Extremism for the Women of the World
Jane Roberts 700 Cajon St. Redlands, CA 92373 909-793-4578 julianrob@aol.com www.34millionfriends.org (of the U.N. Population Fund)
Kofi Annan has asked the world to come together with common purpose. The world’s women, their welfare and human rights, should be that common purpose starting on the first day of this New Year.
At the 16th annual AIDS conference in Toronto, Canada last August, Stephen Lewis, the former U.N. ambassador to Africa for AIDS said “I challenge you to enter the fray against gender inequality. There is no more honorable or productive calling. There is nothing of greater import in this world. All roads lead from women to social change.”
He is right. Coming together for the world’s women is the only hope in the long term for humanity, the planet and peace and stability.
There needs to be a powerful energetic commitment to this long term goal. Short term crises must not be allowed to derail the long term prize. Good things will follow.
Let’s get down to the nitty gritty. There needs to be a worldwide grassroots movement for the women and girls of the world. Millions of men and women understand this. They must make their voices heard.
The United Nations, hopefully with a new powerful and well financed women’s agency headed by an under-Secretary General would take a leadership role. The U. N. knows what needs to be done. It would recommend global and country specific public policies with women’s education, health, and human rights as the target.
Global and country specific policies would certainly include:
1. Adequate budgeting for education and health and the infrastructure necessary to support them. This would range from food resources, to clean water, to sanitation, transportation, books, healthcare commodities. Ten years of education for all boys and girls would be the norm. This would be the first priority of budgets.
2. Adequate budgeting for training and retaining teachers and health care workers. These two professions need to be well remunerated. Right now wealthy countries are importing large numbers of health care workers who are desperately needed in their countries of origin. This must stop.
3. Foreign Aid (Overseas Development Assistance) from the world’s wealthier countries needs to focus on education, health, and the empowerment of women. Wealthier countries should achieve in short order the 0.7 percent of Gross Domestic Income for ODA recommended by the United Nations. Unfortunately the United States only gives 0.16 of GDI in ODA and much of it goes to arms.
The Grameen Bank established by Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammad Yunus gives 97% of its micro loans to women. Women, he says, pay back their loans and use their profits to take care of their families and communities. Development assistance could learn some lessons here.
The U.N. would recommend country specific laws and policies to eliminate all legal discrimination against women. Right now there are legal barriers to women’s rights to own property, to inherit property, to gain access to loans, to establish businesses, to control their own income, to vote, to bring charges against attackers. The list is interminable. The U.N. would engage a corps of legal experts to advise countries and municipalities on establishing gender neutral legal systems.
The United States, as the only developed country not to have ratified the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) should
do so. CEDAW sets minimum standards.
UNKEPT PROMISES PAST AND PRESENT
CAIRO
The commitments made at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development by 179 countries in Cairo, Egypt must be fully implemented. The Cairo Consensus promised over a 20 year period universal access to primary education. Two thirds of the illiterate people on the planet today are women. Girls who can read develop into women who play more active roles in their communities and economies. Female literacy is the key to opening doors. Girls who can read marry later, marry “better” (someone perhaps of their own choosing) have fewer and healthier children, raise them better and send both their boys and girls to school. They also often earn money and participate in decision making in their communities or countries. .
Here are the exact words of the Cairo Consensus as they relate to reproductive health. These words were and remain revolutionary.
“Reproductive rights embrace certain human rights that are already recognized in national laws, human rights documents and other consensus documents. These rights rest on the recognition of the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing, and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health. It also includes the right to make decisions concerning reproduction free of discrimination, coercion and violence , as expressed in human rights documents The promotion of the responsible exercise of these rights for all people should be the fundamental basis for government and community supported policies and programs in the area of reproductive health, including family planning.”
The world has come up with less than half of the resources it promised at Cairo and much of the money which was to go to generalized reproductive health has gone to the fight against AIDS. We have robbed Peter to pay Paul. We must pay Peter and Paul.
Hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps billions, have gone to AIDS and yet the world lacks basic family planning commodities even including condoms which serve a double purpose. Millions of individuals and couples lack access to contraception and increased availability has not kept up with population growth. There is a huge dearth of health workers including midwives. Half of all women give birth with no trained person by their side. They are dying in childbirth, giving birth to terribly underweight children who die aborning, seeking unsafe abortions by the millions because of a lack of access to family planning. Cairo is a broken promise.
The Lancet, the premier British medical journal has published a series of articles lately on reproductive health world wide. I’d like to quote from the November 4 article entitled Sexual and Reproductive Health: a matter of life or death with Dr. Anna Glasier as lead author.
