PROFAMIL Haiti has provided sexual and reproductive health services in Haiti since 1984. This organization is part of a 40 member 40 member organization network called International Planned Parenthood Federation/Western Hemisphere Region (IPPF/WHR). The program in Haiti has three clinics, but the ones in Port-au-Prince, and Jacmel were completely destroyed by the earthquake as you can see by the photo above.
Laura Zaks, Public Affairs Coordinator, shared with me this sad story of devastation and the urgent need for funds to help PROFAMIL resume services through a temporary static clinic and Mobile Health Units to deliver services in tent cities where displaced persons have gathered.
1. How did the earthquake impact PROFAMIL Haiti's work?
PROFAMIL's clinics in Port-au-Prince and Jacmel have been destroyed, although a small amount of equipment and supplies has been salvaged. Unfortunately, many supplies remain trapped in building rubble with conditions too dangerous to access, particularly in light of the aftershocks. In addition, one staff member, the Director of Finance and acting Executive Director has passed away and at least several staff members have been injured, though a full report on the health and well-being of all staff and their families in both cities has not yet been received.
2. What's needed to rebuild the program?
IPPF/WHR has put together a proposal for funding from various donor sources totaling $2,500,000. This is based on the immediate needs over the next three to six months for human resources, site operations/communications and logistical support, transportation, and medical and surgical supplies.
Given the lack of physical clinics in Port-au-Prince and Jacmel and with the structural integrity of standing buildings uncertain, PROFAMIL is coordinating to offer basic primary health care and sexual and reproductive health services via several modalities, including:
• PROFAMILIA in the Dominican Republic has been coordinating with partners in deploying mobile health unit teams across the border to Haiti to conduct an initial assessment of key areas of need and to begin providing health services. Currently, the majority of international assistance is concentrated in Port-au-Prince, with many unmet health demands in the areas surrounding Leogame, Matrissals, Jacmel, Petit Goave and Grand Goave. These mobile health unit teams, consisting of medical doctors, nurses, and volunteer staff, have extensive experience in working with Haitian immigrants living in the Dominican Republic.
• PROFAMIL staff and community health promoters in Jacmel and Port-au-Prince will organize mobile health units to bring primary health care, obstetric care, family planning and HIV prevention services to community-based sites, including tent cities and other temporary shelters that have been set up in and around both cities.
• Though its physical clinics in Port-au-Prince and Jacmel are too damaged to resume operations, PROFAMIL will seek to establish temporary service provision facilities in fixed physical structures only as appropriate and based on structural assessments of their safety.
3. How can people contribute?
We have set up a donate page on our website where secure donations can be made from any country. 100% of the money collected through this site will go towards getting PROFAMIL's clinics and mobile health units up and working as soon as possible. The link is: https://secure.ga0.org/02/haiti and it is also accessible from the IPPF/WRH homepage: www.ippfwhr.org
4. Are you using social media to get the word out?
We also have an online advocacy center: www.freechoicesaveslives.org. We have mobilized our online membership from this center by sending two appeals asking for donations. We will continue to update our membership as we receive further news from our partners on the ground.
5. Please describe to my readers the connection between sexual reproductive health services and poverty reduction.
PROFAMIL's work has always been closely linked to poverty reduction efforts within Haiti. This brief slideshow gives a good picture in the link between sexual reproductive healthcare and poverty reduction. Haiti is one of the poorest and least developed countries in the Western Hemisphere. Infant and maternal mortality rates are the region's highest, and Haiti's devastating HIV/AIDS rate is second in the world only to Sub-Saharan Africa. 2006 data indicates that only 28% of the population uses modern contraceptives. Less than one-half of all births are attended by a skilled health professional.
PROFAMIL is one of Haiti's largest nongovernmental sexual and reproductive health providers. Its clinics, community distribution points, and mobile health units provide hundreds of thousands of sexual and reproductive healthcare services annually. For 25 years, PROFAMIL has provided low-cost, high-quality healthcare services including family planning, early detection of breast and cervical cancer, pre-and-post natal services, and voluntary testing and counselling for HIV/AIDS. In rural areas, a network of health promoters and mobile health clinics provide family planning and basic health care-often the only healthcare available in these remote communities. They recently inaugurated new clinics in Port-au-Prince and Jacmel, to better serve their increasing patient base. Given the massive socio-economic and health care challenges facing the country, PROFAMIL's work has been and will continue to be tremendously important in future development efforts in the country. The stories from the field that I pointed to above further reinforce this connection between PROFAMIL and poverty reduction efforts in Haiti.
The latest report we have from our Planned Parenthood in Haiti, Profamil, is that our two clinics in Port au Prince and Jacmel are, if not totally destroyed, then unusable. The staff has tried to salvage what supplies they can, but have been largely unsuccessful.
