Women's Views on News |
- How to save thousands of women’s lives
- Fundraising: walk for Bosnian women
- School sport for all, not just an elite
| How to save thousands of women’s lives Posted: 20 Jun 2013 08:51 AM PDT
Women in all parts of the world have abortions. And they have them for similar reasons. Where it is illegal, many women still resort to abortion, even when that means breaking the law. In fact there is little relationship between the legal status of abortion and how often it occurs. Some of the highest abortion rates in the world are in Latin America and Africa, where abortion is highly restricted in almost every country—but where many women have unintended pregnancies. The world's lowest abortion rates are in Western Europe, where the procedure is legal and widely accessible—but where effective contraceptive use is high and unintended pregnancy rates are low. The way to reduce abortion is not to outlaw it, but to help women avoid unintended pregnancies in the first place. In the developing world, 222 million women want to avoid pregnancy but are not using a modern contraceptive method. For many, the limited contraceptive services and methods available to them do not meet their needs. Others lack access to family planning services altogether. And some women need better counselling and more power to make their own childbearing decisions. If these women's family planning needs were met, the results would be dramatic. Unintended pregnancies would decline from 80 million to 26 million annually and there would be 26 million fewer abortions each year. Most importantly, thousands of women's lives would be saved. Making abortion illegal does not stop it from occurring. It just drives it underground. Women are then forced to seek risky procedures, often performed by untrained providers or under unsanitary conditions; and many even try to perform abortions on themselves. The consequences can be horrific. Unsafe abortion is a leading cause of maternal death. Every year, 47,000 women die from complications of unsafe abortion. Virtually all of these deaths occur in countries with highly restrictive abortion laws. Millions more are injured, some seriously and permanently. This is a public health crisis that must be addressed. Ensuring that women have access to medical treatment after an unsafe abortion, if needed, is essential to reducing maternal deaths and injuries—but it is only one step. In every country, even those with the highest levels of contraceptive use, there will be a need for abortion. It's the basic right of every woman to make her own decision about whether and when to have a child—without having to put her health or her life at risk. It is time for all countries to make that right a reality. This is the text of a video from the Guttmacher Institute.  |
| Fundraising: walk for Bosnian women Posted: 20 Jun 2013 05:53 AM PDT
This year the March of Peace, a three-day, 120km walk from Nezuk near Tusla to Srebrenica commemorating the victims of the 1995 genocide, is from 5 – 12 July. The route is the exact route followed by the refugees of the war as they tried to escape the massacre, and over the last 8 years it has attracted thousands of participants from all over the world. In July 1995, more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in and around the town of Srebrenica were killed over a several day span – a genocide that was the largest mass murder committed in Europe since World War II. Women for Women International exists because of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1993, Women for Women International’s founder Zainab Salbi heard reports of wartime atrocities against women in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Compelled to act, she visited the country herself. She spoke with women who’d been imprisoned in rape camps, endured daily mass rapes by soldiers and had lost their entire families to ethnic cleansing. When she returned to the USA, she founded Women for Women International to help Bosnian women which now provides women survivors of war, civil strife and other conflicts with the tools and resources to move from crisis and poverty to stability and self-sufficiency, thereby promoting viable civil societies. And although the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina was more than 15 years ago, it toppled the economy and shattered lives, and women are still struggling today: to heal, to recover and to reunite. Women for Women International has operated in Bosnia and Herzegovina since 1994 with programmes that have helped more than 29,000 women in 60 communities. Seventy per cent of the Women for Women International-Bosnia and Herzegovina programme participants and graduates report improved emotional well-being; 96 per cent leave the program with knowledge of their legal rights; 95 per cent are actively participating in key household decisions and more than half of are currently saving income to invest in their future These kinds of projects are particularly important because, still, today, 32.9 per cent of women are unemployed, making them easy targets for getting caught up in prostitution or by traffickers. But it is not only the financial side of Women for Women International's programmes that helps women: Ibrima survived the massacre at Srebrenica, along with her five children—but her husband was among those killed. She escaped the horror of the rest of the war by fleeing Bosnia and Herzegovina with her children, including three-month old twins. When she returned to Srebrenica in 2001, she discovered that much of her family had died in the war, leaving her completely alone to care and provide for her children, with no job and no money. Women for Women International helped with financial assistance and she learned a trade, but she thinks the greatest benefit of enrolling has been healing from the devastation and loss she has experienced, and said that "…[T]hanks to Women for Women, we got help with counselling, one of our most pressing needs." Participants who go on the March for Peace to raise money for Women for Women International get the chance a visit the organisation's programmes in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the opportunity to meet participants and graduates of Women for Women International's training programmes and hear their stories first-hand. Women for Women International UK aims is to build communities of supporters and to change the world – one woman at time. Please join in. Or sponsor someone through one of the programmes.  |