“Despite the call for universal access to reproductive health at the 4th International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, sexual and reproductive health was omitted from the Millennium Development Goals and remains neglected. Unsafe sex is the second most important risk factor for disability and death in the world’s poorest communities and the ninth most important in developed countries. Cheap effective interventions are available to prevent unintended pregnancy, provide safe abortions, help women safely through pregnancy and childbirth, and prevent and treat sexually transmitted infections. Yet every year, more that 120 million couples have an unmet need for contraception, 80 million women have unintended pregnancies (45 million of which end in abortion), more than half a million women die from complications associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period, and 340 million people acquire new gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, or trichomonas infections. Sexual and reproductive ill-health mostly affects women and adolescents. Women are disempowered in much of the developing world and adolescents, arguably, are disempowered everywhere. Sexual and reproductive health services are absent or of poor quality and underused in many countries because discussion of issues such as sexual intercourse and sexuality make people feel uncomfortable. The increasing influence of conservative political, religious, and cultural forces around the world threatens to undermine progress made since 1994, and arguably provides the best example of the detrimental intrusion of politics into public health.” Those are strong words and women pay the highest price.
THE MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS
The Millennium Development Goals have supplanted the Cairo Consensus as the global plan to lessen misery by reducing poverty and hunger. They have a tilt towards women. The U.N. rates the MDGs as ambitious but achievable. To my mind they must be rewritten to match the resources that would be there if global and country specific priorities were set straight. Extreme commitment must be the order of the day. Toughening the language of the MDGs would perhaps insure the implementation of the existing ones. Considering Cairo, if past be prologue, international grand plans (especially the ones calling for bettering the lives of women) are too easily broken. Here are the 8 present MDGs followed each one in turn by my new language and/or by commentary.
1. ERADICATE EXTREME POVERTY AND HUNGER By 2015 halve the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day and those who suffer from hunger.
1. BY 2015 no one would live on less than one dollar a day and no one would suffer from hunger. (Women are the great majority of the world’s poor and hungry. And yet they are the givers and keepers of life. What are we thinking?)
2. ACHIEVE UNIVERSAL PRIMARY EDUCATION. By 2015 ensure that all boys and girls complete primary school.
2. By 2015 ensure that all boys and girls are able to complete at least 10 years of education with qualified teachers and quality educational materials.
3. PROMOTE GENDER EQUALITY AND EMPOWER WOMEN. Eliminate gender disparities in primary and secondary education preferably by 2005 and at all levels by 2015.
3. Comment: How in the world did we get to the point where we have to even talk about promoting gender equality not only in education but in every other realm?
4. REDUCE CHILD MORTALITY. By 2015 reduce by two thirds the mortality rate of children under five. (NOTE: The number is about 10 million per year.)
4. (I am switching 4 and 5) My number 4 would be IMPROVE MATERNAL HEALTH. Ensure that the Cairo Consensus as it regards sexual and reproductive health and universal access to family planning be implemented.
5. IMPROVE MATERNAL HEALTH. By 2015 reduce by three quarters the ratio of women dying in childbirth. (about 530,000 per year.)
5. My number 5 would be: ELIMINATE CHILD MORTALITY. By 2015 ensure that all expectant mothers are healthy, have all the care they need pre and post natal. Ensure that food, shelter, vaccinations, access to safe water be universally available to all women and children. You can not have healthy children who survive if you don’t have healthy mothers who survive. The world tends to put the egg before the chicken. It should be the other way around for the health and happiness of both. UNICEF has recently emphasized the need for healthy mothers to improve child health and welfare.
6. COMBAT HIV/AIDS, MALARIA AND OTHER DISEASES. By 2015, halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS and the incidence of malaria and other major diseases.
6. Because sexuality is a controversial subject, the world has chosen to separate to a large extent the fight against AIDS from reproductive health to the great disadvantage of women. Does it make any sense to have an AIDS prevention and treatment center “over here” and a reproductive health, birthing, and family planning center “over there”? For instance only ten percent of HIV positive mothers in Africa are given the anti retro-viral drugs to avoid transmission of HIV to their babies. Something is wrong here.
The private foundations dealing in world health should not be so caught up in the treatment and prevention of disease that they forget to fund for instance the worldwide shortage of family planning commodities. Or these foundations might figure out how to bring refrigeration for vaccines to remote unelectrified villages. The availability of vitamin pills for all would save countless lives.
And any new initiative (I’m thinking of the Gates Foundation’s new money for malaria), must make sure that women receive their fair share.)
7. ENSURE ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY. Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs and reverse the loss of environmental resources. By 2015, reduce by half the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water. By 2020 achieve significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers.
