Author: Isabel Marler

Abortion in Developing Regions: What Progress Since 1990?

Wednesday marks International Safe Abortion Day. Every year on this day, September 28, women’s health advocates from around the world unite in support of ensuring universal access to safe abortion care and the repeal of laws that criminalize abortion. This global day of action began in Latin America over a quarter-century ago in response to the countless deaths and injuries resulting from clandestine abortion procedures in the region, a reality still faced by millions of women today throughout the world.

Abortion is common. Globally, an estimated 56 million abortions took place each year between 2010 and 2014, which translates to one in four pregnancies ending in abortiohttps://www.guttmacher.org/article/2016/09/abortion-developing-regions-what-progress-1990n.

A recent study, Abortion Incidence Between 1990 and 2014: Global, Regional, and Subregional Levels and Trends, conducted jointly by the Guttmacher Institute and the World Health Organization, found that most developed regions have seen a marked decline in the rate of abortion, dropping over a 25-year period from 46 to 27 per every 1,000 women of childbearing age. This downward trend suggests that women and couples in developed countries have become more successful at avoiding unintended pregnancies, a welcome development.

But the study also reveals uncomfortable truths about the situation elsewhere.

Read the rest of the article at The Guttmacher Institute.

Polish women strike over planned abortion ban

Women wearing black clothes and waving black flags are demonstrating across Poland, boycotting their jobs and classes as part of a nationwide strike in protest against a new law that would in effect ban abortion.

Many men also took part in demonstrations on the streets of Warsaw, Gdańsk and elsewhere across the largely Catholic nation.

Thousands of people also protested on Saturday in front of the parliament in Warsaw. Women were wearing black in a sign of mourning for the feared loss of reproductive rights; they have also warned that some women will die if the proposal passes as it stands now.

Read the full article at The Guardian.

Indonesia Seeks End to Female Genital Mutilation

The Indonesian government has launched a long-overdue campaign to eradicate the cruel practice of female genital mutilation (FGM).

The campaign, led by Yohana Yembise, the country’s minister for women’s empowerment and child protection, will deploy “scientific evidence” to dissuade religious and women’s groups who support FGM. Between 2010 to 2015, 49 percent of girls from birth to 14 years of age in Indonesia had undergone FGM.

 

The campaign is just the latest government effort to end FGM. The government banned the practice in 2006, but buckled to pressure from Islamic organizations in 2010 and issued a regulation allowing FGM “if it is carried out by medical professionals, such as doctors, midwives and nurses.” The government repealed that regulation in 2014, but has not specified penalties for those who carry out FGM.

For the full article, visit Human Rights Watch.

Iran women bike against female cycling fatwa

A ruling by Iran’s top religious leader banning women from cycling has led to angry social media users posting pictures of themselves riding their bikes in protest of the fatwa.

Iran’s religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has angered women across the country by issuing an edict banning them from riding bicycles.

“Riding [bicycles] often attracts the attention of men and exposes society to corruption, and thus contravenes women’s chastity, and it must be abandoned,” Khamenei said on September 10, according to Iranian state media.

Female cycling enthusiasts regularly face criticism and some have even been attacked or arrested in the past.

Recently, a series of campaigns encouraging people to ride their bikes in order to lower air pollution has caught on in numerous Iranian cities, leading many, both men and women, to cycle more often.

Read the entire article at Deutsche Welle.

September 28: 15 Resources for Activism for Safe and Legal Abortion

Women and girls worldwide are entitled to bodily autonomy and freedom, without discrimination. Yet we continue to see the human right to safe and legal abortion imperiled by anti-rights actors from country to country, and repeatedly attacked at the international level.

In Poland, activists today face the imminent possibility of a near-total ban on abortion. In El Salvador, conservative actors now aim to increase the penalty for abortion to 30-50 years. In Northern Ireland, women who miscarry may be threatened with criminalization. In a five year span up until January 2016, over 280 restrictions on abortion were enacted in the United States. And at the Human Rights Committee and other UN spaces, regressive coalitions are pushing to co-opt the right to life to further anti-abortion politics.