Concrete and other debris, including a tree, fell on our Finance Director, severely injuring him and, after his broken legs became infected, he was moved to a hospital outside Port au Prince and is receiving care. We do not know about the health status of our other staff.
There are 750,000 women of reproductive age in Port au Prince. At least 10,000 will need delivery services in the upcoming month. Others will be subject to rape and other sexual violence. Still others will turn to prostitution to survive. For all these women and girls, IPPF is working around the clock to make our services available.
Currently, our Planned Parenthood in the Dominican Republic, Profamilia is sending mobile health unit teams across the border into Haiti and is offering services in partnership with the UN and other agencies.
We are also establishing temporary medical facilities in our administration office, which was undamaged. In addition, we are looking into operating a facility in the tent cities for refugees.
Supplies and staff are scarce, but we are working on a pipeline from our Dominican Republic offices to get needed supplies into Haiti.
Check our website for more details on how you can contribute.
There is an article entitled, "Opening Pandora's Box", in the Headline Bistro of November 16, 2009 by Vicki Thorn, on the subject of hormonal contraception and its influence on mate choice. The article quotes Beyond Choice extensively. The article is aimed at a Catholic readership. You can read it at:
By Alexander Sanger To the Family of George Tiller, M.D. September 25, 2009
The IPPF has a statement entitled "What We Believe". It reads:
"We believe that sexual and reproductive rights should be internationally recognized as human rights and therefore guaranteed for everyone. We encourage individuals, women in particular, to take control of their reproductive lives. We promote equality between men and women, aiming to eliminate gender biases, especially those that threaten the wellbeing of women and girls. Above all, we promote choices."
IPPF/WHR created its Medal of Honor to recognize distinguished men and women who make this statement of beliefs a reality. We honor those without whom women would be bereft of choices. Choices don't appear out of thin air. Choice in the form of surgical abortion exists only when brave doctors offer it.
Tonight we honor the late Dr. George Tiller, of Wichita, Kansas, a man who offered choices to women under the most difficult circumstances.
When my grandmother, Margaret Sanger, founded Planned Parenthood in this country almost 100 years ago, she met with virulent opposition from politicians of every party, from doctors of every specialty, from priests of every religion, and from virtually all men and not a few women as well.
She was vilified, ostracized, harassed, arrested and jailed, but she was never physically assaulted or shot at. In those days, going to jail was the ultimate martyrdom for our beliefs. No longer.
As the status of women has increased, thanks to our work, so have the desperation, intensity and violence of our opposition. Where initially there were constitutionally-protected, peaceful protests against our clinics, for decades now there have been illegal blockades, vandalism, bombings, assaults and murder.
It takes dedication, character and integrity to be an abortion provider in the United States, and George Tiller had these in abundance. It takes even more character to dedicate one's practice to the most needy and desperate of women and to provide abortion services in the heartland of the United States where our opposition is strongest.
Early in his medical practice, George Tiller saw a woman die from an illegal abortion. He said, "no more", and began offering abortion in his practice, eventually providing late term abortions for women who came to him from all over the country – one of a handful of doctors to offer this service. He did so with the utmost caring and compassion, being an example of what all those providing medical services should aspire to be.
For 30 years, George Tiller stood up to protests, harassment and assaults, even being wounded some years ago in a shooting. He kept his clinic doors open to give a choice to women who never imagined they would ever need it – women with a wanted pregnancy that had gone terribly awry as it progressed.
A few years ago I did a fundraiser with George in Kansas City for his political action committee. The protests outside were extensive, grotesque and downright scary, at least for me, even though we were both wearing bullet proof vests and had security guards. George was undaunted – upbeat even, at the reaction he caused by daring to be public in his insistence that women be treated with respect and have all medical options available to them in a crisis. A former naval flight surgeon, George Tiller was not one to be intimidated.
On May 31 of this year, George Tiller was assassinated by an anti-choice fanatic as he ushered at Sunday morning services in his church in Wichita, Kansas.
George Tiller has been silenced and his clinic closed, but his memory and example never will be.
The Tiller Family has lost a husband, father and grandfather, women have lost a savior and we have lost a hero. It is fitting and right that we at IPPF honor him this evening. He represented the best of us.
To accept the IPPF/WHR Medal of Honor, please join me in welcoming George's widow, Jeanne and his daughters, Jennifer, Rebecca and Krista.
One of The United States' most well-known, but fraught, exports, from the point of view of importing nations, is its culture - most notably its music, television and movies. Less well known, but of greater consequence for women, is the export of new anti-choice tactics by the Catholic Church and its allies in the culture war that insists that all abortion be outlawed. The newest of these tactics is the Fetal Personhood Law.
