Population Action International

 

April 2008 Archives

Amy Coen on The Huffington Post: Climate Change And Women's Issues Are More Connected Than You Think

By
Amy Coen, President/CEO
on April 29, 2008 4:15 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week's Earth Day celebration reminded me of the first one. As a college kid responding to the passionate calls to action punctuated by pounding music, I came away thinking that if I hadn't already decided to work for women's rights, I would choose to work on environmental causes as a career.

This came to mind recently as I bumped along a dusty road in Northern Ethiopia. I was distressed by the lack of trees and by the many young women trudging along the road bent under the weight of huge piles of branches tied to their backs. Many of them never attended school or had dropped out because of the time required to travel long distances in search of wood that their families need for cooking and heat in the winter.

Read more of Amy Coen's blog at The Huffington Post.

Family Planning in the Philippines: A Global Wake-Up Call for Policymakers

By
Tod Preston
on April 24, 2008 10:21 AM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
“Birthrates Help Keep Filipinos in Poverty” – that’s the headline of an April 21, 2008 Washington Post article highlighting the plight of a growing number of poor women in the Philippines who lack access to one of the most basic forms of health care: family planning (FP) and reproductive health services. The article, which mentions that the U.S. is scaling down its FP program in the Philippines, should be a wake-up call for policymakers about the global impact of declining FP assistance on the lives of hundreds of millions of men and women in the Philippines and other developing nations.

U.S. investments in international family planning have been one of the most successful and cost-effective ways to improve maternal and child health, ease population pressures on the environment, and help countries fight poverty. But despite the achievements of recent decades -- including an increase in use of contraceptives among married women in the developing world from 10 percent to 60 percent since 1960 and a decline in average fertility rates from about six children per woman to three children per woman -- significant needs remain. For example, only one-third of married Filipino women use modern contraceptives.
Continue reading Family Planning in the Philippines: A Global Wake-Up Call for Policymakers.

Family Planning in the Philippines: A Global Wake-Up Call for Policymakers

By
Population Action
on April 24, 2008 4:00 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
“Birthrates Help Keep Filipinos in Poverty” – that’s the headline of an April 21, 2008 Washington Post article highlighting the plight of a growing number of poor women in the Philippines who lack access to one of the most basic forms of health care: family planning (FP) and reproductive health services. The article, which mentions that the U.S. is scaling down its FP program in the Philippines, should be a wake-up call for policymakers about the global impact of declining FP assistance on the lives of hundreds of millions of men and women in the Philippines and other developing nations.

U.S. investments in international family planning have been one of the most successful and cost-effective ways to improve maternal and child health, ease population pressures on the environment, and help countries fight poverty. But despite the achievements of recent decades -- including an increase in use of contraceptives among married women in the developing world from 10 percent to 60 percent since 1960 and a decline in average fertility rates from about six children per woman to three children per woman -- significant needs remain. For example, only one-third of married Filipino women use modern contraceptives.

The reality is that family planning remains out of reach for hundreds of millions of women and men. In fact, more than 200 million women in the developing world want to space or limit their childbearing but are not using modern contraception. In some countries such as Haiti, Pakistan and Uganda, one-third or more of married women have this “unmet need” for FP. 

Nonetheless, in recent years funding from the U.S. -- a long-time leading donor of FP/RH assistance -- has declined significantly when accounting for inflation and the growing demographic demand. And FP/RH assistance from other donor nations has also declined.

Current U.S. funding for int’l FP (about $460 million) represents a cut of $300 million or 40 percent (adjusted for inflation) from what the U.S. provided for these programs back in 1995. Had the Bush Administration gotten its way and Congress not intervened in the past two years, U.S. funding for these programs would have been reduced by an additional 25 percent. Making matters even worse, the Bush Admin has withheld all U.S. funding (nearly $200 million) for the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), which provides FP/RH assistance in more than double the number of countries the U.S. does.

So what does this downward U.S. funding trend mean for a country like the Philippines? As you’d probably suspect, it’s not good. In its budget request to Congress last year, the Bush Administration proposed spending only $5.2 million for FP/RH assistance in the Philippines -- less than 1/7 of what the U.S. spent in that country in 1995 ($37 million in inflation-adjusted dollars). That’s despite the fact that 25 percent of Filipinas ages 20-24 have an unmet need for family planning -- and these rates are even higher among uneducated women. So funding is going down and contraceptive shipments are ending while the need and demand remain high. And remember, the backdrop for all of this is a country in which more than 40 percent of its people live below the poverty line.

Ironically, this meager funding request for FP in the Philippines was proposed in the same budget in which the Administration acknowledged to Congress the connection between high birth rates and poverty in the country. In its FY 2008 foreign assistance Congressional Budget Justification, the Administration stated that “[the] Philippines struggles to provide sufficient jobs, infrastructure, health services, and education for its rapidly growing population.” (PDF, p. 348)

Just how fast is the population of the Philippines growing? It’s doubled since the late 1970s and -- if access to family planning does not increase and current fertility rates remain static -- it will double again from 86 million today to 170 million in the next thirty years. That’s a lot of additional mouths to feed, especially in a nation that’s recently acknowledged it has a serious shortage of rice and faces the threat of food riots.

