UNC

Chapel Hill Herald, Saturday, April 02, 2005

The Carolina Women's Center's annual Women's Week, which concluded Saturday, covered a lot of topics: violence against women, gender-bending, women and war and mentoring, to pick but a few. The topic that stands out for its exclusion is abortion. This omission represents a significant decision by the Women's Center given the importance of reproductive freedom for college-age women.

Abortion has not always been kept off the program. In 2003, for example, there was a Women's Week forum on "The Abortion Pill: The Clash of Science and Politics."

This year, however, the desire to avoid controversy has left the issue entirely off the agenda.

The problem with this policy of avoidance was well-expressed by geography professor Altha Cravey: "Questions of choice should be front and center; women's control over their own bodies should be front and center.

The center should not alienate women, but the center should stand for something, and those two things are very different." Cravey also serves on the Women's Center's advisory board.

Chapel Hill Herald, Saturday, March 05, 2005

On Feb. 16, 141 nations celebrated the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, an unprecedented global response to the greatest crisis facing the world -- global warming. In one respect, Kyoto represents the culmination of a process that spanned the last century as nations worked to build the capacity to cooperate in the face of global challenges.

Unfortunately, the celebration of this historic moment is sadly diminished for Americans. Alone among the world's great powers, the United States steadfastly refuses to participate.

Reading the various reports and analyses of what one commentator called America's "monumental shame," it struck me that this was a time for local government to truly step into the breach. Symbolic measures, like our towns' occasional protests of national policy, would not be sufficient. Action was needed, the only question being what form that action should take.