From Sunset to a New Dawn: Sustaining Civil Society’s Voice on Safe Motherhood

March 13, 2024
By Jay Gribble & Rebecca Levine

Maternal mortality continues to be one of the scourges in global health. The fact that women die as part of bringing life is an indictment against the overall status of women around the world, and underscores the failure to prioritize women, mothers, and children. Efforts to draw attention to the causes of maternal death and the solutions to maternal mortality abound, but they fail to get enough attention from the decisionmakers who establish health priorities and allocate resources that could actually make a difference.

Global advocacy efforts—such as those led by the White Ribbon Alliance (WRA)—have made progress in drawing attention to maternal mortality, as well as the need to improve maternal health services and outcomes. While improvements in these areas continue to take place, there is still much to achieve through advocacy to improve services and outcomes.

Continued: https://www.newsecuritybeat.org/2024/03/from-sunset-to-a-new-dawn-sustaining-civil-societys-voice-on-safe-motherhood/

13.03.2024

White Ribbon Alliance

The moment that electrified France – and could push forward abortion rights around the world

Some had grumbled it was mere politicking from Macron, yet enshrining the right to abortion felt like a rare moment of unity

Agnès Poirier
Wed 6 Mar 2024

There was little doubt that the French parliament would reach a majority on Monday, when it gathered in a special session to enshrine the right to abortion into its constitution. But even so, it was an electric moment. At the Palace of Versailles, big enough to host the 925 MPs and senators eligible to vote, the scene was set to the solemn drumming of the republican guard.

Broadcast live on every news channel and beamed on to a giant screen at the Paris Trocadéro, opposite the Eiffel Tower, French citizens watched as the national assembly’s first female president, Yaël Braun-Pivet, looking calm and focused, walked towards the packed chamber to declare the hearing open. Passing republican guards in full regalia, sabres drawn, forming a guard of honour, there was total silence as she made her entrance to make history, as France became the world’s first country to guarantee women’s rights to abortion.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/06/france-abortion-rights-emmanuel-macron

06.03.2024

News

abortion law reform

constitutional amendment enshrining abortion rights

Globally, Abortion Rights Are on the March

France’s historic move to enshrine abortion rights in its constitution is in line with global trends: Countries are expanding, not curtailing, abortion access.

By Elliott Davis Jr. and Kaia Hubbard
March 5, 2024

France’s historic move to amend its constitution and enshrine a woman’s right to an abortion put the country in rare company.

While the amendment didn’t necessarily expand access to abortion in France – the practice has been legal there since 1975 – it did mark the first time a country has guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion, according to The Associated Press. France’s amendment goes further than the former Yugoslavia, whose 1974 constitution stated that “a person is free to decide on having children,” and all of its successor states have adopted similar measures in their constitutions, while not explicitly guaranteeing the right to have an abortion.

Continued: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/global-trends-move-toward-abortion-rights

05.03.2024

News

abortion law reform

Center for Reproductive Rights

Advancing together towards abortion access and quality care

19 February 2024
FIGO - Hannah Agnew, Senior Communications and Marketing Coordinator

A new supplement published in the International Journal of Gynecology (IJGO) describes the remarkable progress made in abortion access in crucial areas, such as law and policy reforms, improved access to information and supportive health systems and communities.

This compilation of positive case studies brings together examples from diverse regions, such as England and Wales, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Argentina and India.

Continued: https://www.figo.org/news/advancing-together-towards-abortion-access-and-quality-care-0

19.02.2024

Research

FIGO

Hannah Agnew

International Journal of Gynecology

Global

Clinical

Health

Birth Control and Abortion in the Middle Ages

Birth control and abortion did take place in the Middle Ages and, like today, there were many medical and ethical issues that medieval people had to contend with.

Feb 18, 2024
Medievalists.net

In the Middle Ages you will find many opinions about what should or shouldn’t be done when it came to preventing pregnancies. However, the medieval period might be unique in that it is perhaps the only time when you can read the same author in one work condemning the use of birth control and in another giving directions on how to use it.

Religious values held the most important influence on the use of birth control, before and after one conceives. Taking their cue from the Biblical commandment to “Be fruitful, and multiply,” medieval Christianity saw the sole purpose of sex as a means to conceive children. Therefore, the idea that one could use birth control to stop conception was usually harshly condemned (and often equated as being the same as abortion). One ninth-century text, explains, “a woman who has taken a magic potion, however many times she would otherwise have become pregnant and given birth, must recognize herself to be guilty of homicide.”

Continued: https://www.medievalists.net/2024/02/birth-control-abortion-middle-ages/

18.02.2024

Commentary

abortion in the Middle Ages

Birth-Control in the West in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries

concealment of pregnancy

Etienne Van de Walle

history of abortion

history of contraception

infanticide

Leon Battista Alberti

Pete Billar

The Criminalization of Abortion in the West: Its Origins in Medieval Law

Wolfgang Muller

Global

Contraception

Canada – Right-wing extremism is connected to being anti-choice – but we can win on abortion rights

As we see the growing restriction of abortion in the US, it is important that we remain vigilant of a growing anti-choice movement on the right.

by Joyce Arthur, rabble.ca
February 8, 2024

Canada has done well without any abortion law or restrictions since 1988, leaving abortion care under the same medical regulations as other healthcare. Indeed, abortion care follows the same pattern around the world regardless of law – people who want abortions have them as early as possible, while a small number of later abortions will always be needed for compelling social or medical reasons. Laws trying to regulate abortion are redundant and restrictions are harmful.

