When Cairo was ten, there was a government who said to the UN that if you have that meeting, we’re going to come and withdraw our commitment to it that we’d made in 1994. So the UN said, right, I don’t think we’ll have that global meeting… So, the NGO community, FCI, International Planned Parenthood Federation, and PAI said “Well, we will. We’ll organize it…” We organized a meeting in London looking at Cairo at ten. We knew the world needed to know… like Mayor Koch used to say, “How are we doin’?” We needed to know how we were doing… This was in 2004.
We had a big meeting with 1,000 people. We did a centerfold!—a report card on where it is unsafe to be a woman and a mother… PAI did most of the work. This is the global report card… it showed what are the countries of highest risk [for being a mother].
This is data that’s been collected from around the world. We raised money to do this [the report card]. Then we realized we needed information to go around the report card because not everyone who uses the report card will understand the issues. So the idea was to put together a magazine… this is a big step for a nonprofit. [She shows me the magazine, Countdown 2015: Sexual & Reproductive Health & Rights for All]
It was in three languages. The best and the brightest wrote the articles… but more importantly, we also hired a retired Washington Post correspondent to rewrite every article so that anybody can read it. It’s totally accessible to anyone who reads it… it has a huge circulation… We wanted it to have a shelf life of five years… it has articles, cartoons… [She shows me a cartoon]. There’s a cartoon about a woman telling her daughter, who is holding a baby, “I don’t want you or her [baby] to have sexual education.” It is stuff like that that helps get our message across…
Explain about what readers can expect.
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