Hasta La Gadget!

More than a dozen women died earlier this month in Chhattisgarh state in India after receiving tubal ligations in a government-run “camp.” After being promised financial compensation, 83 women received sterilization procedures conducted by one surgeon in six hours. Village “motivators” were paid to persuade the women to go, and midwives were told that their pay would be docked if they did not meet certain quotas. Regulations stating that only 30 such operations can be performed in one day were ignored. Proper measures for the use of hygienic tools were disregarded. Some of the medications prescribed to the women may have included ingredients commonly used in rat poison. The government is taking action, including prosecuting a surgeon, with an official referring to the catastrophe as “a serious matter of negligence.”

This news in India raises issues far more profound than either sloppy medicine or negligence.

Incidents like this are a stark reminder of how reproduction remains one of the most highly charged political and social issues in the world. For centuries, societies and governments have attempted to control reproduction, especially of women, for a whole host of reasons focused on their overall goals for their communities. For example, in the 1960s, Romania’s Ceausescu severely restricted contraception and abortion and mandated gynecological examinations of childless couples and unmarried people in a blatant attempt to raise the country’s birthrate. Governments have also limited reproduction. Nazi Germany forced sterilization. In the U.S., in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many states had eugenic laws mandating sterilization of people with “mental handicaps.” With the rising awareness of individual rights and the power of the women’s movement, we have witnessed women and men demand their human right to determine if and how they will have children and to have access to the services to realize these rights.

The human right to reproductive self determination includes not only the right to bodily integrity, but also the right of “couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children and to have access to the information, education and means to enable them to exercise this right.” The means by which to realize such rights includes the right to reproductive health services.

Reproductive rights relating to services, especially family planning, are being violated daily. 222 million women around the world have an unmet need for family planning, meaning that they want to delay or avoid their next pregnancy but are not using contraception. 162 million of these women live in the world’s poorest countries. This includes 24 percent of married women in Africa, 15 percent of married women in Asia, and 13 percent of married women in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Like every other human right, the right to family planning needs to be respected. Period. In addition, the promotion of this right will result in enormous benefits. If the worldwide unmet need for contraception were filled, roughly 79,000 maternal deaths and 1.1 million infant deaths could be prevented. Also, 54 million unintended pregnancies – including 7.4 million adolescent pregnancies – and 16 million unsafe abortions would be averted. If men and women could enjoy their right to reproductive health services, their ability to gain education and employment would be enhanced and they would be better able to protect themselves against sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), including HIV/AIDS.

Despite the importance of the human right to reproductive health care, this right continues to be infringed on in numerous ways.

The most notorious examples of such human rights abuses occur when individuals are pressured into using contraception. Zealous attempt to control reproduction, particularly by enacting policies that combine numeric “targets” with monetary incentives that push clients into using specific family planning methods, have often resulted in highly publicized human rights problems. One of the most infamous instances of such governmental policy occurred in China, where, in 1979, authorities instituted the notorious “One Child Policy.” Although this policy has been liberalized recently, the original policy permitted only one child per couple and provided monetary bonuses and other benefits as incentives. Those that disobeyed the original law were subjected to fines, and officials admitted that forced abortions and involuntary sterilizations occurred.

But human rights are also breached when people cannot access the services necessary to exercise their right to decide freely and responsibly about the birth spacing of their children.

Creating barriers to prevent individuals from accessing the reproductive health care they desire results in rights violations. More recent examples of this include attempts to restrict abortion as well as access to emergency contraception. Some countries have far stricter policies. For example, in Myanmar, Spain and Iceland, intrauterine devices are illegal.

Moreover, rights are violated when clients receive poor quality reproductive health care, including family planning, or when there are inadequate supplies of safe and effective contraception. Sometimes patients are not provided adequate and accurate information or allowed sufficient privacy. Increased use of family planning in countries such as Ethiopia, Tanzania, Mexico, and Thailand has led to stock outs of contraceptive supplies.