Make no mistake, because of declining funding USAID has had to make very difficult choices of where it allocates its limited FP dollars. One of those choices is to scale back its family planning program in the Philippines and to end shipments of contraceptives -- contraceptives that we know many Filipinos desire. Tragically, this story isn’t limited to the Philippines. The U.S. has scaled back FP assistance to a number of countries, some with even higher unmet need than the Philippines. Kenya is one example, with troubling implications for maternal and child health and its development prospects.

The great tragedy in all of this -- “outrage” might be a more accurate term -- is that the cuts in FP funding are depriving women and men, many of them impoverished, of something they fundamentally want: that most basic ability to choose how many children to have and when to have them. And by depriving them of this reproductive right, we’re contributing to an increasingly unsustainable and impoverished world.

—Tod Preston, Vice President for U.S. Government Relations, PAI

 

"The Way Things Are" in Togo

By
Jeffrey Locke
on April 14, 2008 3:23 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Jeffrey Locke recently joined PAI as a Legislative Policy Associate, where he will help educate policymakers and their staff about the importance of international family planning and reproductive health programs.  In this blog, he talks about why, after two years in Togo, he decided to come to Washington to work on family planning issues.  
Jeff-Locke-Togo.jpgAfter over two years as a community health volunteer for the Peace Corps in Togo, I don’t have a canned, thirty-second response answer to why I wanted to work on issues of international family planning.  I do, however, have a story.
Continue reading "The Way Things Are" in Togo.

Government Censorship: No Joke

By
Mary Panke
on April 4, 2008 2:19 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
As a librarian for over 30 years, I’ve seen my share of April Fools jokes. But this year’s seemed more outrageous -– and less funny -- than in previous years. A librarian at the University of California/San Francisco Medical Center sent an inquiry to staff at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health when she found discrepancies in POPLINE searches that included the term “abortion.” On April 1, she received the following response from Debbie Dickson at POPLINE:
Yes we did make a change in POPLINE. We recently made all abortion terms stop terms. As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now. In addition to the terms you’re already using, you could try using ‘Fertility Control, Postconception.’ This is the broader term to our ‘abortion’ terms and most records have both in the keyword fields…
In effect, the word “abortion” was downgraded from a medical search term to the status of words such as “a” and “the.”
Continue reading Government Censorship: No Joke.

Government Censorship: No Joke

By
Population Action
on April 4, 2008 4:00 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
As a librarian for over 30 years, I’ve seen my share of April Fools jokes. But this year’s seemed more outrageous—and less funny—than in previous years. A librarian at the University of California/San Francisco Medical Center sent an inquiry to staff at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health when she found discrepancies in POPLINE searches that included the term “abortion.” On April 1, she received the following response from Debbie Dickson at POPLINE:
“Yes we did make a change in POPLINE. We recently made all abortion terms stop terms. As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now. In addition to the terms you’re already using, you could try using ‘Fertility Control, Postconception.’ This is the broader term to our ‘abortion’ terms and most records have both in the keyword fields…”
In effect, the word “abortion” was downgraded from a medical search term to the status of words such as “a” and “the.”


This had to be a misguided attempt at an April Fools joke! POPLINE (POPulation information onLINE), is “the world’s largest database on reproductive health, containing citations with abstracts to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished reports in the field of population, family planning and related health issues.” It’s maintained by the INFO Project at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health/Center for Communication Programs and is funded by USAID.

I subsequently discovered that the timing was pure coincidence, and this was no joke. Apparently, the POPLINE database includes a number of articles on abortion law reform. Years ago a decision had been made by USAID to strongly encourage its grantees to scrub their websites and publications of material offensive to the delicate sensibilities of Bush political appointees. Now the repercussions of that decision are clear; USAID has been compelled to enforce this policy of censorship. And POPLINE is feeling the long arm of the federal government reaching into its academic research collections.

Johns Hopkins is a university that openly prides itself on “securing more federal research funding than any other university.” Understandable, in the day—not so long ago—when scholarship, libraries, and federally-funded research aligned harmoniously behind the principles of free and open access to information, and of commitment to learning built on the sum of human knowledge. This setback at POPLINE represents more chipping away at these foundational principles, and—even more alarming—turns a fundamental principle of democratic governance on its head: Whereas there has always been the possibility that private sources of funding carry the risk of private bias or censorship, slant or “spin”, public funding has always presupposed protection of the free flow of information and ideas. This is fundamental to a democratic society.

Such an Orwellian act runs counter to everything I learned in history class and in my graduate library programs. How is it possible for “the world’s largest database on reproductive health” to remove the word “abortion” as a search term? What does it say about our government’s lack of respect for freedom of speech and for scientific and academic integrity? What are they afraid of, and why are users of this database not trusted to have access to comprehensive information on abortion?

Not only is Big Brother watching you, but he is afraid to let scientists, researchers, students—and even librarians—have access to honest and evidence-based information. As a librarian, I am outraged that I am being asked to sacrifice everything I learned to the altar of the Bush Administration’s ideology. Censorship is always the antithesis of freedom. Please join me in alerting the world to this latest breach of trust with the American people.

—Mary Panke, Director of Knowledge Resourcing, PAI

 

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