Attack on Woman's Reproductive Health

First, House Republicans started with H.R. 3, a bill that would raise taxes on families and businesses that purchase insurance covering a full range of reproductive health care. Now they've turned to the budget to enact their extremist agenda:

• How can they justify eliminating all funds for Title X, which provides health care services for 4.7 million women nationwide and prevents almost 1 million unintended pregnancies a year?
   
• How can they justify defunding Planned Parenthood, an organization that provides 720,000 breast exams and 730,000 pap tests annually, tests that literally save the lives of American women?
   
• How can they justify taking away basic health care from millions of women

the House Republicans passed an outrageous "budget" bill that completely defunds Title X -- which provides cancer screenings, HIV testing, and family planning to low-income women.There's no other way to put it: The House GOP is waging an all-out war on women's health, and we must stop them this week in the U.S. Senate.

And it gets worse: They also voted to eliminate all funding for Planned Parenthood, thereby denying health care to millions of women across the country.

Contraception for Woman: Scientists say vaginal gel cuts HIV-infections by half!!!!!!!

A vaginal gel has significantly cut the rate of women contracting HIV from infected partners in an experiment in South Africa, researchers said.

They said the gel, containing Aids drug tenofovir, cut infection rates among 889 women by 50% after one year of use, and by 39% after two and a half years.

If the results are confirmed it would be the first time that a microbicidal gel has been shown to be effective.
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G20: Illegitimate, Incompetent and Out of Control

By Raj Patel
You can’t formulate a sensible international economic policy without the basics: helicopters, snipers, riot police, attack dogs, tanks and miles of chain link fence. Wherever ministers of finance gather, the essential accessories for crowd control and popular repression are always to be found. But even by the historical levels of unaccountability, profligacy and cowardice set at meetings of the world’s richest economies, this weekend’s Canadian G8/G20 meetings raise the bar. By the time the teeth of the last protester are hosed from the soles of the last Mountie, the security bill will have topped one billion dollars. The six kilometer fence in the middle of Toronto cost $5 million alone but most of the rest of the bill is secret – ‘national security’ provides an alibi for backhanders and white elephants.


So what will Canadians (and the rest of the word) get for their money? Very little. The meeting will produce a tepid ‘big tent’ declaration with language elastic enough to stretch over the bickering interests of thrifty Europeans, improvident Americans, tightrope-walking Chinese, and restive Saudis. All done.
What’ll be worse, though, is what the G20 meeting will fail to do. It will prevent open debate about alternatives, it will let those responsible for the financial crisis maintain their veneer of legitimacy, and it’ll chip away at the institutions that, still, offer an alternative to the G20’s traveling circus. Here, just for the record, are three reasons why the G20 is already a failure.

Protesters demand G8/G20 leaders address rights of women and girls around the world

Standing in the courtyard outside Pitman Hall at Ryerson University, Jessica Yee clutched the megaphone and eyed the crowd of over 200 demonstrators.

As she began to speak, the television cameras, reporters and photographers inched closer.

“We’re here today because if we don’t have rights over our own bodies, what do we have?” asked Yee, a self-described Indigenous feminist reproductive justice freedom fighter.

Her commanding voice thundered through the crowd, some of whom were holding signs that read “Maternal Health Includes Abortion”, “Sex Work Is Real Work” and “Hey G8, Support For Women Everywhere.”
“We’re here today because women aren’t shutting the fuck up and because sex workers make a valuable contribution to society.”

The Countertraffickers

Stella Rotaru’s cell-phone number is scribbled on the wall of a women’s jail in Dubai. That’s what a former inmate told her, and Rotaru does get a lot of calls from Dubai, including some from jail. But she gets calls from many odd places—as well as faxes, e-mails, and text messages—pretty much non-stop. “I never switch off my phone,” she said. “I cannot afford to, morally.” She looked at her battered cell phone, which has pale-gold paint peeling off it, and gave a small laugh. 

Rotaru, who is twenty-six, works for the International Organization for Migration, a group connected to the United Nations, in Chisinau, Moldova. She is a repatriation specialist. Her main task is bringing lost Moldovans home. Nearly all her clients are victims of human trafficking, most of them women sold into prostitution abroad, and their stories pour across her desk in stark vignettes and muddled sagas of desperation, violence, betrayal, and sorrow.

State Department Says Economic Crisis Fuels Human Trafficking

The global financial crisis is feeding both the supply and demand for human trafficking, the State Department warned today in its annual international survey of trafficking.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was expected to highlight the issue at a press conference this morning, where she will officially unveil the report.

The report, mandated by Congress, looks at the efforts of nations around the world to combat severe forms of human trafficking. Millions of people are believed to be trafficked across international borders each year for forced or coerced labor and for sexual exploitation.

South Africa Slave Trade (and how the world cup is good for business)

"Despite more than a dozen international conventions banning slavery in the past 150 years, there are more slaves today than at any point in human history. Slaves are those forced to perform services for no pay beyond subsistence and for the profit of others who hold them through fraud and violence."

Obama has pledged to make the fight to abolish modern-day slavery a top foreign policy priority, but the U.S. currently spends more in a single day fighting drug trafficking than it does in an entire year fighting human trafficking

For a South African victim of human trafficking, this was the endgame. On a freezing night last July, Sindiswa, 17, lay curled in a fetal position in bed No. 7 of a state-run hospice in central Bloemfontein. Well-used fly strips hung between fluorescent lights, pale blue paint flaked off the walls, and fresh blood stained her sheets, the rusty bedpost and the linoleum floor. Sindiswa had full-blown AIDS and tuberculosis, and she was three months pregnant. Sweat poured from her forehead as she whispered her story through parched lips covered with sores. A few blocks away, the roars of rugby fans erupted from Free State Stadium. In June the roars will be from fans of the World Cup.

DEFENDING THE AMERICAN DREAM:

After decades of center-right control of government that recklessly deregulated Wall Street, stagnated middle class wages, decimated job growth, and left tens of millions of Americans without health care, progressives have put themselves to work rebuking the conservative vision of America by rebuilding the American Dream.

Mother Jones Magazine-- STOP BLAMING THE POOR

This Earth Day, Tell Mother Jones (and everyone else) to End the Population Panic

I want Earth Day to be a time for people to think and take action about the absurd global inequalities that force the poorest nations and the poorest people in all nations to carry the heaviest burden of pollution, food and water insecurity, and climate change-related disasters. I want people to think about what governments, industries, institutions, and systems are responsible for this mess.
Mother Jones, which I thought I could count on to support me in this view, decided to go a different route.  Their newest issue instead focuses on the "population crisis" and the dangerous myth that poor, brown people and their babies are the biggest threat to our planet.

I was in a bit of disbelief at first and was somewhat relieved to see quotes like "Mention population, and discussion goes straight to the teeming Third World masses--never mind that an American's carbon footprint is 23 times that of an Indian" in the Editors' Note.  You'd think that with a beginning like that the feature story might be about the disproportionate consumption levels of developed countries, right?


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