New York Newsday, December 1, 2002

By Mabel Bianco

A United Nations report released last week announced that women have caught up with men as far as AIDS is concerned. Half the adults affected with HIV worldwide are now women. This shouldn't come as much of a surprise. It was just a matter of time before the disease shifted from one originally affecting gay white men to one transmitted heterosexually all over the world.

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Summary: By Françoise Girard and Wanda Nowicka (Reproductive Health Matters, Vol. 10, No. 19, May 2002). Describes the findings of the July 2001 Tribunal on Abortion Rights in Warsaw, which was organized by the Polish Federation for Women and Family Planning in response to the Polish Anti-Abortion Act of 1993. A panel of Polish and foreign experts heard testimonies from seven women and, based on their stories, concluded that restrictive abortion laws do not decrease the incidence of abortion but rather push it underground, endanger women's health, create a climate where even those services that are allowed by law become unavailable, and contravene standards set by international human rights law. The Tribunal brought the issue of abortion into the media and galvanized Polish and other Eastern European women's groups to become more active in defense of abortion rights (9 pages). 

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Summary: By Françoise Girard andWilhelmina Waldman (International Family Planning Perspectives, Vol.26, No. 4, December, 2000, New York: Alan Guttmacher Institute).Examines the international legal framework for the reproductive rightsof refugees and internationally displaced persons, as well as someaspects of UN and NGO policies relevant to refugee reproductive health(7 pages).

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Population and Reproductive Health: Where Do We Go Next?

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Summary: By Adrienne Germain (American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 90, No. 12, December, 2000, Washington: American Public Health Association). Describes the areas of critical concern addressed in the ICPD Programme of Action and offers recommendations for moving forward (3 pages).

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Summary: By Françoise Girard (EarthTimes, 2000). Summarizes the challenges and achievements of thefive-year review of the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing PlusFive, New York, 2000) (3 pages).

 

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Summary: By Françoise Girard (Journal of Women's Health and Law, Vol. I, No. 1, November, 1999, Toronto and Vancouver: Butterworths). Analyzes the significance for women's health of the UN's five-year review of implementation of the Programme of Action agreed in the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD). The author outlines and discusses the significance and impact of the original ICPD agreements and of the new commitments made by governments in 1999 to hasten implementation of the Programme of Action (14 pages).

  

Summary: By Corinne Whitaker and Adrienne Germain (African Journal of Reproductive Health, Vol. 3, No. 2, October, 1999, Benin City, Nigeria: Women's Health and Action Research Centre). Invited editorial co-authored by IWHC Senior Program Officer for Africa and IWHC President that describes the scope of the problem of unsafe abortion in Africa and outlines several possible approaches to solving it (4 pages).