As far as global reproductive health, the foreign policies of John McCain and Barack Obama are as different as night and day. More particularly, the candidates have opposite positions on the Mexico City Policy, also known as the Global Gag Rule (the “Rule”), which prohibits U.S. foreign aid for family planning programs going to any U.S. non-governmental organization that either performs abortions, counsels on abortions or advocates for legal abortion. Senator McCain supports the Rule and Senator Obama opposes it. The difference is that clear. Senator McCain has voted consistently to support the Global Gag Rule in votes in the Senate to overturn the Rule, while Senator Obama has consistently voted to overturn it. In the September and December 2007 votes to overturn the Rule, neither Senator was present to vote. However, in a prior vote in April 2006 to overturn the Rule, Obama voted in favor of overturn and McCain voted against. In five previous votes since 1991, McCain voted to uphold the Global Gag Rule. Senator Obama was not a member of the U.S. Senate for those votes. Senator Obama told me personally in January 2008 that he would sign an executive order overturning the Global Gag Rule.
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The attached letter appeared in the Concord Monitor. I don’t think my grandmother was being arrested at that point in her long career of lawbreaking, but who knows.

http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008809080365

In June 2007 the Ministers of Health of all Latin American nations issued a Health Agenda for the Americas: 2008-2015, (the “Agenda”) a supposedly comprehensive plan for improving the health of the people of the Americas that was anything but comprehensive. It managed to leave out many proven recommendations for improving the sexual and reproductive health of the citizens of Latin America.[1] Continue reading →

Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, called the new HPV vaccine, Gardasil, approved last year by the Center for Disease Control (CDC), ”a no-brainer.” Many advocates in the blogosphere use the same phrase, “no-brainer”, to describe the World Health Organization (WHO) 2006 recommendation for male circumcision as an HIV/AIDS prevention strategy, at least in sub-Saharan Africa. Most health professionals agreed, even if they didn’t use the exact phrase.
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The No-Brainer Syndrome : the HPV Vaccine and Male Circumcision Recommendations as the Latest Weapons in the Fight Against HPV, HIV and AIDS

Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, called the new HPV vaccine, Gardasil, approved last year by the Center for Disease Control (CDC), “a no-brainer.”  Many advocates in the blogosphere use the same phrase, “no-brainer”, to describe the World Health Organization (WHO) 2006 recommendation for male circumcision as an HIV/AIDS prevention strategy, at least in sub-Saharan Africa. Most health professionals agreed, even if they didn’t use the exact phrase.
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Two recent articles, one pro and one con, examine the alleged relationship between legalized abortion and crime. See my post of Nov. 18, 2007.
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The headlines screamed: “Teen Birth Rate Rises for First Time in 14 Years!” And that was from the CDC. The newspapers were even more dramatic: “Teen Pregnancy: It’s Baaaack!” read one headline.
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In Chapter Two of Beyond Choice, on pages 66-67 in the hardback, I discussed, in the section on eugenics, the abortion/crime controversy, citing the 2001 study by Donohue and Levitt, which found that the legalization of abortion resulted, twenty or so years later, in a reduction in the crime rate because potential criminals were being aborted rather than born. I also cited contradictory studies that found no effect, or the opposite effect, of abortion on crime. I concluded saying that “The best that can be said is that the case for the alleged causal connection between the legalization of abortion and a decrease in crime rates is unproven.”
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Last week the New Jersey Supreme Court, in an unanimous decision, ruled that a doctor, prior to performing an abortion, was not required to tell his patient that the embryo inside her was “a complete, separate, unique, irreplaceable human being,” with the implication that abortion he was about to perform was the same as murder. The patient, Rosa Acuna, had filed a malpractice action against her doctor, Sheldon Turkish, after her abortion, claiming emotional distress, and asserted that he should have told her, as part of the informed consent process, that it was a “scientific and medical fact” that the abortion would result in the “killing of an existing human being.” The plaintiff claimed further that her doctor had a duty “to explain that the procedure (would) terminate the life of a living member of the species Homo sapiens, that is a human being.”
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