The woman was charged with procuring an abortion, while her male partner was charged with supplying drugs to procure an abortion – charges that could have put them in prison for up to 14 years. But just this week, Cairns District Court jury dismissed the charges after deliberating for only an hour.

The ruling sets a new precedent in the area: the couple was admittedly guilty under present law, but the jury refused to convict them of the charges. This could create a legal basis for the pursuit of abortion rights, particularly with regard to medical abortion, which is becoming increasingly preferred as a method of non-surgical abortion early in a pregnancy.

For more information on the pro-choice movement in Queensland, check out the Pro-Choice Action Collective.

For more on the importance of safe abortion, view our factsheet “Access to Safe Abortion Is a Human Right.”

Millennium Development Goal 5: Improve Maternal Health

Of the eight Millennium Development Goals, many experts agree that progress on MDG5—reducing maternal mortality by 75 percent—is perhaps the most dismal.  While UN agencies last week announced a 34% decline in deaths during pregnancy and childbirth, more than 350,000 women still die senselessly due to preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth.  And for each woman who dies, thousands more suffer debilitating injuries.

The 2007 film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days brings to life a story that is rarely highlighted in the call to action for maternal health: the 70,000 deaths and injuries caused each year by unsafe abortion.  Set in Romania when abortion was illegal, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days tells the story of two university students, friends Otilia and Gabita who arrange an abortion for Gabita.

The audience accompanies them on this intense and emotional journey, made even more powerful by the cramped sets and lingering camera shots.  The viewer is with the women when they locate an unqualified provider to do the procedure, a man who demands sex from Otilia and Gabita before performing the abortion in a hotel room; when they desperately scrounge to find the money to pay him; and as they endure the painful physical and emotional side effects of undergoing an illegal and unsafe abortion.   Nowhere is the point made more clear than in the film’s opening and closing images: The beginning shot of two goldfish swimming in a bowl and the last frame of the two women behind the tall glass windows of a restaurant highlight both the vulnerability and isolation of Otilia and Gabita’s position.

Women on Waves has more information, or if you read Spanish you should check out the hotline project’s website.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told it like it is when in Canada on March 30: “Reproductive health includes contraception and family planning and access to legal safe abortions,” she said during a news conference.

The health links between contraception and maternal health – which enables women’s bodies to recover between births and to delay pregnancy until women are physically able to safely carry the pregnancy to term – have long been known and promoted. Every year, nearly 70,000 women die unnecessarily from the complications of unsafe abortions, and countless more suffer infections, infertility, and debilitating injuries. It doesn’t take an epidemiologist or social scientist to realize the positive impact that access to contraceptive services and safe abortion would have on the maternal mortality rates.

Canada has been spearheading a G8 effort to address maternal morbidity and mortality globally – and since late February has been wavering in its support for systematically addressing this entrenched health problem. With all the progress that has been made over the years on a range of health issues, there has never really been a significant improvement on maternal morbidity and mortality.

Clinton’s welcomed and strong remarks will help the G8 and the rest of the world move forward. There are no simple solutions to this – and Clinton’s statement reminds the world about the practical steps that need to be taken to make a dent in this global health problem. Kudos to that kind of leadership – we’re behind you all the way.

Read more:

• Access to Safe Abortion is a Human Right. Also available in French, Portuguese, and Spanish.
• Five Sexual and Reproductive Health Services that Will Make Pregnancy Safer for All. Also available in Spanish, French, and Portuguese.

This past week, a story has been brewing in Nicaragua about a pregnant woman in her late twenties, anonymized as “Amalia,” who has metastatic cancer. Without an abortion followed by cancer treatment, she and the fetus will most likely die.

Reproductive health advocates have launched an advocacy and information campaign about the case and have been directing letters to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to grant an exception to the Nicaraguan law in this case. As of Sunday, we’ve received news that the IACHR responded favorably to the urgent precautionary measures submitted by a Nicaraguan strategy group. The next step is for the Nicaraguan government to respond favorably to Amalia’s situation and provide prompt and comprehensive cancer treatment.

Here are a few great posts on the subject:

• Nicaragua Anti-Abortion Law Becomes a Cancer Patient’s Death Sentence on Change.org
• Jodi Jacobson has written a few posts on RH Reality Check – here’s her latest (with links to the previous two)

We’ve blogged about the Nicaraguan abortion ban before, and if you want more in depth information about the ban and its effects, check out Amnesty International’s 50 page report, The Total Abortion Ban in Nicaragua (link leads to a PDF of the report).

In describing the focus of MARIA (which promotes the organization through its tagline “fondo de abortion para la justicia social,” or the abortion fund for social justice), Eugenia stressed the important role that class plays in access to safe abortion services, and reproductive health care in general. The average fee for abortion services in Mexico is equivalent to USD $500; whether abortion is legal or illegal, women who have money can buy access to safe abortions. Poor women often seek alternative methods, which range from traditional herbal remedies to ingesting poisons.

According to Eugenia, Poor women who legally should have access to abortion in states that allow abortion in cases of rape and incest are sometimes denied services. Eugenia gave an example of a 16 year-old indigenous girl who was raped and whose family was supportive of her choice to have an abortion. However, the girl was unable to secure safe and legal services locally. With the assistance of the MARIA fund, women like this teenager are able to access their rights.

Eugenia’s tour in the United States is part of MARIA’s new initiative to raise funds to continue their support for women who need abortions. She explained that in Mexico, there isn’t the same kind of donor culture as there is in the United States; individuals are accustomed to donating to churches, but not to non-profits. This is part of the reason that the conservative Catholic Church is so strong throughout the country, and is the driving force behind their plan to seek donations from individuals in the United States. Presently, most of their funding comes from international organizations, while they also receive funds from individuals in the United States and Canada, and Eugenia’s trip is part of MARIA’s initial push to create an international network.