Today, September 28th, marks the Global Day of Action for Access to Safe and Legal Abortion. This day marks the struggle of activists worldwide for the human right to safe and legal abortion.

Today, we come together to declare that our bodies, health, and choices are our own, and cannot be held back by the oppressive fundamentalisms and discourses that seek to lay claim to us.

Join the Observatory on the Universality of Rights (OURs) in celebrating September 28th, standing in solidarity with activists fighting for our human right to bodily autonomy and freedom for all women across the world.

Selection of Resources 

This September 28, OURs highlights a selection of resources for activists working to further safe and legal abortion and on rights related to gender and sexuality worldwide.

Please share these with your networks, and let us know of your key resources! Tweet in solidarity using the hashtags #StepIntoOurShoes and #RightsAreUniversal.

  1. Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights: September 28th Report (2013)
  2. Sexual Rights Initiative: The Decriminalization of Abortion: A Human Rights Imperative
  3. Center for Reproductive Rights: Whose Right to Life? Women’s Rights and Prenatal Protections under Human Rights Law and Comparative Law
  4. AWID: Mass Prosecution for Abortion: Violation of the Reproductive Rights of Women in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil
  5. Ipas: Protecting Women’s Access to Safe Abortion Care – A Guide to Understanding the Human Rights to Privacy and Confidentiality
  6. Ipas: Advancing the Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights of Adolescent Girls and Young Women: A Focus on Safe Abortion in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development
  7. Ipas: A Practical Guide to Partnering with Police to Improve Abortion Access
  8. ARROW: A Call for Action towards Context-Specific Rights-Based Continuum of Quality Care
  9. Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir: Aborto: Aspectos sociales, eticos y religiosos
  10. International Campaign for Women’s Rights to Safe Abortion: How to Talk About Abortion: A Guide to Rights-Based Messaging
  11. International Campaign for Women’s Rights to Safe Abortion: Supporting Independent Use of Abortion Medicines: Fighting Stigma One Email at a Time
  12. Post-2015 Women’s Coalition: Influences of Religious Fundamentalisms on Sexual & Reproductive Health and Rights of Women
  13. Planned Parenthood: The Medical and Social Benefits Of Abortion Access
  14. Center for Reproductive Rights: Treaty Monitoring Bodies on Reproductive Rights
  15. ARROW: Young and Vulnerable – The Reality of Unsafe Abortion among Adolescent and Young Women 

Events & Actions

The Sexual Rights Initiative will host a panel on the Day of Action for Access to Safe and Legal Abortion at the 33rd session of the Human Rights Council to highlight the importance of the right to abortion and promote global policy changes. Find more information on the event here.

The Coalition of African Lesbians is hosting a week-long conversation on bodily freedoms and integrity with respect to abortion. Find out more about their week and their designated discussion topics here.

ARROW will be facilitating an online discussion today examining how and why the systemic denial of sexual and reproductive health services, including access to safe and legal abortion, is a form of institutional violence. Find out more here. 

Thousands of Saudis sign petition to end male guardianship of women

Thousands of Saudis have signed an online petition calling for the government to abolish the country’s guardianship system, which prevents women from engaging in fundamental tasks without the permission of a male relative.

“Women should be treated as a full citizen,” said activist Aziza Al-Yousef who, along with other activists, has been fighting against the guardianship system for a decade.

“This is not only a women’s issue, this is also putting pressure on normal men … this is not an issue for women only,” she told the Guardian.

Under Saudi law, women require the permission of a male guardian to travel, marry, or exit prison and it may be needed to be granted employment or access to healthcare.

A guardian is typically a woman’s father or her husband if she is married; a widow may have to seek permission from her son if she has no other men of age in her life.

But in recent years, a growing protest movement has sought to end the system. Yousef and other prominent activists started holding workshops and performing studies on the religious validity of the guardianship system five years ago. The campaign picked up steam this summer after Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a blistering report on the system.

Read the full article at The Guardian.

Egypt seeks tougher punishment for female genital mutilation

CAIRO, Aug 29 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Women’s rights activists hailed the Egyptian government on Monday for advocating increased prison sentences for perpetrators of female genital mutilation (FGM) but warned that a new law could shroud the practice in greater secrecy.

