Yeah, we've heard about this memo too, but haven't seen it. There are no mentions of abortion in the bill though.

Thank you, Leila!

Congratulations! I'm looking forward to following the development of AWID's new project!

You don't need to register to vote - people who want to vote for you just have to click the "vote" button next to your picture!

Hey all -- I'm the program officer for online communications and campaigns at IWHC, which means that community management of Akimbo and Young Visionaries falls under my domain. I just deleted several abusive comments aimed at Wagatwe.

Here is our comment policy:

"We aim to create a blog that fosters open discussion about the health and rights of women and girls throughout the world, and welcome comments that both support and challenge our work and perspectives. Thoughtful and respectful comments are welcome, while hate speech, personal attacks, offensive language, or off-topic comments to other sites will be deleted.

Comments are moderated by the communications team, though at the moment comments are not held for approval, they are posted when submitted. If we begin to have a problem with abusive or hate-speech comments we will switch to fully moderated comments and a blog administrator will have to approve all comments before they appear on the blog. We retain the right to moderate, edit, delete, and block comments as we see fit."

I am happy to discuss any issues people have with this policy or my choices in enacting it. You can respond here or email me at aray [at] iwhc.org if you like. The abusive comments have not been completely deleted - they are unpublished, and I am tracking the URLs of commenters on this and all other posts.

You can totally vote for yourself - and as many other people as you want. But you can only vote for each person once.

You just have to click where it says "vote" next to Stephanie's pic!

I think the FC products that are being tested and used in Africa are a bit different than this one - there are a few international companies that have been working on FCs outside of the US. Our Food and Drug Administration approval process for medical devices is pretty slow, so there are a variety of options available outside the U.S. That of course doesn't solve your stated problem of expired products. Hopefully with increased attention on the FCs, ngos will be able to help get them more widely distributed.

Here are a few pics of two different FCs, made of latex and nitrile, that are being tested and marketed internationally: http://www.flickr.com/photos/iwhc/sets/7215761133...

Thanks for commenting with the link - I did this when you posted it earlier this week. Got nice notes back from both my NY Senators, who are working to make sex education comprehensive.

Yay, thanks!