News Observer, August 14, 2016 5:59 AM
By Manju Rajendran
Last fall, I had the opportunity to help facilitate a gathering of abortion-stigma workers from several countries across the world who converged in Peru to share findings and troubleshoot challenges in their work.
They were medical providers, researchers, popular educators, and community organizers, and they united through Inroads, an international network for the reduction of abortion discrimination and stigma. Through their stories, I learned about repressive conditions in homes, schools, hospitals, villages, cities and disaster zones.
As participants reported on projects in Central and South America, Africa and Asia, from many different faith and cultural traditions, I found myself reckoning with painful similarities with my community’s experience trying to access safe, legal, and affordable abortion care in North Carolina.
Here, too, we are constantly defending our right to make decisions about whether to carry a pregnancy to term, and fighting to protect our access to the reproductive health care we need without shame.
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Source: News Observer