Vital to back War on AIDS

22 April 2009

LAST week, I was honoured to address a United Nations' Commission at the UN HQ in New York.

I spoke about making family planning in the developing world available to more women and men, to cut the number of deaths from AIDS and maternal mortality.

It was chilling to realise that in the eight minutes I spoke, eight women across the world had died from treatable and preventable complications during pregnancy and childbirth - an estimated half a million women a year.

Growing up when I did in England, access to contraception was not a real issue. It was readily available and I took it for granted.

It was not until my visit to Bangladesh, the slums of Dhaka and the tea plantations of Sylhet, that I began to realise why the politics of reproductive rights is essential to ending poverty across the world.

It was there that I had the privilege to meet a young mother, married at ten, who gave birth a year later. She told me about her desire to become a doctor.

She had enrolled in a UN-sponsored health programme that taught her about the way her body worked, sex, AIDS and contraception.

It was wonderful, she said, to find out how babies were made, and now she and her husband could do something to control the numbers of children she had and when.

She explained that she needed a career now. Because she had the knowledge and wherewithal to control her fertility, she would most likely live longer, past thirty - and so would need a job so she could support her family.

As we said goodbye she made me promise to remember her. I promised, and that's why I went to New York.

There are many people like that little girl in Dhaka - touched and changed by programmes that this country and others support through international aid.

More children are enrolled into schools in the developing world than ever before and child mortality has declined globally. But there is so much more to do.

The numbers dying from AIDS worldwide is increasing - an estimated 2.9 million in 2006 alone. More than 15 million children have lost one or both parents to this dreadful disease.