WHAT DO LIBYAN WOMEN NEED NOW?
Reported, December 07, 2011
According to UNFPA: what the hundred thousand refugee women fleeing Libya need right now is reproductive health kits. As my colleague Lauren Funk said in this blog yesterday, UNFPA has stated for the record that most of these kits are abortion and contraception supplies.
For the last week, Libyan president Qaddafi has engaged in a brutal crackdown on his own people. Reports say he has mowed them down while they peacefully protested for political reform.
At the White House yesterday, President Obama threw in his lot with the rebels and told Qaddafi he had to go. Meanwhile, policy makers and legal experts are debating humanitarian military intervention.
What the people of the oil-rich north African country need now is protection, and ultimately their freedom from oppressive regimes.
As I noted in my blog at the time, UNFPA made the same response to the tragedy in Haiti last year and donors paid them handsomely.
So the question is: is the leadership of UNFPA tone deaf or are they exploiting the agony of the Libyan people to promote their myopic agenda?
That the only response UNFPA can muster at such a time is these kits stuffed with contraceptives tells us how irrelevant that agency is to the real needs of women in crisis.
Worse is that at the UN this week, UNICEF said it was garnering closer ties with UNFPA on the reproductive health issue. In so doing, the childrens agency is endangering whatever relevance it retains for fulfililng its original mandate for child survival.
Credits: Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D. and more information at : http://www.turtlebayandbeyond.org/2011/abortion/what-do-libyan-women-need-now/
Suggested readings at :
http://www.prb.org/pdf/WomensReproHealth_Eng.pdf