Category: Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights

Is Zika a tipping point in the fight for reproductive rights in Latin America?

Much has changed since the Zika virus was declared a global public health emergency by the World Health Organization earlier this month. The WHO alert came as the infection was linked to more than 4,000 reported cases of microcephaly—a birth defect which causes babies to be born with abnormally small heads and brain damage—in Brazil since October. While scientists work to determine the precise connection between the Zika virus and microcephaly, as well as other mental illness risks according to the latest warnings from health experts, the outbreak has kindled a critical conversation about reproductive health in themore than 25 countries and territories in the Americas where Zika infections have spiked.

Exposing the health care reality for women and girls

Recommendations by government officials in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and El Salvador for women to “avoid getting pregnant” only exposes the stark reality for many women and girls in Latin America, especially in rural areas. Most have minimal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights or education. Across Latin America and the Caribbean, for instance, WHO estimates that 22 percent of women want to delay or prevent pregnancy but do not have access to birth control. There are high levels of misinformation—for instance, most women and girls are not educated about contraception or family planning due to strong conservative rhetoric.

Women’s groups are mobilizing to fill the gap in sex education throughout the region, teaching women and girls about their sexual and reproductive health and rights, and helping them access contraceptives. They also help women to navigate the complex abortion laws and exceptions, as well as find physicians that provide reliable care and honest advice.

Read the full article from Global Fund for Women now. 

Pope suggests contraception can be condoned in Zika crisis

In a departure from previous Catholic teaching, Pope Francis suggests women exposed to the Zika virus could use artificial contraception.

Pope Francis has indicated that women exposed to the Zika virus may be permitted to use contraception to avoid pregnancy, in a departure from Catholic teaching.

However he reiterated the church’s staunch opposition to abortion, saying it was a crime and “absolute evil”.

His comments came as women in South America frantically try to terminate pregnancies for fear of giving birth to babies with microcephaly, which gives them unusually small heads.

Speaking to reporters on the papal plane as he returned to Rome after a visit to Mexico, Francis obliquely suggested that artificial contraception could be used in extreme situations to avoid pregnancy.

Unlike abortion, “avoiding pregnancy is not an absolute evil” and in certain circumstances it may be “the lesser evil”.

He referred to the exceptional dispensation issued by one of his predecessors, Pope Paul VI, who permitted Catholic nuns in Africa to take birth control pills in the face of the risk of being raped. He was thought to be referring to the conflict in what was then the Belgian Congo in the 1960s and 70s.

 

By Harriet Sherwood
Read the full article from The Guardian website

Pregnant and desperate in Evangelical Brazil

As Mariana stepped out of the car, her boyfriend Rafael knew he might never see her again.

It was a sunny summer’s morning two years ago in Rio de Janeiro, and the young couple had pulled up outside a small house in a residential northern suburb. The address had been given to them a few days earlier over the telephone by a man who did not identify himself. He told them this address was a place where they could get a certain criminal service: abortion.

Mariana, then 23, was 10 weeks pregnant and desperate. She and Rafael, her boyfriend of six months, were students and had no way to financially support a baby. Making matters worse, Mariana came from a strict evangelical Christian family. “I hadn’t dared buy contraception because if my family found it they would know I was having sex,” she said. “If they found out I was pregnant they would have forced us to get married and would have been angry forever.”

On the day of Mariana’s abortion, Rafael handed over a bag containing 1,600 reais, about $575, to a group of men who approached their car. Then they ordered him to leave. “They would not give us any information about how the procedure would be done or who would perform it,” he said. “I knew she might die or end up with terrible complications. But that was the choice we had.”

Rafael was right to be scared. Hundreds of thousands of women are hospitalized each year following complications from illegal abortions in Brazil, where legal terminations are allowed only in very limited circumstances. Scores of them die.

For decades, Brazilian authorities tolerated underground clinics, but in recent years there has been a major crackdown, coinciding with an increasingly hard-line religious Congress. The result is that far more dangerous procedures are carried out by far more unscrupulous people, according to women’s health experts.

Read the full article at Foreign Policy now. 

Zika, disease of the poor, may not change abortion in Brazil

Six months pregnant with her first child, Eritania Maria has a rash and a mild fever, symptoms of the Zika virus linked to brain deformities in newborn children in Brazil. But the 17-year-old is too scared to take a test to confirm if she has Zika.

Like other women in the slums of Recife, which squat on stilts over mosquito-ridden marshland in northeast Brazil, Maria has few options if her child develops microcephaly, the condition marked by an abnormally small head and underdeveloped brain that has been linked to Zika.

Brazil has amongst the toughest abortion laws in the world and is culturally conservative. Even if she wanted an illegal abortion and could afford one, Maria is too heavily pregnant for a doctor to risk it. So she prefers not to know.

“I’m too scared of finding out my baby will be sick,” she told Reuters, her belly poking out from beneath a yellow top.

The Zika outbreak has revived the debate about easing abortion laws but Maria’s case highlights a gap between campaigners and U.N. officials calling for change and Brazil’s poor, who are worst affected by the mosquito-borne virus yet tend to be anti-abortion.

