Provoking Policy

Today is a day when I want to give thanks for some human rights I deserve and some things I am lucky to have as a woman. I am grateful that my parents were happy I was born a girl. I am happy that my parents valued my education, and for all the education I have achieved and that I can use my education to take any job I choose. For tampons and feminine sanitation, I feel lucky. For contraception and the right to abortion, I thank the women who came before me. For being free to marry who they choose when they choose, I am happy for my sisters who thinks this the right choice for them. I wish my 17 year old daughter would appreciate her good fortune at having the right to drive. I am thankful for a job that allows me to buy as much or as little clothes that I can wear as I please. I am grateful for laws that protect me from rape and violence (the effectiveness of such are left for another day) It is liberating to be able to have sex outside of marriage. I am happy to not need a...

I decided to edit this piece to start with a video of Melinda Gates talking about her privilege to travel the world and meet women whose voices are not heard on the world stage and so she feels it is her obligation to speak on behalf of them. This gets at the heart of why I wrote this piece so I will let her speak in her own words before I speak mine in response: Melinda Gates interview on her work as family planning advocate I work in the development industry. Sometimes. I have worked in the family planning sector a long time. I have worked in safe motherhood a long time. And I have worked in AIDS. (That these are not integrated in the development sector is a topic for another post). I came to development through childhood experiences with development workers whose ideas were formed in some office far, far away using the most recent data and information on my Jamaican community. They were talented, mulitlingual and well-intentioned. But something about the experience left an ind...