Catholic Melinda Gates calling Catholic

Andrew Cuomo on the I phone to tell him that not all Catholics support his religious discrimination and/or preference is closing Nassau OTB on Roman Catholic EAster Sunday in preference to Greek Orthodox  Easter Sunday. Ditto for Palm Sunday. Even Melinda Gates can read NY Const. Art. 1, Sec. 3  better than lawyer Andrew Cuomo who also is campaigning for the votes of women when runs for President.

Perhaps Melinda can see that BCG is available to the citizens of the State of NY without their having travel to the third world See faustmanlab.org and pubmed.org faustman dl

• U.S. NEWS
• May 10, 2013, 7:04 p.m. ET

Travels Changed Gates's View on Global Birth Control

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By BETSY MCKAY

SEATTLE—A little more than a year ago, Melinda Gates made a bold and controversial pledge to help women in the developing world get better access to contraception.

It was an unexpected declaration from the practicing Catholic and co-chair with husband Bill of a private philanthropy better known for promoting vaccines and working to improve education. She was sharply criticized by Catholic groups that argue that global health and development funds should go to other causes.
In her travels across sub-Saharan and South Asia over more than a decade, Ms. Gates says she had seen the same scene play out over and over. Women she met with to talk about vaccines would ask her how they could get birth control. "They would say to me, 'But what about that shot I used to get?' " she said in an interview at the headquarters of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The women were referring to Depo-Provera, she explained, an injectable contraceptive that they told her they like and walk miles to get—only to find often out of stock.
Now, one year later, Ms. Gates appears well on her way toward her goal. At a summit last summer hosted by the Gates Foundation and the U.K. Department for International Development, donors pledged $2.6 billion—$300 million more than the hosts had hoped to raise—to bring voluntary family planning services to 120 million more women in the world's poorest countries by 2020.

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Melinda Gates announced a goal to promote contraceptive use, particularly in poor nations, in London last July.

About 222 million women in the developing world in 2012 who were sexually active and did not want to get pregnant did not use modern contraceptive methods, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-health think tank that favors global contraception programs but whose statistics are used by proponents and opponents of such programs.
Some Catholic groups continue to disagree with Ms. Gates's stance.
The Gates effort could prompt countries to shift precious resources away from investments in making childbirth safer and improving child survival, said Susan Yoshihara, senior vice president for research at the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute, an organization that opposes international programs that promote family planning.
The Gates-supported goal of reaching 120 million more women includes substantial expected contributions from the developing countries, she said. "Preventing a childbirth is not going to save a woman who is dying from childbirth" she said. In addition, many women in the developing world who don't have contraception don't want it, she said.
The Gates Foundation and several public- and private-sector partners have also struck deals to cut roughly in half the price of two long-acting, reversible contraceptive implants—Bayer HealthCare AG's Jadelle and Merck & Co.'s Implanon—to $8.50 per unit for developing countries. The Foundation is leading an effort to improve the way progress in the field is measured and is funding research and development of new contraceptives.