Celebration

and

Agitation

on International Women's Day

Just before a NASA space shuttle took off for the international space station on March 8, the ship's commander held up a sign that said "Happy Women's Day" in English and Russian.

A few hours later, a popular American morning show called "The Today Show" commemorated IWD by airing an interview with feminist Susan Jane Gilman, author of "Kiss My Tiara." They called the tome "a woman's guide to power."

In Canada, women gathered at the United Nations Association in Toronto to speak out about the abuses against Afghan women under the Taliban's misogynist rule.

Women in Europe and the Americas joined in a Global Strike to protest wage inequality based on gender.

Throughout all corners of Asia and Africa, women staged plays, held demonstrations and marches to protest violence against women and gender injustice.

Online, millions of men and women continued to sign on to a postcard campaign to the United Nations to protest the poverty and suffering of millions of women around the globe. The campaign was launched by the Federation des Femmes de Quebec (FFQ) and built upon the momentum of their anti-poverty march to the U.N. in October.

In hundreds of cities and villages around the world, International Women's Day--March 8--has entered the consciousness of women and men, policymakers and housewives, from Manila to Miami. But the everyday reality of women around the world has yet to significantly change.

Women still do only two-thirds of the world's work for only five percent of the income. According to a report from Amnesty International, 20 percent of women in the United States have been physically or sexually assaulted. Violence against women is also prevalent in Britain and other Western European countries. In Egypt, 35 percent of married women report that their husbands have beaten them. In India, that number jumps to 40 percent. "Torture is fed by a global culture which denies women equal rights with men, and which legitimizes violence against women," Amnesty reports.

Worldwide, more than 75 percent of people displaced by war and conflict are women and children, according to the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees. In six out of twelve country studies prepared for former Mozambique Education Minister Graca Machel, the arrival of peacekeeping troops was found to be associated with a rapid rise in child prostitution. And women are regularly excluded from peace negotiations in conflict zones from Tajikistan to Rwanda. "Why is it we bring war lords to the negotiating table and not women?" asks Noeleen Heyzer, Executive Director of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). "The systematic exclusion of more than 50 percent of the population on the basis of gender is rarely challenged."

More specifically, International Women's Day this year is marred by the recent actions of U.S. president George Bush whose first act in office was to deny women the right to an abortion even in countries where that right is protected by national law. When Bush took office on January 20, he re-instated the "Global Gag Rule" which forbids foreign organizations that receive funds from the United States government, to use non-U.S. funds to provide legal abortion services to women, lobby for abortion law reform in their respective countries or provide counseling or referrals on abortion. The rule turns back the clock on the global trend to liberalize abortion laws, says a report from the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Reproductive Law and Policy (CRLP).

"To say that Bush is simply returning to a past conservative policy is to ignore the enormous gains women in many countries have made since that era," says Anika Rahman, CRLP's International Program Director. "The impact of the Global Gag Rule will be even more severe since this is a time when the majority of the world's women have access to abortion--which many of them fought long and hard to achieve."

U.S. President Ronald Reagan first instituted the gag rule in 1984. Since then, at least 19 countries have liberalized their abortion laws. Of these countries, Albania, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Ghana, Romania and South Africa all receive U.S. funding for international family planning. The U.S. government also has new programs in East Central Europe in which abortion has been legal for many years.

In Kenya, Nepal and Nicaragua, women's groups have successfully pressured national governments to relax anti-abortion policy. Their efforts will be completely obliterated by Bush's re-instatement of the global gag rule.

In September 1999, the Kenyan Minister of Health endorsed a liberalization of the country's abortion law. His comments were quickly supported by women's groups and members of the medical community who cite high rates of maternal mortality.

In Nepal, which has one of the world's most restrictive laws on abortion (the procedure is not even allowed in the case of rape or incest), activists recently garnered the support of the Ministry of Health, the Family Planning Association and a number of local women's groups for a number of proposals seeking to liberalize the law. These proposals have been before the Nepalese government for more than four years. The global gag rule prevents women's groups from pursuing their fight to protect women's abortion rights.

In Nicaragua, women's groups, in conjunction with non-governmental associations, lobbied to halt a summertime proposal by the parliament to eliminate all therapeutic exceptions to the law on abortion, excluding the exception to save a woman's life, which was also adopted in El Salvador in 1997.

The re-institution of the global gag rule "directly counters these steps taken by the international community to address the tragic consequences of unsafe abortion that threaten the health and safety of women around the world," says the CRLP report. For more information on the gag rule, visit www.crlp.org/special.html