7. Comment: Demographers predict a world population of 9 billion people by the year 2050 because of the staggering numbers of adolescents on the planet today entering their “reproductive years”. Most of this growth will come in the poorest countries. Can we be a bit realistic here? Water is the world’s most important resource and yet the planet is becoming water stressed in many areas. Women are the water gatherers. They are walking farther and farther, carry heavier buckets. Where will the water come from for 9 billion of us and other living things?
The majority of the coming 2.5 billion people by 2050 will want to become urban dwellers. Won’t this mean hundreds of millions more slum dwellers, slums which even now are not fit for human habitation for women and their families. Who are we kidding? Do you see why extreme measures are necessary to mitigate the worst?
Not to mention global warming and the coming droughts which even now are destroying crop and grazing lands. Women will suffer disproportionately.
8. DEVELOP A GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP FOR DEVELOPMENT (This has to do with trade policy, development financing, good governance, debt reduction, spreading new technologies, especially information and communications technologies.)
8. Education and health, especially for women, must be the two priority areas where development resources are allocated. In general, educated healthy people are energetic and entrepreneurial.
WOMEN AND VIOLENCE
Whether it be domestic violence or violence and rape used as weapons of war, violence against women has reached epidemic proportions. This must end, but how? Through education first, then carrots and sticks. Good behavior would be rewarded. Bad behavior, if repeated after “education” would be punished. The United Nations, the entire world would intervene immediately in any conflict where women were special targets. Darfur and Congo would not be happening.
War is inherently anti-woman. War does not solve problems. It creates problems. The $500 billion spent on arms worldwide is unconscionable. War is a misallocation of resources from which women suffer the most. The suffering of women in the Iraq war has been mostly under the radar.
Television screens are littered with images of young men running around with rifles killing other young men, women and children for some racial, ethnic, religious, territorial accident of history. Happily the U.N. is working on a Small Arms Treaty. We have to stop arming and start educating testosterone laden men-boys. Several columnists, notably Georgie Anne Guyer, have written on the subject of what to do with huge numbers of uneducated hopeless young men today having nothing constructive to do. They are finding meaning in extremist ideologies. They are causing problems for women and civil society.
There are other types of violence. Cultural customs have perpetuated female genital mutilation in order to make girls “marriageable”. Girls are having their breasts ironed flat so as not to be pursued by men.
Sex trafficking is a multi-billion dollar a year business. Poverty and powerlessness are the root causes. A recent article depicted the thousands of underage girls involved in the sex trade in Kenya. Forty percent of their “visitors” are Kenyan, the rest hail from Italy, Switzerland, and Germany. The sex trade is rampant in Asia. It is allowed to flourish with pay-offs to corrupt officials. The way to mitigate this nightmare is to empower girls and women with education and legitimate ways to earn money. And let’s imprison the clients of child sex slaves.
A recent news article pointed out that 7000 girl fetuses or girl newborns are done away with everyday in India. This happens elsewhere also. Imagine a mother who would so devalue her own sex as to destroy or allow to be destroyed her own kind. What does that say?
And then there is the passive kind of violence which kills. The Catholic Church is now debating whether condoms can be approved for use by a married couple if one of the partners is HIV positive.
The Bush Administration, by its gag rules, its abstinence-only wishful thinking, its blackmail of reproductive health care NGO’s who want to be able to tell the truth to women, its defunding of the United Nations Population Fund surely has caused more women to be harmed than to be helped. It has refused in several international venues to reaffirm the Cairo Consensus. For political gain here at home, it has played games with the lives of the world’s most vulnerable women.
EXTREMISM FOR WOMEN
In summary, the world must refuse to accept gender inequality and gender discrimination. The world must be extremely dedicated to changing the cultural traditions and mindsets which by their very nature devalue women. Helping women achieve their full human potential and their full human rights could be a most joyful hopeful common purpose for the global community. It would pay off in spades for people, the planet, and peace and stability. But only with single minded dedication by millions can real progress be made.
The world can change. Empowering women must come from the grassroots up and from leaders down. The “Population Media Center” has presented radio dramas which have achieved huge success in enticing people in remote African villages to access reproductive health services. Advertising influences people all the time. Governments could use cheap creative ways to forge encouraging messages. Schools could insist on the participation of girls. The new U.N. Women’s Agency could lead the way in this global effort
Anything but the most extreme dedication to making sure that there is equality of rights and opportunity for women in every realm of family, civil, and global society will not get the job done. Every public policy must be measured against its probable effects on women. Listen to the words of the Hunger Project’s Joan Holmes: “Gender discrimination is the greatest moral challenge of our age. We will be judged by history on how we respond.”
n I wrote. I think it says some very important things. Cheers, Jane Roberts