Latin America and the Caribbean needed no help from the United States in criminalizing abortion. The termination of a pregnancy has been illegal or unobtainable in the region even since nations were formed. In contrast, most European countries have been moving over the past few decades in the direction of decriminalization of abortion. Recently, the government of Catholic Spain proposed to amend its current abortion law, which permits abortion only in cases of rape, fetal defect or if the pregnancy poses a danger to the woman's physical or mental health, by proposing a new law, which permits abortion on request up to 14 weeks of pregnancy and thereafter in the cases permitted under current law.
Anti-choice activists in the United States have seized upon a new tactic in their campaign to criminalize abortion by so-called Fetal Personhood Laws, which declare that the right to life extends from the point of conception, not just from birth, and that the right of the fertilized egg to life surpasses that of the mother. Recently such a law was passed in North Dakota, the Personhood of Children Act, which declared that the term "individual" or "person" includes any organism with the genome of homo sapiens. This law will undoubtedly end up being reviewed, and hopefully overturned, by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Catholic Church has now taken this campaign to Latin America and the Caribbean. Mexico City last year decriminalized abortion. In reaction to the Mexico City law, about ten states in Mexico now have laws protecting life from the moment of conception. The Dominican Republic recently did North Dakota and Mexico one better (or worse) by amending its Constitution to state that the "right to life is inviolable from conception until death." By so doing, the DR has effectively outlawed abortion in all cases. One commentator stated that the country has put "dogma ahead of the needs of the population, health, housing and better living conditions." He might have added that enforcement of this constitutional provision is impossible (how does one make sure every menstrual period or miscarriage is natural) and, even if attempted, would create a police state and detour even more resources from the needs of the population.
Constitutional provisions of this sort in Latin America have been the source of attempts to ban emergency contraception (EC). Proponents argue that EC interferes with an existing pregnancy after fertilization, rather than, as is the medical case, by preventing conception by delaying ovulation or interfering with the fertilization process.
This battle has been most contentious in Chile. The Chilean Constitution has a form of a Fetal Personhood Law and states that "the law protects the life of those about to be born." Abortion is prohibited without exception. After a long legal, constitutional and political battle, the lower chamber of the Chilean Parliament recently approved legislation, by a vote of 73-34, that guarantees the right of the people to access all forms of contraception, including EC. The bill now goes to the upper chamber.
While this bill is a long way from Spain's recent effort to decriminalize abortion, it is a step in the right direction, and hopefully the new Spanish culture, rather than the American version, will take hold in Latin American and the Caribbean.
During the election campaign of 1912, a mentally-unbalanced man fired a shot at Theodore Roosevelt, the candidate of the Bull Moose Party, at a rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The bullet was slowed by TR's lengthy speech, which he had double folded in his pocket, and by his eyeglasses case, nevertheless the bullet entered his body and he was bleeding profusely. Roosevelt declined to seek immediate medical attention and mounted the podium, announcing that he had been shot but that "it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose."
A minute later, Roosevelt delivered the following lines about his would-be assassin.
"Now, friends, of course, I do not know, as I say, anything about him; but it is a very natural thing that weak and vicious minds should be inflamed to acts of violence by the kind of awful mendacity and abuse that have been heaped upon me for the last three months by the papers in the interest of not only Mr. Debs but of Mr. Wilson and Mr. Taft.
"Friends, I will disown and repudiate any man of my party who attacks with such foul slander and abuse any opponent of any other party; and now I wish to say seriously to all the daily newspapers, to the Republicans, the Democrat, and Socialist parties, that they cannot, month in month out and year in and year out, make the kind of untruthful, of bitter assault that they have made and not expect that brutal, violent natures, or brutal and violent characters, especially when the brutality is accompanied by a not very strong mind; they cannot expect that such natures will be unaffected by it."
These words bring to mind the mendacity, abuse and foul slander that were heaped upon Dr. George Tiller by the Right Wing talk show machine, most prominently by Bill O'Reilly, but by others as well. O'Reilly called Dr. Tiller a "baby killer," who has "blood on his hands" and who is guilty of what O'Reilly called "Nazi stuff." Others in the Right Wing routinely call abortion a "Holocaust."
Bill O'Reilly and his cohorts of hate cannot expect that "not very strong minds...will be unaffected" by their inflammatory language.
Truly delusional or deranged persons need little of this sort of "foul slander" to pick up a gun in order to prevent what they are told is a Holocaust. Those with weaker minds and constitutions need more instigation, which is what the daily litany of hate, intolerance and mendacity that Right Wing talk shows provide. They also provide a justification for murder — that murdering a doctor is justifiable homicide, preventing a greater evil, saving innocent lives. In this case, homicide isn't just justifiable, it is as necessary and imperative as bombing Auschwitz.
