Woman News
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2009 - Seven Who Stretch the Possible
wrong with my commitment in life." --Iulia Anghelescu [----------] Anika Rahman, Campaigner for Reproductive Health Anika Rahman says her life and destiny were shaped by three female power figures from her Bangladeshi childhood: her grandmother, her aunt and her mother. "They were three extremely strong and intelligent women, university educated, who did not receive the respect they deserved in society." Her parents divorced when she was 6, at a time when divorce was neither culturally acceptable nor tolerated. Her mother suffered society"s scorn while her father remarried, free from disrespect. Social justice and equal rights became part of Rahman"s DNA after that, leading to her life"s work. "Women"s health and equality is an essential social justice issue," says Rahman, who in July 2004 became the president of Americans for UNFPA, a New York-based nonprofit advocacy organization that supports UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund. "One of the fundamental differences between men and women is that we can reproduce, men cannot. Any struggle to advance women"s rights must deal with this basic difference." The U.N. Population Fund, funded by over 180 governments, promotes the rights of women and provides women"s health care and family planning programs in over 150 nations around the world. At Americans for UNFPA, Rahman focuses on increasing U.S. awareness and support of the U.N. agency"s global strategies and has built a base of private U.S. donors to support its work. In 1983 Rahman came to the United States to attend Princeton. She went on to Columbia Law School, specializing in women"s rights law. Four years into a Wall Street job, she decided she wanted a deeper purpose to her work; one that evoked her childhood passions for justice for women. She became the founding director of the International Program at the Center for Reproductive Rights, a legal advocacy nonprofit that promotes and defends women"s reproductive rights worldwide. Rahman pushed for framing reproductive rights as a human rights issue and worked with women"s legal groups around the world to raise the profile of women"s health concerns. Over the past eight years, the Bush administration has refused to release nearly $300 million in funds allocated by congress for the U.N. Population Fund. The Bush administration claims the fund supports coercive abortions in China--despite reports to the contrary by the State Department. While vigorously denying the allegation, Rahman"s organization has led the by-and-large successful battle to find alternative sources of funding. She says her next goal is to achieve greater gender equity by increasing U.S. engagement in the promotion of the health and rights of women in over 150 countries. "A woman who has access to reproductive health care and can exercise her rights has won the power to control her body and the right to be free from coercion," Rahman says. --Iulia Anghelescu [----------] Dr. Linda Randolph, Healer With a Mission Growing up, Dr. Linda Randolph didn"t intend to put so much of her professional focus on women"s health. But as a perinatologist treating babies in neonatal intensive care, she saw firsthand how the nation"s health care system was denying women--especially women of color--comprehensive care. As director of New York state"s Office of Public Health in the 1980s, Randolph was alarmed at the numbers of infants exposed to crack cocaine in utero. To help these infants, she realized she--and the rest of medical providers--needed to pay more attention to mothers, and to women, at all phases of their life cycles. "This country seemed to be only interested in women"s health as it related to children and not in terms of women"s preventive health and primary health care in general," she says. "I was linking the two and recognizing that women"s health was significantly important in terms of the woman herself and in terms of family health." So began her long journey to bridge the gap in health care services for women, particularly minority women. One of Randolph"s first projects was to create a series of health care books for women teaching them how to live healthy lives and have healthy futures. She also served on an advisory committee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention where she created programs for low-income women to access preventive care and screening for cervical and breast cancer. She also successfully pushed for more money for early treatment programs to help low-income women diagnosed with cancer. One of her proudest accomplishments is persuading the New York state government to fund perinatal network systems where health care providers and advocates mapped out a strategy to help narrow disparities in health care for women of color. The networks offer services ranging from prevention to direct care to social supports and education. Randolph has since undertaken another collaborative effort, this time in Washington, D.C. She is now director of the Developing Families Center, a small nonprofit network that focuses on using advanced practice nurses, community health nurses, breastfeeding peer counselors, family service workers and trained early childhood teachers to provide comprehensive services to young families, largely African American, living in nearby low-income communities. The results are a startling improvement in maternal and infant health, including a dramatic drop in the number of premature and Caesarean section births. "My general orientation is that we"ve "medicalized" birth," she says. "I"m interested in attempting to give birth back to families with the appropriate supports and professional care but with much more of their involvement and less technology." --Allison Stevens [----------] Cathi Rodgveller, Guider of Girl Techies Cathi Rodgveller has been a teacher and counselor for 26 years, a career path that led her in 1999 to create IGNITE, Inspiring Girls Now in Technology Evolution. She connects female high school students to professional women in careers that require technological or engineering skills, and the teens learn how those skills lead to better paying jobs in almost any area of interest. Rodgveller has a specific measure of achievement: "Success is when girls become so empowered that they want to help other girls," she says. Her sensitivity to the broad spectrum of need among pre-teen and teen girls was awakened while she worked at a New York youth center. Many girls there had experienced sexual abuse. She soon realized no one was helping them. Rodgveller created a peer-based discussion program to address those difficulties. Support groups sprang up in the school; next male teachers began helping boys learn about sexual abuse. "Eventually," she says, "sexual harassment was eradicated because everybody recognized it." In 1998, she moved to Seattle and became the city school district"s nontraditional career coordinator for 14 middle and high schools in the public school district. She received a federal sex equity grant to help create IGNITE and ensure that female students enter male-dominated careers such as construction, technology and engineering. "I knew I had the capacity and the passion to help young women, and I felt that that grant was given to me for a special purpose," she says. Most high school girls hold negative stereotypes that keep them from pursuing technology programs. Rodgveller makes a point of dispelling those notions. She gathers women in skilled professions--plumbers, electricians, engineers, construction workers and techies--and channels their knowledge toward girls wondering about their own future careers. Female enrollment in trade courses has risen 40 percent to 50 percent. Eventually, she realized how "incredibly passionate" women in the technology and engineering sectors were and she focused the program on those careers. Today, girls are exposed to them through talks, field trips to Microsoft headquarters, or by shadowing workers on the job. She now counsels 2,000 female students each year. Since 1999, IGNITE has reached roughly 15,000 young women and been repeatedly awarded for its success, including a presentation before Congress for Rodgveller and 14 volunteers. She also created a handbook to help other school districts create IGNITE chapters. She says her next step is to create a nonprofit to develop IGNITE so it can be offered to girls in every state in the nation. --Iulia Anghelescu For more information: Davis Polk and Wardwell: Sharon Katz http://www.dpw.com/lawyers/bio/skatz.htm Lilly Ledbetter"s Democratic National Convention speech: http://www.democrats.org/a/2008/08/lily_ledbetter.php Rhode Island Attorney General"s Office http://www.riag.state.ri.us/ Dayenu! http://www.dayenu.org/ Americans for UNFPA http://www.americansforunfpa.org/ IGNITE, Inspiring Girls Now in Technology Evolution http://www.igniteworldwide.org Note: Women"s eNews is not responsible for the content of external Internet sites and the contents of Webpages we link to may change without notice. [----------]Pages: 1 [2]