Catholic Melinda Gates defies the Vatican with $560m birth control funds

Melinda Gates, billionaire philanthropist and practising Catholic, yesterday laid down the gauntlet to the Vatican by vowing to dedicate her life to improving access to contraception for women in the developing world.

At an extraordinary summit in London, Mrs Gates announced that the charitable foundation she set up with her Microsoft founder husband Bill was donating $560m to family planning services.

The size of the donation is intended to emphasise the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s commitment to reducing unwanted pregnancies in poorer countries, which experts say lead to more than 100,000 women dying prematurely every year.

A life-long Catholic, Mrs Gates said she had grappled with her faith before deciding to speak out against the Vatican’s opposition to contraception.

“Of course I wrestled with this. As a Catholic I believe in this religion, there are amazing things about this religion, amazing moral teachings that I do believe in, but I also have to think about how we keep women alive,” she said in an interview in advance of the summit.

“I believe in not letting women die, I believe in not letting babies die, and to me that’s more important than arguing about what method of contraception [is right].”

The summit, co-hosted by the Gates Foundation and Department for International Development, started with a remarkable declaration by the Indian government pledged to provide free access to family planning for all 64 million women currently denied the opportunity to control when and how many children to have.

Cash pledges then came in thick and fast from world leaders, with more than 3bn by the end of the day, Almost half of contribution were from developing countries.

David Cameron was given a standing ovation after announcing Britain is doubling its financial support for family planning services to 1bn over the next eight years, but was immediately asked how he would tackle religious opposition to the efforts.

He said Britain’s contribution would save the life of a woman or girl in the developing world every two hours for the next eight years by preventing deaths caused by too many pregnancies, too close together.

Mr Cameron and Andrew Mitchell, international development minister, were widely praised for showing leadership and commitment to women’s health, though the funding is not new money and will come out of existing aid budgets.

Australia and Germany both agreed to double their contributions for family planning programmes. Nigeria, where only one in 10 couples currently use contraception, announced a 300 per cent increase in funds.

In total, the summit raised nearly enough money to expand family planning programmes to an extra 120 million women.

In her speech Mrs Gates said: “What we’re doing is an enormous undertaking? We’re committed to innovating constantly; we’re committed to educating women about their options? It is a difficult task but it is absolutely urgent.”

Mr Cameron said: “When a woman is prevented from choosing when to have children it is not just a violation of her human rights it can fundamentally compromise her chances in life and the opportunities for her children.

“Family planning works not just because smaller families can be healthier and wealthier but because empowering women is the key to growing economies and healthy open societies.”

Mr Cameron added: “We’re not talking about some kind of Western imposed population control, forced abortion or sterilisation.

“What we’re saying today is quite the opposite. We’re not telling anyone what to do. We’re giving women and girls the power to decide for themselves.”

An estimated 220 million women around the world do not have access to contraceptives or family planning information.

In some countries women need written consent from their husbands before they can talk to a doctor about contraception while in others, family planning services are not offered to adolescents or unmarried women. In others, contraceptives are frequently out of stock when women need them.

For the past two decades vaccinations against infectious diseases have been pursued as the global health priority at the expense of contraception and family planning. But a series of papers published in The Lancet earlier this week concluded that addressing the unmet need for contraception was crucial if Millennium Development Goals on maternal deaths, poverty and gender equality were to be ever achieved.

And a recent report from Save the Children said every year one million teenage girls die or is injured because of pregnancy or childbirth – making pregnancy is the biggest killer of teenage girls worldwide.

Mrs Gates said the Foundation had initially focussed on vaccines because women would not choose to have fewer children until they were sure their children would survive childhood

In address by video link, Aung Sang Suu Kyi told delegates that giving women control over family planning would lead to healthier, better educated women and children for the future.

“Reproductive rights are basic human rights,” said Hillary Clinton.

