News / Articles and opinions

Category selected

Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights

USA : On family planning, does the Catholic Church represent Catholics?

Thu 6 October 2011 / Posted by EPPSP
By Jon O’Brien, president of Catholics for Choice

John Garvey’s op-ed, “HHS’s birth-control rules intrude on Catholic values,” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hhss-birth-control-rules-intrude-on-catholic-values/2011/09/27/gIQAOj8s9K_story.html) makes some assertions that do not hold up to scrutiny. In fact, millions of Catholics-theologians and laypeople alike-have lauded the inclusion of women’s preventive healthcare coverage as respectful of Catholic values.

The Catholic University of America (CUA) president asserted that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will “require” CUA to offer its students family planning services, claimed that certain reproductive health services are sinful and that the HHS was violating religious liberty.

There is nothing in the HHS rules that requires anybody to provide services. They require employers to offer coverage, which employees (or students) can then decide to utilize or not. Read more…

Tags:

AIDS Summit at the UN: Not Enough Talk About Sex

Mon 13 June 2011 / Posted by EPPSP

by Evelyne Leopold, The Huffington Post, 13 June 2011

World leaders gathered at the United Nations to mark the 30th anniversary of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and put out a 102-paragraph declaration. Adrienne Germain, the president of the International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC), has been working on women’s issues all her adult life and was active in the 1994 Cairo conference on women, also known as the CPD (International Conference on Population and Development). In an interview with the Huffington Post, Germain and Alexandra Garita, an international policy program officer at IWHC, discuss the declaration and the controversies that arise whenever sex is on the agenda. The declaration, produced every five years, gives U.N. agencies a mandate for their programs and advises governments where best to spend monies.

Q: What about access to family planning, to birth control?

AG: We lost reproductive rights and reproductive health language from the 1994 Cairo document and from early drafts here. Reproductive rights, for example, also includes the right to freely and responsibly decide on the number and spacing of one’s children. If you lose that and you have no reference to family planning services in the document, then you basically have no reference to contraception for women. You also don’t have protection for women living with HIV who are sterilized without their consent and who are forced to have abortion. It is not a rare occurrence in southern Africa (including South Africa).

Q: Who opposed rights for adolescents or women?

AG: Some people have referred to this as a perfect storm created by a combination of the Holy See and Egypt (less so Iran). Read more…

2011-06-13-adrienne.jpg
Adrienne Germain

Tags: , , ,

Participate

Join the discussion, submit your article here.

Join the alliance for a secular Europe here.

Events and activities / More events

Read Latest Blog of Mrs Joanna Senyszyn (MEP)