Justin Timberlake and Rose McGowan among those calling for end to singer’s conservatorship
There was tentative anticipation surrounding Britney Spears’ address to an LA court during a hearing on Wednesday on the future of the conservatorship that has governed her life for 13 years.
Would she affirm the theories of the #FreeBritney movement, which alleges she is being held against her will? Or would it be a disappointing procedural affair of little substance?
Continue reading...National Trust for Scotland presents exploration of intimacy from 17th to 20th century
The chafing doesn’t bear thinking about. A replica linen condom secured with a dainty blue ribbon is one of the more wince-inducing props for a new exploration of the history of sex and intimate lives in Scotland.
The other material used to fashion prophylactics in the 17th century was animal gut, which was dried then rehydrated at the crucial moment. The Edinburgh-born diarist James Boswell writes about dipping one in a river before intercourse. He was adamant about their use to ward off venereal disease, but still recorded numerous painful bouts of infection in his journals.
Continue reading...Figures from the US and Japan reveal sharp declines in birthrates, and even China may have peaked, but there are upsides
Read more: Italy’s birthrate is falling. Can the storks help?
Census data from the US released last week showed the number of babies born in the country in 2020 dropped to the lowest level in more than four decades. The same day, Japan marked Children’s Day by announcing that the number of under-14s in the country had fallen for the 40th consecutive year to a record low.
It is not just in the rich world that the appetite for having children is falling. Also in 2020, China may have recorded its first overall population decline since a catastrophic famine in the late 1950s, the Financial Times has reported, citing unpublished census data.
Continue reading...Public consultation led by the MHRA is looking for views on the potential reclassification of two pill types
Two types of the contraceptive pill could be sold over the counter for the first time, the government has announced.
As part of a public consultation, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is looking for opinions on the reclassification of two progestogen-only pills.
Continue reading...‘Women’s bodies are not political bargaining chips’ says UNFPA director, as US funding restored after Trump era
The decision by US president Joe Biden to refund the UN population fund, UNFPA, offers “a ray of hope for millions of people around the world”, said the agency’s executive director.
Dr Natalia Kanem said the announcement on Thursday would have an “enormous” impact on the agency’s work, particularly as the world continues to grapple with the coronavirus pandemic.
Continue reading...President’s move to end ‘abortion ban’ on overseas funding hailed – now aid groups want apology for harmful Trump policies
Health groups around the world are celebrating the end of a harmful policy banning US funding for overseas aid organisations that facilitate or promote abortion, which was scrapped by the US president, Joe Biden, in a presidential memorandum on Thursday.
Reproductive rights advocates are urging the new administration to now go further and permanently repeal the Mexico City policy – known as the “global gag rule” – to prevent it being reinstated by a future Republican president. The policy has been blamed for contributing to thousands of maternal deaths in the developing world over the past four years.
Continue reading...Sixty million more girls and women using modern contraceptives due to global campaign, but pandemic recession threatens services
Sixty million more women and girls in the world’s poorest countries are now using modern contraceptives, after an eight-year global effort to expand family planning services.
But the FP2020 global partnership, launched in London in 2012, warned that the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting financial crisis imperils further progress.
Continue reading...Girls who got free sanitary products at school were pushed to desperate measures in what is being called a shadow pandemic
Thousands of girls in Kenya will not be going back to school when classes start again in January, because they became pregnant during the Covid 19-lockdown.
The African Institute for Development Policy puts the number of teenage girls who became pregnant in the country between January and May at more than 150,000, with Nairobi recording nearly 12,000 pregnancies. Anecdotal evidence from healthcare workers across the Kenyan capital suggest the true figures could be higher, as many pregnant teenagers are not coming to clinics.
Continue reading...Organisation says Black Lives Matter movement reaffirmed commitment to changing name to MSI Reproductive Choices
Marie Stopes International (MSI) is to change its name in an attempt to break its association with the family planning pioneer.
From Tuesday, the abortion and contraception provider, which operates in 37 countries, will abbreviate the initials and go by the name MSI Reproductive Choices.
Continue reading...Unplanned pregnancy rates have fallen globally, report finds, but coronavirus could endanger access to services
Rates of unplanned pregnancies have fallen around the world, according to new data published by health research organisation the Guttmacher Institute and the UN Human Reproduction Programme (HRP) on Wednesday.
Global rates of unintended pregnancies have fallen from 79 per 1,000 women aged 15 to 49 in 1990 to 64 in 2019, thanks in part to a concerted effort to increase access to contraceptives, but there are concerns that decades of progress in reducing the numbers risk being undone by Covid-19, as lockdown restrictions hamper health services.
