Women’s rights on spotlight

BERLIN—Sex happens 125 million times a day, but the subject remains taboo and the issues associated with it—including abortion and contraception—remain a source of division among people with different persuasions, a conference was told here Monday.

Sex, abortion, women’s rights, religion and politics were the hot issues at the opening of the Global NGO Forum on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Population Development here.

The meeting is being hosted by the United Nations Population Fund and the German government at the Hotel Estrel-Berlin to evaluate 15 years of work since the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in September 1994.

“… sex happens 125 million times a day, [but] over 200 million women around the world have ‘unmet need’ or want but lack access to modern contraceptives,” said Gill Greer, director general of the UK-based International Planned Parenthood Federation.

“Demand for contraception is expected to increase by 40 percent by 2050,” she said, because there were more than 1.5 billion people aged between 10 and 25 years—the largest generation of young people in history—and they would need sexual and reproductive health services.

The world’s population now stood at 6.7 billion, of which 1.5 billion were just entering their prime reproductive years, Greer said.

The Berlin Conference is being attended by 400 delegates from 131 countries, and on Monday officials expressed concern that 15 years after the Cairo meeting pledged to attain the 2015 UN Millennium Development Goals, little progress had been achieved to reach them.

The Philippines’ Sylvia Estrada-Claudio said the Cairo meeting held governments accountable for population control policies affecting women and children, but non-government organizations must continue to make governments work, and they must work with governments to attain the UN goals.

Claudio, of the Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights, is one of four panelists tapped to assess the Cairo consensus. She and the other Philippine delegates told the Berlin meeting that while the “world is talking about reproductive health and population development… the Philippine Congress has become quiet” over a bill on reproductive health that the influential Catholic Church is fighting.

In a news conference later, Population Fund executive director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid said the fight to attain population goals was making progress with the German and US governments leading it.

The US under President George W. Bush stopped providing funds to the UN from 2002 to 2008, but President Barack Obama had resumed the $50-million annual appropriation for reproductive health and population development, she said.

Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, Germany’s Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, called on donor-countries to earmark 1 percent of their economic stimulus funds for development policy measures.

“We call for special protection for the poorest and weakest, particularly in these times of economic and financial crisis,” he said, adding women’s rights must be recognized and universal access to sexual and reproductive health services must be in place by 2015.

Obaid said an additional dollar invested in voluntary family planning came back at least four times in saved expenses.

“It would cost the world only $23 billion per year to stop women from having unintended pregnancies and dying in childbirth, and to save millions of newborns,” Obaid said.

“The amount is less than 10 days of the world’s military spending.” –Christine F. Herrera, Manila Standard Today