Current instances of coercive contraceptive practices cast a dark shadow over the equally important reality of the pervasive and daily violations of human rights that occur by depriving millions of people of their right to reproductive health care, including family planning. While quality reproductive health care services are important to ensure that women and men exercise their rights, they are insufficient. We need laws, policies and health systems that promote and protect the rights of individuals to make choices.

Most importantly, we need to live fully into the reality of the human rights associated with reproduction. We need to affirm that our common humanity demands that we recognize how issues of reproduction lie at the core of being human.

University of Virginia Dean of Students Allen Groves explained during a TEDx talk in 2013 why his school has avoided suspending or expelling students, even when they commit serious infractions.

“The university’s role, in my opinion, shouldn’t be punitive,” Groves said. “It ought to be risk reduction and rehabilitation and education.”

The talk took place on April 20, 2013, but was not uploaded until October of that year. The 10-minute address provides a more in-depth look at how a University of Virginia administrator approaches student misconduct.

UVA has come under intense scrutiny in the last week after a Rolling Stone article about the school’s handling of reports of sexual violence on campus. Over the weekend, video surfaced online in which Associate Dean of Students Nicole Eramo, head of the university’s Sexual Misconduct Board, admits a student can confess to rape and face a lesser punishment. Responding to criticisms of her comments, Eramo explained that confessions in an informal resolution would incline the university to be lenient.

But Groves has a different role.

Groves told The Huffington Post on Tuesday that his prior remarks did not necessarily reflect how he would respond in an official capacity to an act of rape, and clarified that he only has the power to impose interim suspensions.

Groves noted during his TEDx talk that he has “the authority to basically suspend — it’s called interim suspension — suspend students from the university,” though he said he exercises that authority “probably less than four times a year. And the reason is I will only exercise that authority if someone presents a present threat to health and safety.”

Groves told HuffPost that he lacks the authority to impose severe sanctions such as suspension for a semester or longer, or expulsion. He clarified that such penalties can only be imposed by the student-run University Judiciary Committee, by the student-run Honor Committee or by the Sexual Misconduct Board, which is constituted of students, faculty and staff.

During his TEDx talk, Groves used the example of someone who gets severely intoxicated and physically assaults another student. He would not want to expel that person, Groves said, because if he did, the person could continue to drink heavily, could still have anger issues or could still harbor violent tendencies.

“They’re angrier and we have taken away the one thing that was the only leverage we had on them,” Groves said during the talk, adding that, “A calculated risk, based on the factors that I’ve given you, I think is wiser than just expelling someone from the university. I just don’t see how that, at the end of the day, works for us.” He concluded, “That is the way we try to pursue matters at the University of Virginia, and I think it’s the right approach.”

Groves told HuffPost he was discussing a philosophical rebuttal to zero-tolerance policies, and why he does not advocate for them.

“I was trying to make two points,” Groves said via email. “First, what can we really do to make the community truly safer in a case like the one I was discussing (alcohol dependency/anger), rather than just move the problem on to somewhere else? Second, the criminal justice system can do things we as a university cannot, and a distinction between the two is critical.”

Part of the scrutiny UVA has faced this month hinges on whether or not the prestigious university should expel students for sexual assault.

UVA has repeatedly denied media requests for information about punishments imposed on students found responsible for sexual misconduct. However, the university has confirmed that 13 students were found responsible for sexual assault between 1998 and 2014. A 2004 article from The Hook indicated that no one had been expelled for sexual assault in the five previous years. A Freedom of Information Act Request from Susan Russell, the parent of a former UVA student, showed that no one had been expelled for sexual assault through 2011.

One recent graduate, a sexual assault survivor who requested anonymity, said that federal investigators had met with groups of students on campus, who were asked if they were aware of anyone who had been expelled after being found guilty of sexual assault.

A Huffington Post analysis earlier this year showed that most students found responsible by their college for sexual assault nationwide are not expelled.