Add a conservative Congress packed with Evangelical Christians staunchly opposed to easing restrictions, plus the difficulty of identifying microcephaly early enough to safely abort, and hopes for change seem likely to be frustrated.

As with many countries in mostly Roman Catholic Latin America, Brazil has outlawed abortion except in cases of rape, when the mother’s life is at risk or the child is too sick to survive.

An estimated 850,000 women in Brazil have illegal abortions every year, many under dangerous conditions. They can face up to 3 years in prison although in practice, jail terms are extremely rare.

With two-thirds of the population Catholic and support for Evangelicals growing fast, polls show Brazilians oppose changing the law. A survey by pollster VoxPopuli in 2010 showed that 82 percent reject decriminalization, while a Datafolha poll the same year put the figure at 72 percent.

Vandson Holanda, head of health for the Catholic Church in Brazil’s northeast, said there was no chance the Church would shift its position on abortion because of Zika.

Read the full article from Reuters

Tony Abbott jets to US to address abortion and gay-marriage opponents Alliance Defending Freedom

Fresh from giving new hope to disaffected conservative Liberals by staying in federal politics, Tony Abbott will fly to the United States on Tuesday to gee-up one of the religious right’s most reactionary bodies, the Alliance Defending Freedom.

Mr Abbott, who is being accompanied by wife Margie, will give a speech on the topic of “the importance of family” to the pro-Christian, Republican-aligned lobby, which opposes abortion, wants to end gay marriage and is pushing to roll back some feminist advances.

he speech comes as the primary race for the presidential nomination approaches fever pitch, with contenders on the Republican side scrambling to secure the overwhelmingly Christian “Tea Party” base.

The Alliance Defending Freedom’s founding president, Alan Sears, is a regular conservative voice on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News channel and co-authored the 2003 book, The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Liberty Today.

With Craig Osten, Sears argued that America’s growing tolerance of homosexuality was being achieved through the indoctrination of children, tacit support of corporate America, and through “positive” television depictions of alternative family structures.

 

By Mark Kenny
Read the full article on the Sydney Morning Herald website

OURs - News piece

The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights launches campaign to decriminalize abortion

On Jan. 18, the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights (ACHPR) launched a continental campaign for the decriminalization of abortion in Africa to bring attention to unsafe abortion which significantly threatens women’s and girls’ sexual and reproductive health and rights.

ACHPR announced the campaign during the African Union Gender is My Agenda Campaign (GIMAC) meeting held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), unsafe abortion continues to be a major cause of maternal deaths and injuries in Africa. Roughly 47,000 women die each year from complications from unsafe abortion and nearly two thirds of those deaths occur in Africa. In fact, more than 6 million unsafe abortions occur in Africa, resulting in 29,000 deaths and countless serious injuries and disabilities every year for poor, mostly rural-based African women and girls under the age 25.

Hon. Commissioner Lucy Asuagbor, Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Women, said these deaths occur partly because of laws that criminalize abortion, presuming that the threat of arrest or imprisonment will prevent women and girls from having abortions. Yet making abortion illegal does not reduce the number of abortions nor deter women from having abortions—it just makes abortion unsafe and risky, resulting in more women suffering injury or even death from complications from unsafe abortion, she noted during the campaign launch event.

The ACHPR is committed to bringing countries into compliance with their commitments under the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights and the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (Maputo Protocol); the Maputo Plan of Action; and the Campaign for the Accelerated Reduction of Maternal Mortality in Africa (CARMMA). To that end, the ACHPR has called on governments to demonstrate their commitment to African women and girls by decriminalizing abortion in their respective countries.

“Ipas is proud to partner with the ACHPR on this campaign. We are ready to bring our growing body of evidence around the criminalization of abortion to the table and will continue to push for access to safe, legal abortion for women in Africa,” says Ipas Africa Alliance Senior Advisor Lucy Lugalia, who participated in the campaign launch event.

For more information, contact media@ipas.org

Originally published on Ipas website

Bill banning child marriage fails in Pakistan after Council deems ‘un-Islamic’

Pakistani lawmakers had to withdraw a bill aimed at curbing the practice of child marriage after a prominent religious body declared the legislation un-Islamic.

The bill, which proposed raising the marriage age for females from 16 to 18, also called for harsher penalties for those who would arrange marriages involving children. Despite the laws in place, child marriages, particularly involving young female brides, are common in parts of the country. It’s estimated that some 20 percent of girls in the country are married before they turn 18.

But the Council of Islamic Ideology, a constitutional body which gives advice to parliament on the compatibility of laws with Sharia, appeared to slap down the legislation after deeming it “un-Islamic” and “blasphemous,” according toAgence France Presse. It had already handed down a similar ruling in 2014.

Read the full article on the Washington Post now. 

OURs - News piece

Dominican Republic’s top court reinstates total abortion ban

BOGOTA, Dec 4 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A decision by the Dominican Republic’s constitutional court to reinstate a total ban on abortion is putting women’s lives at risk, rights groups said.

