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Sacramento Bee (US), January 23, 2005 Editorial: Keep
UNICEF Healthy; Veneman Needs to Grasp Its
Full Mission Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, who grew up on a peach farm near Modesto, will soon take control of a United Nations agency that touches the lives of millions of children around the world. Veneman's appointment as director of UNICEF should be a cause for celebration in the Central Valley. Unfortunately, this native daughter stumbled badly last week when, in her introductory comments, she said UNICEF had no role in promoting reproductive health. Opponents of family planning likely were heartened by Veneman's comments. Supporters of UNICEF's historical mission were baffled. In the United States, UNICEF is known largely for selling holiday cards. But its real work is in the developing world, providing vaccines, vitamins, education, health care and a protective environment to children. Millions of people are alive today because of UNICEF programs. The agency is now trying to save thousands more in the aftermath of the South Asia tsunami. Family planning isn't its major focus - much of that work is handled by a separate agency, the U.N. Population Fund. But UNICEF is very much involved with programs to prevent infant mortality, AIDS and maternal deaths. Reproductive health is intertwined in all these programs. You can't protect children without ensuring the health of mothers. Consider the situation in Burkina Faso. In this African country, 62 percent of women marry early, before the age of 18, according to UNICEF. Girls have a 1-in-14 chance of dying in pregnancy, and are up to three times more likely to be infected with HIV than boys. To counter such trends, UNICEF has helped fund special sex education programs for girls across Africa and other regions. A top health concern is women and girls who have repeated pregnancies, in rapid succession, which can add to the risks for both mother and child. As a result, the agency has long supported family planning, even though it doesn't endorse any particular method of controlling births. "UNICEF continues to advocate the well-informed timing and spacing of births, and to draw attention to the well-documented disadvantages for both mother and child of births that are 'too close or too many'," the agency says on its Web site. Upon being picked to replace Carol Bellamy as UNICEF director, Veneman was asked Monday if she supported reproductive health programs, such as sex education for girls. Like many in this country, Veneman wrongly assumed that UNICEF has no role in this area. "I don't come with any broad agenda with regard to those or any other social issues," Veneman said in a report by Reuters. "I don't believe that these issues are relevant to the mission of UNICEF." One can only hope that Veneman, a smart and sometimes moderate voice in the Republican Party, will be able to articulate a more knowing vision for UNICEF once she joins the agency in May. No one expects Veneman, a Bush administration appointee, to travel the world promoting contraception. But she should at least be aware that, through educational and noncoercive methods, UNICEF has an important mission in protecting the reproductive health of women worldwide. << Sacramento Bee -- 1/23/05 >>
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