past media summaries

August 16-31, 2001

SAVING WOMEN’S LIVES
Girls’ Education

"In study after study, girls' education emerges as the single best investment that any society can make," UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said at a forum at the August 13-17 Girls’ Education Movement Conference in Kampala, Uganda. "Educated girls become educated women - women who participate in the social, political and economic life of their nation," Bellamy said in an August 22 story disseminated by Africa News. The conference concluded with an 11-point “platform of action” that called for concerted advocacy with government for greater resources; the participation of girls in decisions that affect them; the abolition of harmful practices that are barriers to girls' education; and the provision of equal opportunities for girls in scientific subjects. The platform will be presented in New York at the UN Special Session on Children in September. The Associated Press also covered the conference.

[NOTE: Go to www.PLANetWIRE.org for a current feature story on Girls' Education.]

Violence against Women

The Government of Pakistan and UNICEF’s Regional Office for South Asia held a symposium on South Asian Girls. The Business Recorder (Pakistan) reported on August 16 that a symposium resolution calls on adults and boys to help end all forms of discrimination against girls, involve them as equal partners and provide them with equal opportunities in processes and decisions that affect them. The symposium also drew attention to harmful practices that damage the physical and psychological health of girls. "Such practices include violence, early marriage, early and too frequent pregnancies, lack of rest, heavy domestic work load and unhealthy living and working conditions.”

Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands are now treating trafficked prostitutes more as rape victims than criminals. The Los Angeles Times reported on August 17 that these governments offer shelter, protection and residency permits to trafficked prostitutes so they can help identify and prosecute their exploiters. Italy also offers schooling, job training and employment to help them start new lives.

Abortion

Women in Jamaica who are faced with possible life imprisonment for terminating their pregnancies resort to dangerous and sometimes deadly methods of abortion. These include the labor-inducing misoprostol, taken at up to four times the recommended dosage, said gynecologist Errol Daley, vice president of the Medical Association of Jamaica, in an August 21 story by InterPress Service.

The New York Times Magazine featured an August 26 story on Dr. Rebecca Gomperts and her Women on Waves organization that offers reproductive health assistance, including abortion, on a fully-equipped ship called the Aurora, sailing it to women where abortion is illegal or highly restricted. Gomperts described her motivation this way: “In my trips with Greenpeace, I became aware of the enormous and invisible suffering of women due to illegal abortions. To me, this is a basic human rights issue." In the article’s final analysis of Women on Wave’s first mission to Ireland, it said, “It may be hard to say whether Rebecca Gomperts succeeded or failed in Ireland.” “Even though the details didn't work out exactly right, Gomperts ignited something,” said feminist Eleanor Smeal. ''This was a first step.'' Elle Magazine also featured Gomperts and Women on Waves in its September 2001 issue.

HIV/AIDS

More than 7 million people could be infected with HIV/AIDS in South Africa in the next 10 years, the South African government reports. According to an August 17 story by United Press International, the report found that women are at greater risk of infection due to biological, social and economic factors. AIDS activists and a group of pediatricians sued the government, demanding it provide the anti-retroviral drug nevirapine to help HIV-infected pregnant women avoid transmitting the virus to their babies. The Associated Press reported August 21 that the suit also demands the South African government develop a clear national policy to help reduce mother-child transmission. It should provide mothers with voluntary counseling and testing at prenatal clinics and with infant formula to prevent transmission through breast milk, the suit said.

The World Health Organization warned that adult AIDS death rates in Asia will rise by 40 percent in the coming decade in areas most affected -- Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand and a few states in India, according to an August 24 story by Agence France Press. In a recent trip to clinics, blood banks and hospitals in four Chinese provinces, U.S. experts found that current pilot HIV-prevention programs are too small, and that few Chinese know how to avoid catching the virus. The Associated Press reported on August 30 that Helene Gayle, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s center for preventing HIV, tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases, said, "It really will be the sexual transmission that will lead to a generalized epidemic in this country and a global and human catastrophe." China this month announced new spending and measures to slow HIV infections. The Washington Post reported August 24 that the Chinese government now estimates more than 600,000 Chinese have the virus, although U.N. experts say 20 million could be infected by 2010 unless effective measures are taken.