Delusional people often commit assassinations—Hinckley shooting Reagan to impress Jody Foster, for example. But an ordinary human mind, even a not very strong one, needs to be inflamed to commit the deed. Murder is a powerful taboo, but it can be overridden by the sort of bile that TR decried in 1912.
The Right Wing talk show juggernaut is an operation that would make Joseph Goebbels or the KKK proud — first dehumanizing the enemy, as the Nazis did the Jews and as the KKK did the black man, then dramatizing their threat to the home and hearth, and finally inciting the weak, in carefully coded and deniable language, saying that whatever happens to the enemy he brought on himself.
Those defending or excusing the murder of Dr. Tiller adduce a perverse variation on the civil obedience argument of Gandhi and King and Thoreau—murder for a higher principle. They press that principle further to say that it was necessary to kill the doctor in order to save lives—the lives of unborn children he might have aborted. This is to adapt the Hiroshima/Nagasaki Greater Good justification (we dropped the bombs to end the war to save American and Japanese lives, as many as a million and more) to the abortion issue.
General George S. Patton used to give incredibly bloodthirsty speeches to his men in order to inflame them to kill in battle, believing that it was necessary get men's passions up in order to induce them to commit murder. So the atrocities they committed in war seemed to them condign revenge and (as with the murder of an abortion doctor) a morally justified preventative measure. In his famous "Blood and Guts" speech to his Third Army on the eve of D-Day, Patton said the following:
"We're not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we're going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We're going to murder those lousy Hun cocksuckers by the bushel-fucking-basket. War is a bloody, killing business. You've got to spill their blood, or they will spill yours. Rip them up the belly. Shoot them in the guts."
Scott Roeder, the accused murder of Dr. Tiller, upon hearing that Dr. Tiller's clinic would not reopen, said the closure would mean "no more slicing and dicing of the unborn child in the mother's womb and no more needles of poison into the baby's heart to stop the heart from beating..." I wonder which Right Wing Patton he heard that from.
Bye-Bye Gag Rule — Hello Family Planning Funding Increases
As expected, on January 23, 2009, President Obama rescinded, by Executive order, the Mexico City Policy/Global Gag Rule and announced that he would ask Congress to fund the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which has been denied US funding for the past eight years.
The President said in his written remarks, "For the past eight years, they have undermined efforts to promote safe and effective voluntary family planning in developing countries...For these reasons, it is right for us to rescind this policy and restore critical efforts to protect and empower women and promote global economic development."
The President added, "For too long, international family planning assistance has been used as a political wedge issue, the subject of a back and forth debate that has served only to divide us. I have no desire to continue this stale and fruitless debate."
Alas, politics being what it is, the stale and fruitless debate on this issue flared up almost immediately, and opponents brought motions before the Congress to overturn the President’s repeal of the Global Gag Rule. All these motions failed by wide margins, wide enough so that another proposed bill, which would codify the end of the Global Gag Rule and prevent its re-issuance by future Presidents, is almost certain to pass. That said, politically-motivated future administrators of United States Agency for International Development (USAID) could simply refuse to fund IPPF projects.
As for money for family planning, well, no surprise, given the U.S. financial crisis, there is none — not this fiscal year anyway. Even in the future, there will be little new money for Latin America and the Caribbean. The Western Hemisphere is not high on the list for U.S. foreign aid — the priorities being in Africa and Asia. There is a proposal before Congress from a coalition of international agencies, including IPPF, to increase U.S. funding for family planning to $1 billion a year from its current level, which is about half that amount.
In response to our proposal, on June 17, 2009, a House Appropriations Subcommittee approved $648 million for family planning programs in the 2010 fiscal year appropriations bill, including $588 million for USAID programs and a $60 million contribution to the UN Population Fund.
If enacted, this appropriation would represent a 19 percent increase over the 2009 fiscal year allotment of $545 million. It also marks a 40 percent increase in funding over the past two years.
Alexander C. Sanger, the grandson of Margaret Sanger, who founded the birth control movement over eighty years ago, is currently Chair of the International Planned Parenthood Council.
Mr. Sanger previously served as the President of Planned Parenthood of New York City (PPNYC) and its international arm, The Margaret Sanger Center International (MSCI) for ten years from 1991 - 2000.
Mr. Sanger speaks around the country and the world and has served as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Population Fund.
The new book
by Alexander Sanger
published by PublicAffairs
With reproductive freedom in jeapordy, Alexander Sanger, grandson of renowned family planning advocate Margaret Sanger and a longtime leader in the reproductive rights movement, has taken an urgent, fresh look at the pro-choice position—and even the pro-life position—and finds them necessary, but insufficient. In Beyond Choice he offers the first major re-thinking of these positions in thirty years.
“Well researched and readable, Beyond Choice should be required reading for both pro-choice and pro-life supporters.” —Governor Christine Todd Whitman