| School sport for all, not just an elite Posted: 20 Jun 2013 01:09 AM PDT
But how should it do this? I was recently talking about PE lessons with a friend who teaches in a primary school. A Year Three lesson she told me about, involved standing in a circle, throwing and catching bean bags. I'm fairly competitive by nature, and I was just a little bit scathing about my friend's lesson. Learning to throw and catch is necessary, I agree, but surely by the age of eight children can manage something a bit more challenging. Add bouncing and running to the mix, for example, and you have a game of basketball. We're supposed to be building an Olympic legacy here, I argued, and if we are to develop world-class athletes, schools should be the front line in engaging children in real sports. But last week, when women's sports campaigners called on the government to make school sports less competitive as a way to involve more girls in physical activity, I was forced to rethink the issue. Sue Tibballs, chief executive of the Women's Sport and Fitness Foundation (WSFF), told an All Party Parliamentary Group that the government must clarify its policy on school sport. The priority, she said, should be promoting health and fitness for all, rather than focusing narrowly on encouraging elite success. "There needs to be more clarity about what school sport is for," she said. "There is still a clash between exercise for all and the old fashioned idea of competitive sport." "Within the main organisations working in school sport, there has been a real shift to thinking that getting kids active should be the priority. “Very high numbers of girls still say their experience of school sport is too geared towards the sporty, the talented and the able." Tibballs' argument stands on much stronger ground than my own. Research from the WSFF has found that 45 per cent of girls find school sport too competitive, and 51 per cent are put off by the experience. A WSFF report published last year showed that school sport is failing to get the majority of girls interested in exercise. We've reported on the findings before, but a quick summary makes the situation plain. At the age of 14, girls were half as likely as boys to reach the recommended level of physical activity, and more girls than boys drop out of sport as they get older. During the first three years of secondary school, boys' activity levels dropped only slightly; over the same period, the proportion of girls regularly taking an hour's exercise plunged from 49 per cent to 31 per cent. This was the result of social attitudes about girls and their bodies. Being thin is more important for girls than for boys; getting sweaty is not feminine; girls who play sports are less feminine. As adults, we're familiar with these ideas, but it's disturbing to remember just how early they begin to take root. This is an issue that can't be fixed simply by teaching more, and more challenging, sport in schools. There is little point in teaching young children to play basketball if most of them will feel pressure to drop out by the age of 14. Yet I stand by my argument that school sport should be more challenging. Bean bag throw and catch isn't enough develop children's skills, or to identify those who have the ability to go on to a higher level of competition. But it is also unlikely to engage children enough that they will want to carry on with sport and exercise in secondary school, or later in life. Non-competitive PE lessons need not be less engaging or exciting. How about dance lessons taught by qualified dance teachers, instead of PE teachers whose specialty lies elsewhere? Or aerobics, circuit training, spinning or yoga? Many adults find these fun and non-competitive ways to stay fit, yet they are neglected by the school curriculum because they are perceived as less important than "real" sports. The government must indeed clarify it policy in this area, and it should create a double strategy. On the one hand, this strategy should give financial support to funding bodies and youth sport programmes, in order to identify talent and encourage elite achievement. But this should no longer be at the expense of those who do not represent their school, county or country. The government's strategy must also aim at increasing participation among this vast majority. To do this, it must accept that competitive sport is not the only "real" form of exercise. The aim of school sport should be to help each child find an activity they enjoy enough to continue into adulthood. The benefits of such a policy could be huge and long-lasting: less childhood obesity, lower levels of heart disease and diabetes, and the encouragement of healthier body image are a few that come to mind. Even if Great Britain never wins another Olympic medal, a more active population would be a fitting legacy.  |
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