Women's Rights in Iraq, Morning-After Pill Discussions Continue

Iraq

In Iraq, security trumps women's rights - Christian Science Monitor
On the second floor of Love Hall, a building here used for wedding receptions, women from Iraq's northern Nineveh province gather for a conference on women's role in the nationwide election this Thursday. But the event quickly veers away from its stated agenda and becomes a gripe session about life in Iraq today. There are few jobs, poor services, no safety net for the least fortunate, and above all, no security, say the women in this majority Christian town. The assembly of about 80 women - many in traditional black abayas and a few sporting Western dress - reflects how basic needs are dominating the average Iraqi's political outlook and placing goals like women's rights and interests on a secondary level.

Reproductive Rights

200 pharmacists attend training for morning-after pill - AP
Six months after [New Hampshire] Governor John Lynch signed a bill to make "morning-after" pills available to women hoping to prevent pregnancies, about 200 pharmacists have received training in dispensing the drug. The law allows pharmacists who have volunteered for the training to provide women with an elevated dose of birth-control hormones without a doctor's prescription. The drug, if taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex, can cut a woman's chance of pregnancy by up to 89 percent. Two training sessions for pharmacists were held during the weekend. Once trained, pharmacists need to partner with a doctor or nurse practitioner to be able to prescribe the pill. The training sessions address such issues as a pharmacist's personal views on emergency contraception and the medical side effects or liability that come with dispensing the drugs.

Middle ground sought on morning-after pill - Post-Gazette
Patient care and pharmacists' rights are converging in the debate over the morning-after pill. [Pennsylvania] State Rep. Dan Frankel believes he's found middle ground in legislation that would ensure patients' access to emergency contraceptives while allowing pharmacists to refuse to dispense them based on their personal views against abortion. According to the legislation, if a pharmacist refuses to fill the prescription, another pharmacist at the store must fill it or transfer it to another nearby pharmacy. The legislation also would ban pharmacists from humiliating or intentionally violating the privacy of customers seeking the prescription.

International

Honour killing dad jailed - The Courier-Mail
A father who ordered his two teenage sons to murder a British university student in an "honour killing" because the victim had made the man's daughter pregnant was jailed yesterday for 20 years. The sons of Chomir Ali, aged 15 and 19 at the time of the murder, were sentenced to minimum terms of 14 and 16 years respectively for killing Oxford Brookes University student Arash Ghorbani-Zarin. Ghorbani-Zarin, 19, was found dead with 46 stab wounds in the front seat of a car in Rosehill, Oxford, on November 20, 2004.

Indian Muslims say no to condom machines - Reuters
Plans to install 500 condom vending machines in the capital of one of India's worst HIV/AIDS-affected states have angered Muslim groups so much they have taken to the streets to protest a "condom culture." Critics of the plan by the Tamil Nadu government and India's National Aids Control Organization to put 500 machines in the capital of Chennai and 1,000 more across the state later say it would degrade women and corrupt the young. India has more than 5 million HIV/AIDS sufferers, second only to South Africa. But efforts to combat the spread of the disease have come up against deeply conservative traditions.

Bosnia's rape babies: abandoned by their families, forgotten by the state - The Independent
Suzanna is 12 years old. In the eyes of the law she does not exist. She has no family, no birth certificate. The place that she calls home is the state-run orphanage in Zenica in Bosnia, a run-down building with broken windows. The orphanage is home to just over 150 children. Some of them have lost their families to war and sickness, others, like Suzanna, were abandoned as "rape babies" - children born during the war to women who had been raped - and left unacknowledged by families and state alike.