Uganda/Kenya: Cruel Choices: How Trump’s Global Gag Rule Hurts the Fight Against HIV

Cruel Choices: How Trump’s Global Gag Rule Hurts the Fight Against HIV

By: skye wheeler
Dec 7, 2017

Pamela was 13 years old when both her parents died in the 1990s as the AIDS pandemic inflicted death across East Africa. She sold sex to keep herself and her three younger siblings fed and alive. When she got pregnant she had no real choice but to get an abortion. Abortion is illegal in most instances in Uganda. Her second of three backstreet abortions almost killed her.

Now 24, Pamela [not her real name] works for a sex worker-led organization, fighting for women’s rights, sex workers’ rights, and access to anti-retroviral drugs and other lifesaving health care for her organization’s members. The job provides her with income, but also the satisfaction of working to increase choices for women and to minimize the risk of harm she knows from personal experience.

Continued at source: http://womensenews.org/2017/12/cruel-choices-how-trumps-global-gag-rule-hurts-the-fight-against-hiv/