International Campaign for Women’s Right to Safe, Legal Abortio

28 MAY 2012, International Day of Action for Women’s Health

On this Day of Action, ICMA is happy to announce the launch of the International Campaign for Women’s Rights to Safe Abortion. This campaign aspires to become a movement to challenge the growing threat posed by conservative political and religious forces who are seeking to turn the clock back, block efforts to improve laws and provide services, and exclude abortion from maternal mortality reduction and family planning initiatives. Involvement in the campaign is open to all civil society and other groups/ organizations/ networks/ individuals who endorse its aims, objectives and guiding principles and who support women's right to safe abortion.

We invite you to join us!

International Campaign for Women’s Right to Safe, Legal Abortion

In the past decade, a much greater awareness of the need for safe abortion has emerged across the globe, and an increasing number of clinics and clinicians are providing aspiration abortions and promoting the use of medical abortion pills, including in countries where abortion remains legally restricted, resulting in a fall in the number of deaths from major complications of unsafe abortion.

However, these positive changes in many legally restricted settings, because they are not available by right, have left out a great number of women who are young, single, poor, and living outside major urban areas, where most of these changes have taken place. Moreover, even when safe services exist in these settings, they are often too expensive for many young and poor women to afford in a timely way. Thus, many millions of women continue to resort to unsafe providers or self-inducing abortion using misoprostol pills. While self-use of misoprostol was shown as early as the late 1980s in Brazil to reduce deaths and serious complications from unsafe abortion, it is not problem-free and many women have little or no information how best to use it most effectively.

In spite of agreements that unsafe abortion is a serious public health problem, approved at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo in 1994, the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, the Maputo Plan of Action 2006 and although a good number of countries have amended their abortion laws and attempted to increase access to safe services to some extent since 1994, at least through social marketing of medical abortion pills, there has been a resounding failure in many countries in the global South and elsewhere to protect existing abortion rights and to make legal abortions available, let alone to reform existing laws and policies, provide abortions at primary health care level, and train mid-level abortion service providers to staff those services, in order to make all abortions legal and safe.

Moreover, a well-funded, well-organised, coordinated opposition to abortion has been developing over the past decade which aims to recreate a politically hostile climate against abortion, led by the Vatican and other conservation religious forces. It is threatening hard-won reproductive and sexual rights of many kinds, including access to safe abortion, in a growing number of countries.

On 24 October 2011, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, Anand Grover, presented his annual report to the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly. The report focused on the interaction between criminal laws and other legal restrictions relating to sexual and reproductive health and the right to health. It highlights that the right to sexual and reproductive health is an essential component of the right to health, and that States must ensure these rights are implemented for the right to health to be fully realised. The Special Rapporteur outlined 14 recommendations for a right to health approach, including encouraging States to decriminalise abortion; decriminalise the use and supply of all forms of contraception; remove barriers for spousal and/or parental consent; and ensure access to evidenced-based information and education on sexual and reproductive health. The General Assembly’s response was very positive. The majority of States who spoke during the dialogue welcomed the report’s contribution to the implementation of the right to health. However, supportive speakers were mainly from Western/Nordic States (the European Union, Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway, US, Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, South Africa), while Egypt, Swaziland, and Chile reacted more negatively. A global consensus among States is far from being achieved.

At the global level, review processes have been launched to assess the progress of the ICPD Programme of Action and the Millennium Development Goals. It is thus a crucial time to mobilise civil society action across the globe, to create an awareness and an insistence that women’s need for safe, legal abortion receives its rightful place within the context of women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights, many of which are also being contested.

For all these reasons, we think it is now time to launch an international campaign for women’s right to safe, legal abortion and to call on advocates, law and policy makers, health service providers and researchers, to build greater local and civil society involvement in order to create a critical mass of support for women’s need for access to safe abortion; promote a climate that is conducive to women’s human rights; and develop a deeper understanding of and support for women’s right to decide whether and when to have children.

This campaign will be based in social justice advocacy, that is, it will:

• increase fairness in the distribution of resources (e.g. in relation to services such as health or education, ensure equity in their availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality);
• end discrimination against all groups, fostering values that recognise all people as equal; and
• promote the participation of people in policy and implementation processes that affect their lives, and transparency and accountability for how decisions are made and how they impact on society, thus incorporating social, economic, cultural, civil and political rights. [1]

The year 2012 will be spent articulating the goals and objectives of this campaign, which will be focused on promoting national and regional activities, gathering and disseminating evidence, and bringing together representatives of networks and organisations who have committed themselves to taking this campaign forward – to share strategies and experiences, to develop and increase advocacy skills and advocacy plans and activities, and to motivate national, regional and international involvement in this campaign on the part of everyone who support women’s right to safe, legal abortion, especially among young women.

References
1. Klugman B. Effective social justice advocacy: a theory-of-change framework for assessing progress. Reproductive Health Matters 2011;19(38):146–62.

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On this International Day of Action for Women’s Health, we congratulate the World Health Organization for announcing the updated forthcoming Safe Abortion Guidance (2012) on its web page!
Updated "Safe abortion: technical and policy guidance for health systems" will be available soon on this link http://www.who.int/reproductivehealth/publications/unsafe_abortion/9789241548434/en/.

On this day of Action, ICMA calls for Mifepristone and Misoprostol to be approved in all countries. The drugs are on the Essential Drug List of WHO and should be made available at an affordable price for safe abortion in all countries.