Noted.

GAG OVERRULED: On January 23, one day after the thirty-sixth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, President Barack Obama overturned the Mexico City policy, aka the global gag rule, which barred US funds for overseas health organizations that so much as mentioned abortion in their work. Score one for women's rights, women's health, free speech and international family planning. Contrary to David Brooks, who, while admitting total ignorance, opined on The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer that the gag rule had no practical effect, the International Planned Parenthood Federation estimates that it lost $100 million in US funding. The Marie Stopes International family planning organization closed down four programs in Kenya, Ethiopia and Nepal. Meanwhile, funding that had gone to family planning was shifted to evangelical groups promoting abstinence. If Obama restores US support for the UN Population Fund--vetoed for eight long years by George W. Bush on bogus charges that it funded forced abortions in China--the dismal picture for women's reproductive health in the developing world will surely brighten.

Still, it's insulting that healthcare so essential to women's well-being is dependent on the good will of the president, like some kind of medieval boon. Can you imagine, say, funding for heart disease being swapped in and out of the budget depending on whether a Republican or a Democrat occupies the White House? To please right-wing Christians, women in far-off lands suffered fistulas and other horrible pregnancy-related conditions, wore themselves out physically and emotionally in childbearing and died in great numbers from pregnancy, labor and illegal abortions; children died in infancy, were impoverished and orphaned. For now, that's over. But in four years? Eight years?   KATHA POLLITT

IRAN'S WAR ON AIDS: On January 21 two HIV/AIDS physicians, Kamiar and Arash Alaei, were sentenced by Tehran's Revolutionary Court to three and six years in prison, respectively, for "communicating with an enemy government." As with the cases of Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh, respected Iranian-American scholars arrested for similar "offenses" but eventually released in 2007, the Alaeis' case has been met with outcry from organizations like Physicians for Human Rights, which called the charges against them "illegitimate and politically motivated."

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