A separate analysis of 25 colleges by the Columbus Dispatch and the Student Press Law Center this week showed that of students responsible in 1,970 cases since 2010 for a violent offense — sexual assaults, physical assaults resulting in serious injuries, robberies and other violent crimes — a total of 152 students were expelled.

Two very different studies crossed my desk this week and, when read together, they point to a disturbing problem.

Earlier in the week, many media outlets reported on a new study in Pediatrics which adds to the growing evidence that energy drinks pose a serious danger to young children.  Looking at data from a three-year period, researchers found that of over 5,000 calls to poison control centers around the country for energy drink caffeine overdose, over 40 percent of such calls involved children under the age of six. And the study’s lead researcher, Dr. Steven Lipshultz, told CNN this finding is likely just the tip of the iceberg because many parents are likely to take a caffeine-sickened child directly to the emergency room without first calling poison control.

Lipshultz also told CNN that even teenagers can experience adverse effects from drinking 100 mg of caffeine, yet some energy drinks have as much as three times that amount. Consumption of energy drinks by preadolescents, and especially very young children, poses even greater risks. For this reason, the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended since 2011 that children and teens avoid energy drinks, and it has also testified before Congress regarding concerns over the various herbal stimulants also often included in such products.

To defend itself against the poison control center study, the American Beverage Assocation (ABA) issued a statement which reads in part:

… leading energy drink makers voluntarily place advisory statements on energy drink packaging stating that energy drinks are not intended for children. They also have voluntarily pledged not to market these products to children or sell them in K-12 schools.

That statement might have been reassuring if I hadn’t also received this week a copy of a new report from the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity regarding current trends in the advertising of sugary drinks to kids. I encourage you to take a look at the report’s key findings, which relate to all sugar-sweetened beverages, but what particularly caught my eye was this: according to the Rudd Center, Red Bull, one of the leading manufacturers of energy drinks, has significantly increased its youth-directed television advertising since 2011, with teens now seeing 68 percent more Red Bull ads on TV, children seeing 59 percent more, and, disturbingly, preschoolers seeing 72 percent more such ads.

This is not to say that Red Bull is directly targeting children and preschoolers, though it and other energy drink companies are most definitely targeting teens; the ABA’s statement is likely true on its face. But the Rudd Center report nevertheless found that of all sugary drink ads viewed by preschoolers and children in 2013, one out of four such ads were for energy drinks (including, but not limited to, Red Bull ads).

Taken together, the Lipshultz and Rudd Center findings present a disturbing picture, because even young children who don’t have access to energy drinks now are likely forming favorable views about them from the “cool” advertising to which they’re exposed. This means they’re being primed to consume such beverages when they’re old enough to have access to them.

Given the serious concerns raised by energy drinks, there have been a few measures proposed around the country to ban the sale of such beverages to minors, but so far these efforts have not been successful. Outside the United States, this month Lithuania became the first country in the European Union to put such a ban into effect and the United Arab Emirates enacted a similar ban in 2012 for children under the age of 16.

Unless and until we follow suit in this country, however, it’s important to remember that preschoolers and other young children likely have access to energy drinks only if they’re already in the home.  As Lipshultz told CBS News, “[t]hey didn’t go into 7-11 and say ‘I want to buy an energy drink.'” So his findings would suggest that parents who keep energy drinks around for their own consumption (or for their teens) need to keep these drinks out of reach, just as they would with any other substance that’s dangerous to kids.

Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard are back with another adorable Samsung commercial. The new holiday-themed ad features the couple joyfully, and hilariously, preparing for Christmas.

The attentions of the space-faring industry may have turned to more distant targets, like Mars or even hurtling comets, but that’s not to say there’s not still room to explore a closer neighbor, like our own moon. Carnegie Mellon has revealed the robotic rover it believes will not only clinch it part of a $20m+ Google Lunar XPrize, but discover … Continue reading