'Reproductive Health' Catchphrase a Double-Edged Sword. [Kenya] Reproductive health is one of the most loaded of all politically correct phrases. Imagine a politician saying, "We should abolish reproductive health for all women!" If he wanted to be more popular, he could change his name to Godzilla. As happens with many politically correct phrases, "reproductive health" is a two-edged sword - sharp as a razor on one side and soft as a pillow on the other. Reproductive health sounds so comforting that people would doubt the sanity of anyone who opposed it. But it is specific enough in law that it can include destructive activities such as providing abortions to 15-year-old girls without parental consent. Ambassadors and officials trying to fashion international law at the United Nations are often caught off guard when faced with this two-edged sword. They do not want to oppose women having children (that's what reproduction is all about, isn't it?). And who would oppose having healthy women and healthy children? The upshot is that everyone supports reproductive health. The phrase sounds wonderfully positive. Pro-abortion lobbies have been trying to use this to their advantage. When they want to be vague - when they want to sound as if they are promoting nothing more than the health of all women - they can hide behind the phrase. When circumstances make it possible, they lobby for a legal definition of reproductive health that includes abortion on demand.

War Crimes Against Women. [Liberia] Last year, two out of three women in Liberia became the victims of sexual violence. During the fourteen-year civil war, rape was used systematically as a weapon of war. Although the conflict has ended, violence against women continues unabated because the war has destroyed social values and norms and left a far greater tendency to resort to violence. In connection with International Women's Day on 8 March, Deutsche Welthungerhilfe (German Agro Action) and medica mondiale are calling for girls and women in post-conflict societies to be protected from rape and sexual torture. Both organisations are also calling for systematic efforts to empower women in post-conflict environments to participate in the peace process and in the reconstruction of society.

TUC Wants Passage of Women's Right Bill. [Nigeria] Trade Union Congress of Nigeria (TUC), an umbrella organisation for senior staff associations in the country, has protested the failure of the National Assembly to pass into law a bill on women's right that was presented before it some months back. The TUC president general, Comrade Peace Nkiru Obiajulu, made this declaration at the weekend when she delivered a speech at the 2006 International Women's Day celebration organised by the TUC women's commission. Obiajulu, in her address, called on women to actively participate and contest in elective positions from wards to the national level in 2007. The TUC boss observed that in spite of protests organised by its women's wing last December against the non-passage of the bill, the National Assembly has not deemed it fit to pass the bill into law. She disclosed that in the next two months, women in TUC would in addition to converging on the National Assembly to register their protest against the non-passage of the bill, engage all possible means to lobby the legislators to ensure that the bill sees the light of the day.

A Highly Charged Rape Trial Tests Ideals. [South Africa] For Jacob G. Zuma, a charismatic figure of South Africa's liberation struggle, the last year has been a series of shocks: fired as deputy president, ousted as the front-runner to succeed President Thabo Mbeki, indicted on bribery charges, and, most recently, put on trial on charges of raping the daughter of a family friend. Now Mr. Zuma has begun to fight back. And it is his critics' turn to be shocked. Taking the stand for the first time this week in the rape trial, Mr. Zuma cast himself as the embodiment of a traditional Zulu male, with all the privileges that patriarchal Zulu traditions bestow on men. Mr. Zuma, who turns 64 this week, said his accuser, a 31-year-old anti-AIDS advocate, had signaled a desire to have sex with him by wearing a knee-length skirt to his house and sitting with legs crossed, revealing her thigh. Indeed, he said, he was actually obligated to have sex. His accuser was aroused, he said, and "in the Zulu culture, you cannot just leave a woman if she is ready." To deny her sex, he said, would have been tantamount to rape. Such arguments have stirred a storm here, not because he insists that his accuser wanted sex - he-said, she-said arguments are not unheard of in rape trials worldwide - but because he has clothed them in what he depicts as African mores about sex and male primacy. In South Africa, by far the most Western of African nations, the accord between centuries-old cultures and newer, more European notions of science and law has been both uneasy and unspoken. Mr. Zuma has laid it bare, effectively arguing that he is being persecuted for his cultural beliefs.

'I Did Not Have HIV,' Zuma Tells Rape Trial. [South Africa] Former Deputy President Jacob Zuma told a South African court Tuesday that he was HIV negative, putting an end to speculation that he was infected with the AIDS virus. Under cross examination from the prosecution in his rape trial, Zuma said that he did not use a condom when he had sex with his HIV-positive accuser because the risk of a man being infected by a woman is statistically lower than a woman picking up the virus from a man. "I knew that the risk I was taking was not a great risk," Zuma replied when asked why, as former head of the South African National AIDS Council which preaches safe sex, he did not behave more responsibly. AIDS activists fear that Zuma's behavior may set a bad example in a country which has the highest number of people with HIV in the world and where men have multiple partners and are notoriously reluctant to use condoms.

Lewis 'Frantic' Over Slow Aids Response for Women. [South Africa] A senior UN official says there is an urgent need to tackle the gender discrimination that for too long has 'feminised' HIV/AIDS in Africa. After a recent trip to Lesotho and Swaziland, Stephen Lewis, the UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, said at the weekend that it was "impossible to traverse the continent without an enveloping sense of horror and despair at the carnage amongst women". African women and girls remained the unwilling recipients of rights abuses, including rape and sexual violence, polygamy and access to education, said Lewis, "and in very large part this carnage ... has been allowed to rage because the voice of women is the voice that is still not heard". According to the World Health Organisation, an estimated 30 percent of girls aged 15 to 17 in Lesotho were living with the HI virus, while prevalence stood at just over 53 percent among pregnant women in Swaziland.