Women Deliver: The Next Push to Get Abortion into Development Goals
One of the final announcements at Women Deliver, the global conference on family planning, was the launch of a social network campaign to demand countries include reproductive and sexual health and rights in the UN’s new development goals. These new development goals will take over when the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) expire in 2015. UN [...]
Women Deliver: If it’s not Sexy It’s not a Right
A side event at the Women Deliver conference last night featured an expert panel that reported on the serious discrimination and psychological harm millions of girls in developing countries experience due to the taboo subject of menstruation. Cultural taboos surrounding menstruation alienates girls from their families and homes due to beliefs that girls and women [...]
Expanding Abortion Through Midwifery Programs
At the Women Deliver conference held this week in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, sexual and reproductive rights advocates have convened to present strategies on how to expand access to contraception and abortion to poor women and girls in developing countries. One such strategy is incorporating family planning and abortion as essential competencies provided by midwives. A [...]
Trouble for Abortion Stealth Campaign
Abortion groups’ plan to get the abortion-causing drug misoprostol widely used for post-partum bleeding has run into roadblocks. People in the targeted areas know what they’re up to, and the message that “misoprostol saves lives” is hyperbole intended to influence policymakers. Leaders of this campaign gave an update at a seminar held in conjunction with [...]
Fertility 2.1
Fertility is plummeting around the globe and countries are at a loss to solve the problems created by aging and population decline. Without robust workforces it will be impossible for African countries with emergent fiscal systems to sustain any kind of social protection floor in the future. While countries negotiate a document to address the challenges countries and [...]
Give them Condoms!
If only women in sub-saharan Africa would finally stop having more than 3 children each… This is what the head of the UNFPA just communicated to UN member states at a UN meeting on migration and development, in more politically correct terms. [...]
LGBT try to get climate change funding
Abortion leaders have shamelessly discussed how they can tap into the massive global funding on HIV/AIDS. Now LGBT leaders are eyeing the flood of money going toward climate change. Noelene Nabulivou, from Fiji, is a member of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN). She proposed this theory at a panel on Development [...]
Abortion in France gives Ireland the benefit of hindsight
Here is a post published on the Blog “Constitution Project” of the University College Cork (UCC), an inter-disciplinary research group looking at issues surrounding constitutional law, history, governance and politics. It may also be of interest for the readers of Turtle Bay. Abortion in France gives Ireland the benefit of hindsight Posted on March 22, 2013 We are delighted to [...]
Offensive USAID-Funded Ad Pulled in Kenya After Public Outcry
Just one day after USAID released a progress report on development reform, a US and UK funded AIDS prevention ad was pulled for being offensive and immoral for its promotion of extramarital affairs. While Christian and Muslim religious leaders called on the Communications Commission of Kenya to remove the ad from airwaves, it was a [...]
Global Abortion Lobby Stuck at the Rubicon. A Hobbit is Sneaking By…
“Though Shalt not pass!” Last week at the Commmission of the Status of Women, nations that cherish traitional values were able to halt the advance of the global abortion lobby towards abortion as a human right. Despite attempting to do so for over 40 yrs, nations and groups that want abortion to be a human [...]
Groups Ask U.S. to Back Off Demand for Abortion at UN
Over 20 groups are asking U.S. Secretary of State to end the U.S. obstruction over abortion at the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Here is the letter sent today: Dear Secretary Kerry, This week the United States has an opportunity to advance international efforts to prevent violence against women and girls through the [...]
Why “Abortion as a Human Right” Is More Dangerous for Women
The World Health Organization and the UN Commissioner on Human Rights have both released guidelines that assume abortion is a human right and should have no limits. Abortion for all nine months, with no legal protections for mother or baby. Here is what happens when there are virtually no restrictions. In the state of Maryland, [...]
Human Rights Alert: Forced abortion and sterilization in China.
Abortion and sterilization are quite different in China than in the US. In the US pro-life and pro-choice advocates debate whether abortion should remain a legal choice. As a result 55 million abortions have taken place in the US. In China fertility is controlled by the state. When women violate the one-child policy or related policies (such [...]
A World without handicapped children?
In 2011 the German parliament was divided beyond party lines on the issue of pre-implantation diagnostics (PID) of embryos. The parliament eventually decided to allow PID, thereby weakening the protection of the right to life of the unborn child ex utero. On friday, the Federal Council (vaguely similar in function to the US Senate), which [...]
Is International Planned Parenthood Abetting Criminal Activity?
International Planned Parenthood Federation’s Carmen Barroso sent around an e-mail today soliciting year-end donations. She illustrates the role IPPF plays throughout the Western Hemisphere by telling the story of Valeria, a young Argentine woman: “This year, we provided vital health services to individuals like Valeria, a young Argentine woman who never received sexuality education at [...]
The Culture of Death, the Dictatorship of Relativism and the Inter-American Court
Late yesterday the Inter-American Court of Human Rights released a lengthy opinion (Murillo et al. v. Costa Rica, dated November 28, 2012) holding that Costa Rica’s law which protects life at its earliest stages by prohibiting in vitro fertilization violates the American Convention on Human Rights. In so doing, the Court turned the Convention, which protects [...]
Cooler heads prevailed on Disabilities Treaty
The Hill, a newspaper for people who work on U.S. federal legislation, ran Dr. Susan Yoshihara’s op ed today on the defeat of the vote on the UN Disability treaty. Dr. Yoshihara, who participated in the negotiations of the UN treaty, anticipated the political attacks that may come against the dissenting senators. Her op ed [...]
Disability Treaty Goes to Senate Floor
Senator Reid made a motion yesterday to move the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) to executive session. The motion passed allowing debate to follow. Foreign Relations committee chairman Sen. John Kerry followed with an opening statement in which he tried to assure senators that the convention would not grant any new [...]
WHO Prescribes Unsafe Abortion for Poor Women
A new manual by the World Health Organization (WHO) on how to do abortions is facing criticism for advocating substandard medical care and a ban on all limits to abortion. Aimed particularly at poor women in developing countries, the manual downplays medical oversight and recommends disposing of the “waste,” including babies’ remains, in sewers or [...]
European Union: Anti-Religious Hate Groups Join Forces to Oust Catholic Politician
Strange things are going on in the EU Institutions. First John Dalli, the EU Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection, was ousted from the European Commission on the basis of (rather flimsy) charges of wrongdoing. Requests to Commission President Barroso to explain why exactly he forced Mr. Dalli to resign have been left unanswered. As [...]