Ultimately, though it is crucial for MARIA’s sustainability that they establish a network of individual donors, Eugenia thinks that it is important to give women support that reaches beyond money.

“Initially we found that there were women who really wanted the service but were really fragile, who thought that God would come and take their ability to have other children,” said Eugenia. As a result, MARIA has developed beyond a fund and into a true support network that connects women in need with transportation, housing, and meals during their stressful trip to Mexico City. They also provide their clients with counseling before and after the procedure, and follow-up support after they’ve returned home.

For more information, check out the recent story by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, The hard reality behind Mexico’s bitter abortion debate, as well as this report from the Guttmacher Institute: Estimates of Induced Abortion in Mexico: What’s Changed Between 1990 and 2006?

While there are many more steps in the health care insurance reform debate in the Congress – especially since the final bill only had a 5 vote margin of victory in the House and the Senate is struggling through various proposals – it will be an uphill climb to pass anything by both houses that does not include the damaging Stupak amendment.

The Global Gag Rule has been used as a political football since it was initially instated by Ronald Reagan in 1984, with women in the developing world bearing the brunt of this harmful policy that was also active under the Bush Sr. and Bush Jr Administrations. Though the Global Gag Rule Executive Order was rescinded by President Obama, nothing stops it from being reinstated through an Executive Order by a new president in the future. In a 17 – 11 vote by the Senate State-Foreign Operations Committee, a permanent repeal became part of the Senate fiscal 2010 State-Foreign Operations spending bill (S 1434). Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) offered the amendment that ensures a hostile administration cannot reinstate the Global Gag Rule without changing the law through Congress. Senator Lautenberg in a recent CQ Today article stated, “Health care providers across the globe should be able to care for the health of women and families without ideological obstacles blocking the way.”

The full Senate has yet to take up the bill for passage since it passed out of Committee in July 2009 – perhaps due to the fact that the National Right to Life Committee is raising its opposition to the Lautenberg amendment and mounting pressure against it. Because they will “score” the vote in this way, which affects their endorsement of political candidates in the future, middle of the road Senators can be swayed by the pressure. If that happens, it may be challenging to pass the bill without the 60 votes likely to be needed in the Senate.

Most recently, the organization has put out a report called Catholic Voters’ Views on Health Care Reform and Reproductive Health Care Services (link gets you a PDF). The results are really fascinating, and much more pro-woman than I assumed they’d be. Here’s a snippet, download the PDF for more:

Large majorities of Catholic voters support health insurance coverage for abortions—either in a private or a government-run scheme:
• when a pregnancy poses a threat to the life of a woman (84 percent)
• when a pregnancy is due to rape or incest (76 percent)
when a pregnancy poses long-term health risks for the woman (73 percent)
• when test results show a fetus has a severe abnormal condition (66 percent)

]]> http://blog.iwhc.org/2009/10/catholic-pro-choice-and-complicated/feed/ 1 http://blog.iwhc.org/2009/10/hoping-for-progress-brazil-supreme-court-will-soon-rule-on-abortion-law/ http://blog.iwhc.org/2009/10/hoping-for-progress-brazil-supreme-court-will-soon-rule-on-abortion-law/#comments Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:23:27 +0000 Denise Hirao http://blog.iwhc.org/?p=2180 In Brazil, abortion is a crime in most circumstances, including when the woman is carrying an anencephalic fetus – a fetus whose brain is undeveloped and will thus die in the uterus or right after birth. As soon as this month, Brazil’s Supreme Court will rule on a case that might decriminalize abortion for cases of anencephaly.

Last week our partner the Institute of Bioethics, Human Rights and Gender (ANIS), launched a campaign for the right to interrupt a pregnancy in cases of anencephaly. The organization posted a video in Portuguese on youtube and they have an online petition that can be signed by anyone, not only Brazilians. We encourage everyone to sign it!

Also: some more background on the development of this case over the past few years. A few months ago when Debora Diniz, founder of ANIS and now a board member of IWHC, was in town, I interviewed her a bit about the work that ANIS has been doing. Here’s an excerpt of that interview – for the full interview, plus a short video clip, check out the original post.

DEBORA DINIZ: In 2004, Anis presented a case to the Brazilian Supreme Court. It was a case on an anencephalic pregnancy, which is when the fetus has no brain and will not survive after birth. In Brazil, abortion is banned with two exceptions: when the woman’s life is at risk and in case of rape. Our idea was to change this small piece of abortion legislation at the Supreme Court level.

DENISE HIRAO: So this case was filed in the Brazilian judiciary and it went to the Supreme Court. Can you tell us what has happened since then?

DEBORA DINIZ: We got a preliminary injunction, a temporary authorization that allows women to decide if they want to abort when encephaly occurs. No women were forced to abort; they were free to choose whatever they wanted. But we lost the authorization; it was cancelled by the Supreme Court.

DENISE HIRAO: I understand that you have made a few short documentaries about this issue. Can you tell us a bit about the films?

DEBORA DINIZ: In partnership with International Women’s Health Coalition we did two films. Four Women tells the story of four women who were able to get abortions during the time that women were protected by the preliminary injunction. The second film is Severina’s Story – Severina is the name of a farmer, a poor woman who was in the hospital on the same day that the Supreme Court cancelled the authorization. We decided to follow Severina during four months after the cancellation so we could show the part of Severina’s life that the Supreme Court never witnessed.

Denise Hirao is IWHC’s Program Officer for Latin America. Read her bio here

]]> http://blog.iwhc.org/2009/10/hoping-for-progress-brazil-supreme-court-will-soon-rule-on-abortion-law/feed/ 1