By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org Full coverage for birth control, as part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), kicked in as Americans rang in the new year.  Contraception is now available for free from health insurance plans under the ACA. A key provision of the ACA requires employers with 50 or more workers to provide medical
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org Most Americans have heard about the glitches with the roll-out of the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. But apparently many women haven’t heard that birth control is essentially available for free under health insurance plans.  According to the Phoenix Marketing Company, which has been tracking this topic, this is
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org The end of a year normally leads to reflections on how the preceding 365 days turned out on many different issues.  As  2012 comes to a close, there are reasons to feel confident about how family planning and reproductive rights fared this year. There were three major events that should be
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org. As the fighting and political crisis in Syria escalates, the number of people fleeing the turmoil also increases. Nearly 130,000 people have fled Syria and taken refuge in neighboring countries since the conflict began. Globally, the UN estimates that for any crisis situation, one in five women of childbearing age is
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At last week’s London Summit on Family Planning, a high-level gathering hosted by the Gates Foundation and the UK Department for International Development, donors pledged to provide $2.6 billion over the next eight years to help the world’s poorest women gain access to contraceptives.  It has been called a “breakthrough for the world’s poorest women
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by Suzanne York, HowMany.org – In the aftermath of the UN Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development, which deliberately left reproductive rights out of the official outcome text, there is little time to feel discouraged.  There are education and awareness campaigns to undertake, and alliances to build and strengthen – especially between the environmental and women’s
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by Suzanne York, HowMany.org – An experienced and learned colleague of mine asked me one evening at the start of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) if it really mattered what issues made it or didn’t make it into the official Rio+20 text known as “The Future We Want”. Symbolically, it seemed important to
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By Suzanne York, HowMany.org Rio de Janeiro — Some of the biggest names in the population and women’s empowerment movement weighed in at Rio+20 on successfully promoting these topics at the UN conference and beyond. Gro Harlem Brundtland, former president of Norway and now the UN Special Envoy on Climate Change who has been around
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By Kelly White, July 21, 2011                         Photo: somewhereintheworldtoday Projecting population growth is not an exact science, so when the United Nations chose October 31, 2011, Halloween, as the day that world population will surpass 7 billion, one has to wonder as to why
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By Suzanne York, HowMany.org, March 21, 2012   The official focus of the upcoming United Nations “Earth Summit”, aka Rio+20, will be on the green economy and solidifying a sustainable development framework. This past January, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon laid out five imperatives of an action plan to “build the future we want.” These are
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