Egypt’s cabinet on Sunday approved a bill, which must be passed by parliament to become law, imposing jail terms of up to seven years for people who perform FGM and up to three years for those who escort a girl or woman to undergo the practice.

It is currently punishable in Egypt by between three months and two years in prison under a 2008 law, which was enacted after an 11-year-old girl died following an FGM procedure.

The drive for tougher sentences follows the recent death of a 17-year-old girl of complications during an FGM operation in a private hospital in Suez province.

The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), a Cairo-based rights group, welcomed the bill but said it may not deter people from performing FGM and could drive it further underground.

“It will also decrease the rate of reporting FGM cases, as imposing a punishment on whoever escorts a girl to have the operation will make families fear reporting cases,” Dalia Abd El-Hameed of the EIPR told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

For the full story, please visit Thomson Reuters Foundation News.

Qatar’s Christian Crusaders

THE GULF STATE of Qatar is small but exceptionally rich and uses its money relentlessly to acquire friends and influence. The recipients of its largesse have been many and various, from Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation in the United States to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups. But while there have often been complaints about Qatar’s support for militant Muslims its dubious links with non-Muslim religious groups have largely gone unnoticed.

Over the last decade Qatar has been working quietly with socially-conservative elements in the west to promote “traditional” ideas of family life. In doing so it has readily joined forces with Mormons and the more reactionary parts of the Roman Catholic church. It has also helped fund a right-wing think tank set up by a former leader of Britain’s Conservative Party.

In turn, these western groups seem content to accept support from a country where polygamy is legal, where gay sex — and, indeed, any kind of sex outside marriage — is a crime, where loveless arranged marriages are not uncommon, where a husband can divorce a wife simply by saying so three times but a wife who wishes to divorce her husband must go to court.

Read the rest of the article at Medium.

Egypt’s tougher penalties for FGM will have little impact, say rights groups

Egypt has increased the penalty for practising female genital mutilation to a sentence of between three and 15 years in jail, although campaigners say this will have little impact.

Successful convictions of doctors or others found to be performing the procedure are extremely rare, despite it being illegal in Egypt since 2008.

Raslan Fadl, the first doctor to be sentenced in Egypt, was recently found to have walked free after serving the minimum three-month sentence. The nature of the law allowed Fadl to negotiate with the family of 13-year-old Sohair al-Bata’a, who died after he performed FGM on her, to serve the lowest possible sentence.

On Sunday, Egypt’s cabinet proposed an amendment to the law banning FGM, which would classify it as a crime rather than a misdemeanour. Practitioners could now receive up to 15 years in jail if a victim dies, while anyone who accompanies girls to be cut could face between one and three years in prison.

“This new law won’t necessarily stop private reconciliation,” said lawyer Reda el Danbouki, who fought the Bata’a case. “If anything, it imposes a sentence on the families or whoever escorts the girl to the operation – the family will not want to say they took the girl to undergo FGM, or else they will face prison themselves.” It is common for deaths caused by FGM to be deliberately misreported by both practitioners and families, further obscuring the possibility of cracking down on those who carry it out.

Read the rest of the article at The Guardian.

OURs at the AWID Forum 2016

Join us at the AWID Forum this September 8-11th in Bahia, Brazil, to stand in solidarity with each other, to strategize towards a feminist future, and to bring together our movements in a safe space.

Now is the time to imagine futures free from oppressions, injustice, war and violence and to develop concrete strategies for people and planet based on our shared humanity.

OURs at the AWID Forum

For the first time, this year OURs is proud to host events at the 13th AWID International Forum. Look for us to highlight the impacts of conservative actors on our human rights and discuss progressive moves, innovative tactics and organizing by activists around the world to push back against the undermining of our fundamental rights and freedoms.

OURs is coordinating the following events:

Other events relevant to our work:

And some of the events our Working Group members are hosting:

If you are interested in the work of OURs or would like to collaborate, please get in touch.

For those attending the AWID Forum, we invite you to join our session, and for those not present, please join the conversation on Twitter with the following hashtags:

#RightsAreUniversal

#AWIDForum