DEVELOPMENT: Every Minute, Dying for Having Sex

By Julio Godoy
BERLIN, Sep 3 (IPS) Fifteen years after 179 nations agreed to implement a
plan of action on sexual
health, a woman still dies every minute because of inadequate pregnancy
and
birth services, according to the World Health Organisation.

These alarming figures were under the spotlight at the opening of a forum
on
sexual and reproductive health and development in Berlin Sep. 2-4.

More than 400 representatives of non-governmental organisations from 131
countries are attending the forum, to mark the 15th anniversary of the
International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in
Cairo
September 1994.

"The conference of Cairo of 1994 was a groundbreaking moment in birth
and
sexual policy and family planning," Laura Villa Torres from the
Mexican Youth
Network for Sexual and Reproductive Rights told IPS.
"Until then, demographic policies both at the national and
international level
were characterised by undemocratic and sometimes even racist rules, such
as
forced sterilisations in determined ethnic groups."

In the new approach sexuality and family development was seen as a human
right, not a matter for authoritarian state-determined objectives.

The ICPD programme called for making family planning universally available
by 2015 as part of a broadened approach to sexual health and birth rights.
It
also provided estimates of national resources and international assistance
that will be required.

It underlined the importance of gender equality and of improving the
status
of women, not just as ends in themselves but as essential factors for
achieving sustainable development.

But as often with human development policy programmes, the goals are far
from being met.

"No doubt there has been progress, but it has been uneven and
selective," Gill
Greer of the London-based International Planned Parenthood Federation told
IPS. "The right to the highest attainable standard of health,
particularly sexual
and reproductive health, continues to elude millions of people, especially
the
poor and marginalised.

"Nobody should be dying for having sex. And yet, it happens every
day."

The HIV/Aids pandemic is taking hundreds of thousands of lives every year.
More than 200 million women, mostly in the less developed countries, lack
access to contraceptives. Every year, some 67,000 women die from unsafe
abortions; millions of others suffer injuries, illness, or disabilities.

A measure of governments' failure is the fall in funding for
sexual health.
"Between 1994 and 2008, funding for reproductive health as a
proportion of
health aid dropped from 30 to 12 percent," says Greer.

The government of former U.S. president George W. Bush, and religious
leaders especially in the Catholic Church bear prime responsibility for
this.
The Vatican's condemnation of sexual education, and
Bush's conservative
approach helped "political opposition to the ICPD programme to
resurface,
facilitating worldwide attacks against programmes for sexual and
reproductive health," says Greer.

And now the financial crisis is crowding out resources for human and
development programmes as money goes into rescue packages for banks and
industry.

The environmental degradation caused by climate change, the global food
scarcity, and consequent trends such as mass migration, are drowning calls
for new efforts on sexual health.

Such an approach is wrong, Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, executive director of the
United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) told media representatives.
"An
additional dollar invested in voluntary family planning comes back at
least
four times in saved expenses." The UNFPA is sponsoring the Berlin
forum
along with the German government.

"It would cost the world 23 billion dollars a year to stop women from
having
unintended pregnancies and dying in childbirth, and to save millions of
newborns," Obaid said. That, she said, is what governments spend in
10 days
on the military.

German minister for economic cooperation and development Heidemarie
Wieczorek-Zeul made a "Berlin clarion call" for governments of
industrialised
countries to earmark one percent of the economic emergency stimulus funds
to rescue banks and industry, for development needs.

Wieczorek-Zeul criticised the stubborn application of market economy
principles, when a major global crisis is questioning them. The theme for
global policies, she said, must be: "It is not the market, stupid, it
is the
people who matter".