Hasta La Gadget!

By Rachel Sullivan Robinson, American University School of International Service

President Donald Trump is leading an assault on family planning around the world.

Most recently, his administration cut off U.S. contributions to the United Nations Population Fund, which provides and funds reproductive health services in poor countries. That follows his reinstatement of what’s known as the “global gag rule,” the executive order enacted by all Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan barring foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that receive U.S. funding from even mentioning abortion.

But Trump wants to go even further than his GOP predecessors by slashing spending on global health efforts funded through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Deeper family planning retrenchment would, however, put millions of lives at risk.

US family planning assistance

Trump’s proposed 28 percent cut to the foreign aid and diplomacy budget could translate into a $175 million reduction in USAID’s family planning spending from 2015 levels.

The magnitude of these cuts pales in comparison to the nation’s $4 trillion budget and the administration’s overall plan to reduce non-military spending by $54 billion. But the potential impact on the lives of women, children and men in developing countries outweighs their monetary value.

Rolling back U.S. support for family planning in developing countries is dangerous for two main reasons. First, contraception saves lives by limiting the total number of pregnancies, including those endangering mothers’ lives. Second, as I explain in my book, “Intimate Interventions in Global Health,” past U.S. funding for family planning had an unintended upside: it helped form the backbone of many countries’ early HIV-prevention efforts and created organizations that remain central to the response to HIV.

The U.S. government has identified 24 priority countries for family planning assistance, including 16 in sub-Saharan Africa. In these countries, on average only half of women who wish to avoid pregnancy are using modern contraception. That means U.S. funding can go a long way toward helping these women have the number of children they desire.

Contraception saves lives and strengthens health systems

Contraception lets women and men exercise reproductive freedom and averts maternal and infant deaths. According to the Guttmacher Institute, which researches sexual and reproductive health, U.S. foreign assistance for family planning in 2016 funded contraceptive services for 27 million girls, women and couples, helping avert six million pregnancies and 11,000 maternal deaths.

Fewer unintended pregnancies also means fewer maternal deaths due to unsafe abortion. Sub-Saharan Africa has both the world’s highest fertility rate and the least access to safe abortion. U.S. family planning assistance in 2016 helped prevent two million unsafe abortions resulting from unplanned pregnancies.

For the 22 priority nations with good data, the fertility rates average 4.5 children per woman, ranging from 2.3 in Bangladesh and India to 6.6 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In comparison, the U.S. total fertility rate is 1.9 children per woman.

Designed to slow global population growth and encourage socioeconomic development, U.S. spending on family planning in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s also yielded benefits beyond family planning.

Specifically, U.S.-supported family planning organizations became the first responders when the HIV epidemic emerged. For example, to promote contraception, a group of Nigerian medical professionals founded the Society for Family Health in Nigeria in 1985 in partnership with PSI, a U.S. nonprofit previously known as Population Services International that gets government funding.

In the 1990s, the HIV epidemic took off in Nigeria amid political chaos and government denial of the disease. As one of the main sources for condoms, the Society for Family Health helped prevent the spread of the as-yet untreatable virus. It remains both a key player in the response to HIV and a major recipient of U.S. global health funding. Similar results were echoed across Africa.

In “Intimate Interventions in Global Health,” I also detail how U.S. family planning helped build infrastructure for women’s health research in Senegal that became useful for the fight to stop HIV’s spread. Key researchers working at the Social Hygiene Institute, including Senegalese doctors Soulemayne Mboup and Ibrahim Ndoye, argued in the 1980s that effectively running family planning programs required comprehensive knowledge of sexually transmitted infections among women. USAID agreed and invested in laboratory capacity, which ultimately supported Senegal’s successful response to the epidemic.

What to expect once the US cuts global health spending

For sure, the impact of the U.S. government’s cessation of United Nations Population Fund support will be largely symbolic. In 2015, Washington’s $76 million contribution amounted to about 7.5 percent of the global agency’s $993 million budget.

Previously, when the U.S. has refused to support the global agency, other countries stepped in to fill the gap. It’s unclear whether other countries or additional funders, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, would be willing to do so if Congress embraces Trump’s broader proposed cuts to global health assistance. (The Gates Foundation spent $144 million on family planning in 2015, slightly less than a quarter of what USAID spent on family planning that year.)

Family planning funding alone could not stop HIV from infecting the 1.2 million Americans living with the virus that causes AIDS, but it did help slow the virus’s spread in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly when governments widely denied the need to make treatment and prevention high priorities.

Cutting U.S. funding for global health efforts, including family planning, would leave the poorest countries ill-prepared for epidemics, pandemics and other emerging health threats – including the kinds that easily cross borders. This negligible budgetary savings will ultimately cost rich and poor nations in the future.

Rachel Sullivan Robinson, Associate Professor,American University School of International Service

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton praised the thousands of demonstrators who protested against President Donald Trump’s anti-science agenda on Saturday and urged people to “protect the Earth and all its beauty.”

“It is Earth Day, and we are marching on behalf of science,” Clinton said to applause during a surprise appearance at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York on Saturday evening. “Part of science is understanding the intricate relationships we share with those on this planet.” 

Saturday’s nationwide March for Science, coinciding with Earth Day, came just three months after the massive Women’s March on Jan. 21, the day after Trump’s inauguration.

Earlier on Saturday, Clinton affirmed her support for the marches, tweeting “March on!”

Clinton attended the festival as an unannounced panelist at the premiere of “The Protectors: Walk in the Rangers’ Shoes,” a virtual reality documentary about elephant poaching that was co-created by Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow.

The film, which National Geographic will release online next month, documents park rangers in the Congo combating the environmental crisis caused by elephant poaching, an issue Clinton worked on as secretary of state.