GLOBAL POPULATION COVERAGE
International Family Planning Policy

Newsweek featured a story in its September 3 issue on an area to which, it said, few Americans are paying attention: President Bush’s pro-life foreign policies. Bush’s efforts to mollify religious conservatives with his rumored choice of John M. Klink to head the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration is now on hold, with religious groups backing his appointment and pro-choice activists vowing to derail it. The Washington Post’s “In the Loop” column featured a section also criticizing Klink’s rumored nomination titled “Nomination Doing the Limbo” on August 29.

In addition, “the Bush administration also expects to send a high-level delegation to the United Nations General Assembly Special Session in September on children despite continuing concerns that the final declaration will endorse abortion services and counseling,” said the State Department’s spokesman Richard Boucher. The Washington Post reported August 29 that Boucher’s comments came after the State Department said the United States might not send high-level representatives to the three-day conference in New York. The Post's story also quoted a senior State Department official that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell likely would not attend but that Education Secretary Roderick R. Paige or Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson could be tapped. The Associated Press and The New York Times also reported on this.

Global Aging

Paul Hewitt, director of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies' global aging initiative, said in an August 27 story by The Associated Press that global aging was among the most important problems the world would face in the first half of the 21st century. Another Associated Press story reported August 29 that the challenges of global aging are fundamental, unprecedented and potentially destabilizing to global prosperity. Pension and labor shortfalls are the most daunting hurdles facing Europe, Japan and other parts of the developed world. Japan, with the world’s fastest aging population, is ground zero in the global debate.

ENVIRONMENT: FOOD AND WATER

The United Nations World Water Forum 2001 in Stockholm, Sweden revealed grim statistics that about 450 million people in 29 countries lack adequate water supplies, with Asia, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa suffering the most. At the plenary session at the forum, international water management expert Jay Narayan Vyas warned that adverse consequences of the global shortage of water for sustainable development, human health and food security are a matter of great concern, according to an August 23 article by The Times of India. He added that more than 800 million people -- roughly 15 percent of the world's population, and especially women and children --are most at risk.

“Efforts in Zambia to provide clean water and sanitation are failing to keep pace with the rapid growth of its population,” said United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) resident representative Dr. Stella Goings at the 27th Water, Engineering and Development Center Conference. According to an August 21 story disseminated by Africa News, UNICEF chose to look at the provision of water and sanitation as central to all efforts in ensuring the well-being of children and the realization of their rights. In addition, a report by the International Food Policy Research Institute found that Africa will have 6 million more malnourished children in 2020 than it did in 1997, a rise of 18 percent, reported Reuters on August 28. "Sub-Saharan Africa is likely to remain a hot spot of hunger and malnutrition for years to come," the report said. The group, funded by 58 governments and international organizations, based its research on the assumption that the world's population would reach 7.5 billion people in 2020, up from 6 billion in 2000.

OPINIONS AND EDITORIALS

In response to Arnold Beichman’s August 14 commentary in The Washington Times, Amy Coen, President of Population Action International, wrote in an August 20 letter that Beichman’s use of University of Aarhus, Denmark, statistics professor Bjorn Lomborg's conclusions “prompt a false sense of relief regarding the status of world health and greatly undermine the importance of programs that work to eliminate poverty and improve environmental and living conditions across the globe.”

The Los Angeles Times featured an August 26 op ed by Sara Seims, president of the Alan Guttmacher Institute, noting that many developing countries struggle to improve their family-planning programs in environments of extreme hardship, while in the United States we are spending far too much time, energy and money just to protect the progress already made. In other countries, family planning is viewed as a matter of public health rather than politics. There is absolutely no reason why American women, particularly young women, should not have the same high levels of reproductive health as other women worldwide.

On August 31, The Washington Times ran a letter by Anika Rahman, Director of the International Program at the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy (CRLP), responding to Austin Ruse’s August 26 commentary titled “Pro-Choice and Pro-U.N.” She said he had misrepresented the CRLP’s lawsuit challenging the Bush administration's global gag rule. “This lawsuit is about cherished American principles: the rights to freedom of speech and association. It is not about any funding that CRLP receives. We have never accepted any U.S. funds,” the letter said.

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The above analysis was written by Elena M. H. Cabatu and Kathy Bonk at the Communications Consortium Media Center, 1200 New York Avenue, NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20005, 202/326-8700. Redistribution is encouraged with credit to CCMC.

Read more about global population and related issues in the online newsroom www.PLANetWIRE.org.

past media summaries