective, alternatives to PVC are readily available and responsible companies are phasing it out.

The fight is by no means over, despite these most welcome developments. Please visit the campaign's site to find out how you can support socially responsible companies by purchasing alternative, safe products--and how you can challenge the firms still guilty of monumental disrespect for life.



**Why did I say "fetal and newborn disabilities" instead of the more common "birth defects"?

A disability rights consciousness calls this term into question, because it implies that people with disabilities are "defective" as human beings.

(Just as a feminist and/or prolife consciousness calls into question the term "illegitimate children"--because how can human beings be somehow invalid?)

In fact, the branch of medicine that studies disabilities in the earliest stages of human life is still called "teratology"--literally the study of monsters. A characterization that I and (I'd venture to assume) most people with disabilities find objectionable.

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?

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.

Thwarted: Bush Administration Complicity in Eco-Abortion

Environment News Service brings good news today. Federal court has overturned the Bush administration's 2005 "Clean Air Mercury Rule," terming it a violation of the Clean Air Act.

And indeed the Bush policy attempted to permit ung-dly levels of toxic mercury emissions--and this at a time when an estimated 630,000 children in the US alone are born every year with unhealthy levels of mercury in their bodies.

Pregnant and nursing women and their babies, as well as older, still growing children, are the most vulnerable to mercury pollution. Individuals can of course take steps to reduce their exposure. GotMercury.org and the US Food and Drug Administration advise on how to avoid or reduce mercury exposure through fish and seafood consumption. Vegetarianism is also an option, even during pregnancy, nursing, and beyond.

As important as consumer education is, ultimately the most powerful and enduring safeguard against is a federal government that protects all Americans, born and unborn, against mercury and other toxins, instead of serving industries that care more for their bottom lines than for life and health.

FAO Calls for Local Food Production to Stave Off Famine

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization demands immediate action to protect the Earth's poor from steep escalations in food prices.. FAO is zeroing in on the need to boost local food production in 37 countries.

Food security is part of the right to life, and it is essential to women's good reproductive health and the healthy prenatal and postnatal development of children. Yet so many of Earth's poor are subject to famine, despite the fact that (at least now, this could change) it is a matter of distribution, not availability.

Historically, too, this has been true of many famines. As a boy, Amartya Sen witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, which killed three million people. As part of his career as a Nobel Prize-winning economist, he researched the causes of this and other past Indian famines. He concluded that the problem was not so much lack of food, but overly high food prices and other preventable, addressable causes--meaning that millions of deaths were wholly unnecessary.

This gets personal for me, too. Some of my ancestors escaped An Gorta Mor, the Great Irish Hunger of the nineteenth century, which drove into exile or killed millions of human beings. Irishers will refer to 1847, the most deadly year of An Gorta Mor, as "Black '47" (that's what it's named for, the New York City band of Larry Kirwan and lawsuit-against-the-BBC-winnin' rapper Chris Byrne, aka Seanchai.)

The potato blight was but one cause of many. In fact, it was simply the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. The English colonizers forced the Irish to devote most of the land to export food, leaving very little land to grow their own food security. Even though political decolonization of the Two-Thirds World was at its height forty and fifty years ago, this economic scenario prevails today in so many impoverished, famine-threatened nations. Small wonder that so many Irishers, like the people of Concern Worldwide, are involved in hunger relief.

In other words, just as there was during these historical catastrophes--there's currently enough food and food production capacity to go around--the richer countries just don't have political or economic will, or enough of it, to ensure that poorer countries are not robbed of what is rightfully theirs. FAO is right to focus on local food production and security.

In part because I have a long memory...the Nonviolent Choice Directory offers numerous resources on Food & Nutrition (http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/foodnutrition.html if the link doesn't work) not only for people who wish to get involved in this issue, but for pregnant, breastfeeding, and other humans in need of emergency food assistance; for anyone interested in learning about and promoting the nutritional needs of mothers and children; for anyone interested in the eco-friendlier, often less expensive option of vegetarian diet; and for anyone interested in feasible, practical ways to grow their own food security.

New: Post Abortion Care Resources

We have added resources on Post Abortion Care (http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/postabortioncare.html if the link doesn't work) to the Directory. It ia difficult to find sound resources on this sensitive subject, but we have found several, and are working on some more. Please send any recommendations to editor@nonviolentchoice.info

Ten Ways to Make a Real Difference for Ten US Dollars or Less

As an American who lives with her family on the economic edge, by US standards, I sometimes struggle, especially during the winter holidays with all their talk and customs of giving, to keep things in global perspective and remember that our economic constraint is unimaginable luxury for someone else. I have a computer, for one, and steady electricity and Internet access, and I sit before my screen fully and well nourished with an unleaky roof, sealed against the cold, over my head. I even have access, however battled-for, to the health care that keeps me alive. And so I am able to research this question that is no doubt close to many people's hearts, even in the wealthiest countries: how to make a difference when you're already squeezed financially?

I found at least 10 ways that people who can afford a ten-dollar bill or less can take part in charitable giving or social action(as the terms are generally understood).

--For $10.00, you can donate one print copy of the new, state-of-the-art Family Planning: A Global Handbook for Providers to a health care worker in the Two-Thirds World.

--For $10, you can give hundreds or even thousands of organic, open-pollinated seeds that will help empower people in poor countries to sustainably grow their own food security. If you have even a small garden space of your own, you can do this for practically free.

--For $6.00, you may be able to offset one metric half ton of carbon dioxide emissions.

--Check Alternative Gifts International to see the many ways that small US sums make big differences.

--$3.50 gains one months of Tibetan preschool education for a Tibetan refugee child in exile.

--For as little as $2.49 to $3.24 apiece, you can further reduce global warming by purchase of energy-saving Certified "CarbonfreeTM" Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs, which are manufactured through a carbon-neutral process.

--$1.00 can plant one tree to reforest the devastasted nation of Haiti.

--For free, you can learn and pass along these many ways an "ordinary" person can help to prevent and heal child abuse.

--For free, you can sign up and respond to action alert campaigns to save all life on Earth.

--For free, you can learn the whys and how of going veg, one of the most powerful ways you can serve life on Earth, from this Vegetarian Starter Kit.

How to Make $10 Go a Really Long Way--and Save Lives While You're at It

How far can $10 go these days? A lot more than a person in a dollar-rich country might imagine.

The newest edition of Family Planning: A Global Handbook for Providers is now available in English, in online and print editions, with translations forthcoming in at least ten more languages. As the Handbook's website states, it is "one of the World Health Organization’s Family Planning Cornerstones, provides evidence-based guidance developed through worldwide collaboration. It offers clinic-based health care professionals in developing countries the latest guidance on providing contraceptive methods."

Voluntary family planning is a proven lifesaver because it promotes maternal health and prevents maternal and fetal deaths and injuries from abortion. And for $10, you can put a print copy of the Handbook into the hands of a health care provider in the Two-Thirds World region of your choice. Just click on the above link and take it from there--and please do spread the word!

A word to people who have religious beliefs against what you all term "artificial methods": You might be interested to know that the Handbook covers the latest scientific knowledge concerning what you all call term "natural methods."

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....

Pardon Our Silence While....

...we are constructing, as part of our Directory, links to help women and children in just about every country on Earth find & access health care before, during, & after birth.

And to encourage greater public commitment everywhere to maternal and child health. This commitment is of course a human right in and of itself, but it also is a surefire protector of the human rights to life and nonviolent choice.

In the meantime, if you need something that can't wait, please email editor@nonviolentchoice.info and we'll see what we can do for you.