“It became clear to everyone that this was not just a terrible crisis when it came to the elephant population; it was a trade, a trafficking that was funding a lot of bad folks, a lot of bad actors,” Clinton said. “It was being used to take ivory and sell it in order to buy more weapons, and support the kind of terroristic activity that these and other groups were engaged in.”

Clinton has kept a relatively low profile since November’s election, but has attended plays and other cultural events in New York and spoken at events related to issues she champions, such as LGBTQ rights and women’s rights.

The former secretary of state’s appearance at the festival was kept tightly under wraps. Bigelow, who moderated the panel, said even she didn’t know that Clinton would be there.

“I had nothing to do with her being here,” Bigelow told The Wrap. “This was all the festival’s doing. But I know she’s been doing great work in this field for years, and she’s a woman of extraordinary power.”

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By Brendan Nystedt and Michael Sullivan

This post was done in partnership with The Sweethome, a buyer’s guide to the best homewares. When readers choose to buy The Sweethome’s independently chosen editorial picks, it may earn affiliate commissions…

If you ever played Super Mario Bros., you know the thrill of running across one of those question mark blocks. Bop Mario’s fist against that thing over and over and you never know how many coins or other goodies would come out. If you remember the box, you remember the coin sound as well.

ThinkGeek has a Mario Question Block Money Box that you can drop your coins into. It makes the sounds from the game with each coin you put in. It’s sort of the reverse of the box in the game. It’s just $15.99(USD) and will accept any size coins, so it works with all currencies.

On the other hand, it has no lock so your kids can easily pilfer your change as needed for snacks. This bank will go perfectly with the Coin Box Lamp I talked about last year.

French voters cast their ballots Sunday in the first round of a presidential election that may be a litmus test of just how influential the strains of populism and nationalism in Europe have become.

Polls opened Sunday at 8 a.m. local time for the first-round vote that will whittle down the field of 11 candidates. Unless one of them wins more than 50 percent of the vote, the two top candidates will face off in a second round on May 7. 

Exit polls for the vote are set to be released just after 8 p.m. local time, with official results to come later in the night. At midday, turnout figures for the vote were on pace to top the country’s last presidential election in 2012.

In the days prior to the vote, four front-runners emerged in the tight race to succeed Socialist François Hollande and become France’s next leader. Center-left Emmanuel Macron and far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen were leading in the polls at 23 percent and 22 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, François Fillon and Jean-Luc Mélenchon hovered between 19 and 20 percent. 

France finds itself at somewhat of a crossroads in its political history. Working-class voters are struggling with high unemployment and an economy that hasn’t fully recovered from the European debt crisis. Several French cities are reeling from recent deadly terrorist attacks. (A Belgian who claimed allegiance to the so-called Islamic State killed one police officer and injured several more Thursday night on Paris’ Champs Elysées. French authorities foiled yet another attack in the city of Marseille last week.)

Security fears loomed over France on Sunday as citizens voted, and a polling station in the eastern town of Besancon was evacuated after reports that a stolen vehicle was abandoned nearby with its engine still running.

The threat of terror, along with lack of jobs, have fueled distrust in the government and reinvigorated a vicious debate about immigration and national identity. 

The vote is just as much a test for the future of Europe. Compounding France’s internal challenges are the rise of populism and the rejection of establishment politics in places like Britain and the United States. Trust in the European system has eroded, and proposals to depart the European Union have become en vogue for populist candidates across the continent. 

Amid these larger challenges, the French election has also been marked by scandal, surprises and upsets at every turn.

First, Hollande announced he would not seek re-election. Then, former President Nicolas Sarkozy failed to win his party’s nomination when Fillon, who served as prime minister from 2007 to 2017, beat him in the primaries.

The conservative Fillon was a likely front-runner, appealing to right-wing voters with a pro-business and socially conservative platform mixed with anti-immigration and anti-Islam views. But a series of scandals, including allegations Fillon had paid his family members to work as parliamentary aides, caused his support to plummet. 

As Fillon’s star faded, Macron’s rose. A relative political novice, Macron founded his own political party, En Marche! (which translates roughly to “Onward!”). After leaving investment banking in 2014, he served as Hollande’s economic minister until deciding to run for office last year. Unlike Le Pen, Macron is pro-E.U. and pro-immigration.

For Le Pen, the election is the ultimate test of her efforts to bring the extreme-right National Front into the mainstream. 

Le Pen took over the party’s leadership from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and has worked hard to clean up its image. She remains vehemently anti-immigration and has vowed to hold a referendum on France’s membership in the European Union if elected. Le Pen is also an open admirer of Russian President Vladimir Putin. During a visit to the Kremlin last month, she called sanctions against Russia “silly” and reiterated her desire for closer ties with Russia. Faced with declining polls in recent weeks, Le Pen has made a sharp turn to the right and intensified her anti-immigrant rhetoric.

For months, polls have been leaning in favor of a runoff between Le Pen and Macron, putting Le Pen’s presidential dream within reach. And she’s managed to harness the youth vote: An Ifop survey last month revealed that 39 percent of French voters between the ages of 18 and 24 back her.

But the far-left Mélenchon, 65, has thrown a major curveball by soaring to prominence in the final stretch of the race. 

A open admirer of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong, Mélenchon spent decades in the Socialist Party before forming his own party, La France Insoumise (“A France That Won’t Bow Down”) last year.

He views himself as a patriot who wants to end austerity and boost the economy with a giant stimulus package while also reducing the workweek to 32 hours. Like Le Pen, he opposes E.U. and various other international institutions, including the World Trade Organization.

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