Birth Control - Are we really still debating its merits?

I am currently working for one of the largest and most generously funded international aid agencies in the world. Like many large, international corporations, the agency provides healthcare for its employees through an on-site clinic staffed by international doctors - in order to ensure quality treatment and decrease cross-cultural misunderstandings that could muudle care. Aids education posters pepper the walls, and a bowl of condoms sits by the fishbowl in the waiting room for free distribution.

So, I was shocked speechless to discover that the agency's healthcare plan does not cover or provide birth control pills. The clinic staff suggest that women seeking birth control visit a local gynecologist for a prescription (expensive and time consuming), buy a generic version at the pharmacy (risking faulty, un-controlled medication), or bring it with them when they arrive (difficult for those coming form countries with private healthcare). I find this disturbing for many reasons:

1) The agency has a stated goal of increasing the percentage of female employes from an abysmal 18%. The usual explanation of this figure is that the conditions of life far from home in a hot, dusty, Islamic foreign country deter many women candidates. If this is true, providing women with the basic means to control their own bodies in this environment might be a good place to start.

2) As an international organization also committed to hiring employees representative of geographic diversity, there are many male and female employees from all over the world, including countries that don't have family-planning education. Providing birth control would be an excellent opportunity to set an example of the 'freedom and equality' the West claims to offer, educate those not otherwise exposed to family planning choices, and 'lo and behold' reduce unwanted pregnancies.

3) We are working in a conflict that, like many conflicts, has a significant rape and sexual violence component. Across Africa birth control is inadequately provided in normal health clinics and especially in displaced persons camps. Do to the pyschology of war and the increased vulnerability of women, these camps often have significantly higher rates of pregnancy and teenage pregnancy than the surrounding population. The international community has been negligent in its response. If International Aid organizations intend to promote health and empowerment, birth control for constituents and birth control for employes is fundamental.

Rape in the Congo

There has been a media trickle for the last few years about rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that is beginning to gain strength and shed light one of the most horrific experiences of the modern world. Recent pieces in the New York Times(Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo, Jefferey Gettleman) and BBC Radio (Women's Hour, Congo Sex Crimes) seek to understand how and why rape is being perpetrated in the DRC on a scale and with a brutality not seen for centuries. What is driving this phenomenon? How do we even conceive of it? in evolutionarily terms? - where women suffer rapes so brutal they fracture spines? In social terms - how can a society recover from this type of violence? How do we stop it? So far, these peices have brought more questions than answers, but at least the topic is emerging from hiding...