Continue reading...Data from the UN population fund, outlining increases in abuse, FGM and child marriage, predicts a grim decade for many women
At least 15m more cases of domestic violence are predicted around the world this year as a result of pandemic restrictions, according to new data that paints a bleak picture of life for women over the next decade.
The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) has also calculated that tens of millions of women will not be able to access modern contraceptives this year, and millions more girls will undergo female genital mutilation or be married off by 2030.
Continue reading...Two men sue over alleged HIV and gonorrhoea infections that they claim were caused by defective contraceptives
Two Ugandan men have taken court action against an international charity for distributing faulty condoms which, they claim, led to one of them contracting HIV and the other gonorrhoea.
In a lawsuit, Joseph Kintu and Sulaiman Balinya say they bought Life Guard condoms from stores supplied by the Marie Stopes organisation in Uganda in October last year.
Continue reading...Instead of becoming ‘factories for babies’, women who’ve fled South Sudan to Uganda are trying new options for managing their reproductive health
Christine Lamwaka and her husband gathered their six children and fled. It was April 2017 and their town in South Sudan had just been attacked. They walked for two days from Eastern Equatoria before crossing the border into Uganda.
“It was hard to flee with the young children. We struggled to run. I thought we couldn’t make it alive,” says Lamwaka, who was 22 at the time of the attack.
Continue reading...Charity takes action after holes are discovered in two batches of Life Guard condoms
The charity Marie Stopes International is recalling more than a million condoms in Uganda, after officials raised concerns that they were prone to breaking.
The charity began the recall of packets of Life Guard condoms after the National Drug Authority found they contained holes and did not meet quality standards. More than half of the affected products have since been recovered.
Continue reading...UN urges major push to meet targets as researchers at Nairobi summit also sound alarm over family planning and violence
The global push to stop mothers dying unnecessarily in childbirth, meet family planning needs and end violence against women could be undermined by a massive funding shortfall, researchers have found.
World leaders have pledged to redouble efforts to end preventable maternal death, satisfy family planning demand and stop violence and harmful practices against women and girls by 2030.
Continue reading...Family planning services are reaching more women, but population growth is hampering efforts to reach 2020 goal
More women and girls in low income countries are using family planning than ever before, but global efforts to widen access to contraception are still falling well behind targets, according to a report.
One year away from a global deadline to widen access to modern forms of family planning, such services are accessible to less than half of the women that policy makers hoped to reach.
Continue reading...An NGO has recut and overdubbed a Venezuelan telenovela to raise awareness of sexual health
Uganda has one of the highest birth rates in the world. It also has some of the most dedicated soap opera watchers anywhere in Africa.
Now a group of enterprising Ugandans is aiming to tackle the former through the medium of the latter. Soap operas are expensive to make, however, so they plan instead to “hack” a Venezuelan import, recutting the existing series and overdubbing it with Ugandan actors.
Continue reading...The harrowing experiences that Fred Sai faced as a young medical officer in Ghana in the 1960s fuelled his concern about the link between frequent childbearing and preventable death and sickness in mothers and children, and turned him into a passionate campaigner for reproductive rights and health in the developing world.
In his early clinical work, Sai, who has died aged 95, came across many children with protein-energy malnutrition, or kwashiorkor, which in the language of the Ga ethnic group to which he belonged means “the disease of the displaced child”. “I realised that fully a third of my child patients had mothers who were pregnant or had a young sibling born very soon after them,” he told the Lancet in 2012. “The abrupt stopping of breastfeeding was making them sick. I thought that one way to help these women was to teach them family planning and the importance of spacing children properly.”
Continue reading...Majority of funding will go to UN population fund, which works across countries with highest maternal death rates
The UK government has pledged to spend an extra £600m to support family planning programmes in some of the world’s poorest countries.
Most of the money, which will be rolled out between 2020 and 2025, will be given to the UN population fund (UNFPA), which works in 150 countries, including the 46 with the highest rates of maternal deaths and lowest rates of modern contraceptive use.
Continue reading...World Population Day will mark a global crisis – one that is best tackled by more access to birth control, particularly in Africa
President Magufuli pulled off an intriguing feat last year when, in a single speech, he managed to affront just about every liberal cause on the planet. The Tanzanian leader told a public rally not to listen to advice from foreigners on contraception because it had “sinister motives”. For good measure, he accused women who use birth control of being “lazy” – it was their duty to have large numbers of children.
By any standards, these were outrageous remarks – and worrying ones, for they indicate there has been a deep and potentially catastrophic failure by the west in promoting a measure on which the future health of our planet depends: limiting numbers of our species. Until this basic task is achieved, virtually every measure we take to tackle global heating will be negated by the energy demands of the extra billions we have added to global populations, say campaigners.
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