Good news for the women of Arizona; the fight to restore insurance coverage for safe abortion care; North Dakota court approves sex-ed program; and more.
More than 20 different methods of long-acting and short-acting hormonal and barrier contraception are now available, many of which are 99-percent-plus effective. But strange superstitions live on.
Yet international support for such programs has not kept pace with the need for family planning. As a result, many developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, continue to face rapid population growth and other impediments to social and economic development.
Mexico has thirty-two states if you include Mexico City’s federal district, and until the spring of 2007, when Mexico City legalized it during the first twelve weeks of gestation, abortion was illegal in all of them. It was rarely prosecuted, though, and there were also legal exemptions.
Use of erotic imagery to promote family planning (as opposed to HIV prevention) has been less the norm but this need not be the case.
![Juno meets her baby's to-be-adoptive parents. [img src]](http://rhrealitycheck.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/../../files/teaser-images/2011-11-30-sisson-187x125.jpg)
Many of the historical problems with adoption came from the desire to keep it secret, to allow adoptive families to “pass” as traditional, biologically related families. Fully embracing openness is key to our efforts to keep improving adoption and placing further distance between its dark and coercive past and its hopeful future.
For many committed to intercountry adoption, it is unfortunate that since the year 2004 the practice has declined more than 50%. An important question is: what is happening? The answer is complex. To begin with, the unfortunate reality is that intercountry adoption has a mixed history.
Abortion was a rite of passage for most of the girls I knew in the small Southern town where I spent my teenage years. As a contraceptive measure, teenagers did what teenagers have been doing forever — they pulled out. Any other birth control was a premeditated sin.
The most dangerous place for an African-American child is not in the womb, but in hands of lawmakers and anti-abortion groups that fail to realize the critical importance of funding family planning medical services.