Reforms last year to amend the country’s criminal code to allow abortion in cases of rape, incest, a deformed foetus or when a woman’s life is in danger, were passed by congress and approved by President Danilo Medina.

The reforms, a result of years of debate over the abortion ban in the predominantly Catholic and socially conservative Caribbean country, were set to take effect on Dec. 27.

But after an appeal by religious and conservative groups who said the country’s laws and constitution must protect the rights of an unborn child at all costs, the court on Wednesday ruled changes to the criminal code dating back to 1884 were unconstitutional.

“This decision takes women’s and girls’ human rights back to the 19th century,” Erika Guevara, Americas director at Amnesty International, said in a statement on Thursday.

“Its impact will be catastrophic for women and girls in the Dominican Republic who will continue to be criminalised, stigmatised and forced to seek out unsafe abortions because they are denied access to safe and legal medical treatment.”

Bishops from the country’s influential Roman Catholic Church have publicly criticised moves to overturn the abortion ban.

Rights groups say blanket bans on abortion are a leading cause of maternal mortality because they force women to undergo dangerous backstreet abortions.

 

By Anastasia Moloney

Read the full article from the Thomson Reuters Foundation

 

Young Gambian Woman (photo: Allan Hopkins)

The Gambia bans female genital mutilation

President Yahya Jammeh outlaws practice that affects three-quarters of women in west African country.

The Gambia has announced it will ban female genital mutilation (FGM) after the Guardian launched a global campaign to end the practice.

The president, Yahya Jammeh, said last night that the controversial surgical intervention would be outlawed. He said the ban would come into effect immediately, though it was not clear when the government would draft legislation to enforce it.

FGM involves cutting female genitalia – often when girls are young – to remove their labia and clitoris, which often leads to lifelong health complications, including bleeding, infections, vaginal pain and infertility. More than 130 million women worldwide are subjected to the procedure in Africa and the Middle East.

The practice is widespread in many African countries, including the Gambia, where 76% of females have been subjected to it. The age at which FGM takes place in the Gambia is not recorded, but it is reported that the trend of practicing FGM on infant girls is increasing. By the age of 14, 56% of female children in the country have had the procedure.

 

By Kate Lyons
Read the full article on The Guardian website

Demonstration for the Health of the Mother, May 28 2007 (photo: Sven Hansen)

Commission on Human Rights reprimands Nicaragua for continued abortion ban

Criminalization of abortion denies young sexual violence victims access to life-saving care.

Years of advocacy by Ipas and partners in Central America paid off last month when leaders of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) issued a strongly worded reprimand to the Nicaraguan government for its continued violation of women’s sexual and reproductive rights.

During a hearing on Oct. 20 focused on Nicaraguan women’s and girls’ sexual and reproductive rights and access to justice, the IACHR special rapporteurs on the rights of women and of children issued a severe reprimand to Nicaragua’s government for its continuation of a total abortion ban, especially when there are high rates of sexual violence against girls in the country. They also admonished Nicaragua’s refusal to recognize claims of unconstitutionality brought against the ban since 2007 (the ban was enacted in 2006), and its refusal to receive a country visit by IACHR members to assess the status of women’s human rights in Nicaragua firsthand.

Ipas Central America presented new statistics on sexual violence in the country that show how the abortion ban disproportionately harms young women. Fully 83 percent of sexual violence victims are age 16 or younger in Nicaragua, and they face a high risk of unwanted pregnancy—and the possibility of resorting to unsafe, clandestine abortions—as a result.

“We are encouraged by the commission’s strong statements in support of women’s and girls’ right to safe, legal abortion in Nicaragua, including victims of sexual violence,” says Ipas Central America Policy Advisor Mayte Ochoa. “Along with our partners, Ipas has been presenting to the commission for years on the terrible rates of sexual violence—and the lack of safe, legal abortion services—that women face in this country.”

Ipas Central America has been working with the IACHR since 2007 to raise awareness of women’s human rights violations in Nicaragua, and has also worked with partners in El Salvador like the Agrupación Ciudadana por la Despenalización del Aborto (Citizen Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion) to advocate against the total abortion ban in that country. As a result of these efforts, in the past five years the commission has agreed to hear the cases of three specific women denied life-saving health care and/or imprisoned due to these abortion bans, and the commission’s statements and calls to action are now escalating as the governments of both countries continue to resist appeals for legal change.

“The IACHR is increasingly invested in tackling issues of women’s sexual and reproductive rights,” Ochoa says. “We’re grateful they’ve been listening to our ongoing request to address these urgent topics directly—and we hope for a prompt response from the Nicaraguan government.”

Another hearing before the IACHR in October focused on the harmful effects of El Salvador’s total abortion ban.

Learn about Ipas’s previous (2013) presentation before the IACHR: “Inter-American Human Rights Commission holds landmark hearings on abortion laws in Latin America.”

For more information, contact media@ipas.org

 

Article originally published on Ipas website