Abroad, Canada has a reputation as a socially liberal western democracy that guarantees reproductive rights and minority rights such as for gender expansive people. The Liberal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has a self-declared feminist foreign policy and has often spoken out in favour of abortion rights.

Continued: https://rabble.ca/health/right-wing-extremism-is-connected-to-being-anti-choice-but-we-can-win-on-abortion-rights/

Second trimester abortions: a preventable crisis in global abortion care

Diminishing access to second trimester abortions in many countries denies the reality of the rising number of vulnerable women most likely to need a later stage abortion. Sally Howard reports on a preventable crisis in global abortion care

BMJ 2024; 384 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.p2982
Published 31 January 2024
Sally Howard, freelance journalist

Kamila had dearly wanted to have a child. The 27 year old was happily engaged to be married and was 17 weeks pregnant when a scan showed that her fetus was developing without a skull and wouldn’t survive to birth. She was refused an abortion in her home country of Poland, where abortions in the case of fetal abnormality are prohibited.

On her way to the Netherlands, where an abortion had been arranged by the charity Abortion Without Borders, Kamila (not her real name) started bleeding heavily in a petrol station toilet. Distraught and weak, she had to be transported to a German hospital, where she gave birth to a dead fetus in the emergency room. Kamila returned to Poland after a four day hospital stay, with a bill for her medical treatment from the German state.

Poland has some of Europe’s most restrictive abortion laws (fig 1). The law that forced Kamila to travel had been in place since 2020, introduced to Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal (the national court that supervises compliance of statutory law with the country’s constitution) by the Polish Law and Justice Party, which was voted out of power on 19 October 2023. In those three years the ruling has effectively shuttered Polish abortion provision: both medical and surgical abortions are inaccessible in Poland, even in cases where they’re technically legally permitted, such as when there’s a threat to the life or health of the parent.

Continued (Behind paywall): https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj.p2982.full

31.01.2024

Abortion Without Borders

Poland Constitutional Tribunal

Polish abortion ban

Sally Howard

second trimester abortions

Making Abortion Safe Outside of the Legal System: A Q&A on Self-Managed Abortion

Sociologist Naomi Braine’s new book on the global feminist movement for self-managed abortion took her to Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Europe to study activists’ work there.

FELICIA KORNBLUH
Jan 30, 2024

From 2017 to 2019, sociologist Naomi Braine, a professor at Brooklyn College, traveled in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Europe to study what she terms a global feminist movement for self-managed abortion (SMA). The result is her new book, Abortion Beyond the Law: Building a Global Feminist Movement for Self-Managed Abortion (Verso, 2023).

The story of self-managed abortion starts from the fact that, according to the Guttmacher Institute, at least half of all abortions around the world in 2017 were medication abortions, in which people used drugs to end their pregnancies. (The ambiguous legal status of abortion in many countries means that the data is incomplete.) This contrasts with the common image of so-called “procedural” abortion, which occurs under professional medical care and mostly or entirely in a clinic or hospital.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/self-managed-abortion-naomi-braine/

It’s Time to Recognize Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare Providers as Human Rights Defenders

Around the world, frontline reproductive healthcare workers are facing physical and verbal abuse, public shaming and humiliation, harassment, legal threats, death threats, sexual assault and rapes—simply for doing their jobs.

Jan 9, 2024
by VICTORIA BOYDELL and KATE GILMORE

Around the world, frontline healthcare workers defending our right to sexual and reproductive healthcare services are under vicious attack from anti-rights actors.

In the horn of Africa, one district health official who has been providing sexual and reproductive health services for 15 years described the attacks he faces from local conservatives: “They tried to even shoot me because of the belief and the values that I had … I had provided family planning service[s] in my district. They said, ‘You are a genocider.’”

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2024/01/09/sexual-health-abortion-healthcare-providers-violence-threats-abuse/

Applying global lessons to protect abortion access in the United States

Strategies used in other countries, such as state referendums and strategic litigation, can help restore and protect abortion access in the United States, argue Terry McGovern and colleagues.

BMJ 2024; 384
https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2022-073833
Published 03 January 2024

Terry McGovern, Mary Favier, Laura Gil, Bonsitu Kitaba-Gaviglio, Clarisa Bencomo, Ira Memaj, Samantha Garbers, Malia Maier

Since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, eliminating the federal constitutional right to an abortion, the introduction of state laws and policies has made the legal and healthcare landscape more challenging. Twenty states have banned or severely restricted abortion care,1 and recent legislation is restricting access to abortion medication as well as abortion services, with Wyoming becoming the first state explicitly to ban the use of abortion medication.2

In response, US abortion rights advocates have pushed to extend federal protections and the federal government has taken important steps to expand and protect access to medication abortion. These efforts have focused on strengthening executive branch rules and guidance because the lack of a pro-abortion majority in Congress prevents legislation being passed to protect abortion. In January 2023, the US Food and Drug Administration eliminated a requirement that mifepristone, the most common form of medication abortion, be dispensed in person.3 In December 2022, the Department of Justice ruled that it was legal to post mifepristone or misoprostol, another drug often used in medication abortion, to anyone seeking an abortion.4 While these efforts are critical, federal level mitigation strategies alone are insufficient to preserve and expand abortion access and are vulnerable to legal challenges, especially if an anti-abortion administration is elected in 2024.

Continued: https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj-2022-073833