Bill and Melinda: A labour of love

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was set-up by the Microsoft founder and his wife in 1994. Since then it has become a significant player in global development and health. As co-chairs of the Foundation, the Gates’ are intimately involved in its work.

Latest figures show that the foundation has funded $26.2bn worth of programmes and grants, including more than $6bn for libraries, scholarships, emergency relief, schools and homelessness in the United States.

Global health is their first love, on which more than $15bn has been spent so far. They are probably best known for their work on Malaria, vaccines and HIV/Aids, but have also invested significantly in research and treatments for diarrheal diseases, TB and pneumonia which costs millions of lives every year. They have offices in India and China where large programmes of work are focused.

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From Sex To Love: Emotional Attachment And Sexual Desire Originate In …

Conventional (read: antiquated) dating wisdom tells us that men and women have totally different feelings about sex. Women automatically get emotionally attached, and men quickly flee to the next sexual partner. But a new study helps put this myth to rest.

The research, out of Concordia University in Montreal, indicates that emotional attachment can actually grow out of sexual desire. Psychologist Jim Pfaus and his research team sought to discover where feelings of love and of sexual desire originate in the brain. To do that they reviewed 20 past studies that scanned men’s and women’s brains with fMRI machines. They found that love and lust, two supposedly separate emotions, actually originate in the same location in the brain — the insular cortex (insula) and striatum, reported MSNBC. That doesn’t mean love and sex are the same thing, just that they’re not as separate as “The Rules” might have you believe. “Love and sex are clearly overlapping and they are different,” Jim Pfaus, a professor of psychology at Concordia told MSNBC. “You can have desire for sex without love.”

The study found that love and sex fall on a sort of neurological continuum. Both phenomena activate a section of the striatum (the part of the brain that receives messages from the cerebral cortex about emotions, memory and other functions). Lust causes the ventral striatum the part of the brain associated with emotion and motivation — to “light up.” Love activates the dorsal striatum, which impacts decision-making and is associated with drug addiction, reported MSNBC. (So when Ke$ha sang, “Your Love Is My Drug,” she was closer to the literal truth than she perhaps thought.) The researchers also discovered overlap between sexual desire and emotional love in the brain’s insular cortex, further demonstrating that lust can transition into love and vice versa. “Even love at first sight, can it happen? Of course it can happen,” Pfaus told MSNBC. “And when it does happen, do you want to play Scrabble with each other? When it happens, you normally want to consummate it.”

So what does this study mean for women whose brains aren’t being scanned in an fMRI machine? Jezebel’s Lindy West read the study as a confirmation that the “don’t sleep with him or her on the first date” rule isn’t really grounded in reality. She wrote:

So there — love can grow out of a sweaty one-night stand. I’ve seen it happen plenty of times; I don’t know many young people who would admit to being morally opposed to casual sex; and yet the idea that, in general, waiting as long as possible is just nebulously better still completely pervades our culture.

The study also indicates that there may actually be a neurological basis for getting emotionally attached after a sexual encounter. “Love is actually a habit that is formed from sexual desire as desire is rewarded,” Pfaus said in a press release. So if you tend to feel closer to someone after a sexual encounter, that may be at least in part about your brain working correctly — not about you being needy. And according to the study, you probably aren’t ruining your chances of finding love if you decide to express your sexual desires before you act on your emotional ones. The two go hand in hand.

Also on HuffPost:

GALLERY: 5 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT THE BRAIN, SEX, LOVE AND DESIRE

Via author Kayt Sukel

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In recent years there has been a lot of talk about pheremones — chemicals that have the ability to trigger a social (and potentially sexual) response from members of the same species. Some companies have even begun bottling these chemicals, urging consumers to use them as cologne and “enhance your sex life.”

According to Sukel, these bottled pheromones are little more than marketing. “As of now there’s no good scientific study that shows that these sprays actually work,” she said. “But there are plenty of people who use them and claim they’re the best thing ever. The placebo effect really works.”

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