posted on: Wednesday, July 11, 2012

By Lisa Ranghelli
 

Several years ago my book group read Monique and the Mango Rains, a memoir by Kris Holloway about her friendship with a rural midwife in Mali, where the author had been a Peace Corps volunteer. Monique was the only health care provider within many miles of her tiny town of Nampossela. In a region where the risk of dying during pregnancy or childbirth is 1 in 12, Monique’s provision of health care was literally a lifeline to so many women. The book recounts the unlikely and beautiful friendship between these two people from very different cultures, and it offers a window into the harsh life of rural African women. Monique had several children and then wanted access to birth control so that she wouldn’t have more, but it was frowned upon by the male tribal leaders.
 
The ironic tragedy of this true story is that Monique, an experienced midwife, died in childbirth.
 
Kris Halloway has used the book as a way to honor Monique’s legacy and promote women’s health by fundraising so this community in Mali could build and equip a clinic in that region of Mali, Clinique Monique.
 
I was reminded of this story after reading about Melinda Gates’ ambitious and sorely needed new effort to provide access to contraception for 200 million poor women and girls in the developing world, especially in Africa. She is inviting everyone, not just billionaires, to take a different sort of Gates pledge: “I believe that every girl and woman deserves the opportunity to determine her own future.”
 
Today political leaders, NGOs, donors and others from across the globe are convening in London to make such a pledge. They are doing so because they know that contraception saves lives (it could have saved Monique’s), and it allows women and girls to prosper. And we all know by now that when women and girls thrive, their families and their communities thrive as well.
 
Perhaps not surprisingly, given how aggressively the Catholic Church has resisted implementing the Obamacare birth control mandate at its institutions, Melinda Gates must spend time explaining that what she is promoting is “not controversial.” In fact, the pledge website URL is “no-controversy.com.” In a CNN interview, Gates, who is a practicing Catholic, said that despite the criticism from some Catholics, she would not back down from being an advocate for poor women, asserting “This will be my lifetime’s work at the foundation.”
 
In a recent blog post I characterized certain actions of the Catholic Church as bullying and questioned whether philanthropy was going to be a complicit bystander or stand up to the bullies. I am heartened to see Melinda Gates stand strong against Catholic criticism of a program that will benefit not just hundreds of millions of women and girls, but in turn, the hundreds of millions of lives they directly touch as well.  Helping a billion people or more  escape death and abject poverty – what’s controversial about that?
 
Lisa Ranghelli is the director of NCRP’s Grantmaking for Community Impact Project.