May 17, 2022
PATRICK ADAMS, NPR
Ukrainian women who were raped by Russian soldiers are among the millions of refugees who have fled to Poland.
And they now find themselves in a country that severely restricts access to reproductive health care, including both contraception and abortion.
By Annabel Rackham, BBC News
Apr 29, 2022
Charities are working to deliver emergency contraception into Ukrainian hospitals as reports of rape rise.
Nearly 3,000 packets of morning-after pills have been sent to areas of the country most affected by the Russian invasion.
The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) has provided the pills, which volunteers are delivering.
Continued: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-61269792
Ukrainian women fleeing the war are at risk of sexual violence, rape, and trafficking and those who are pregnant as a result cannot get an abortion in Poland due to one of Europe’s strictest anti-abortion laws.
By Giedre Peseckyte | EURACTIV.com
Apr 27, 2022
During the first days of the war, a 29-year-old Ukrainian woman fled the country with her two children. After about a week of travelling, she crossed the Ukrainian-Polish border, having never visited before and not speaking the language. As she travelled at night, by the side of the road, she saw groups of men holding signs with the name of Polish cities written on them in Cyrillic.
“You might have heard the great solidarity from the Polish people, and you might be tempted to get into one of the cars parked on the side of the road before the laws were passed and before drivers were registered,” said Anna Dąbrowska, president of Homo Faber, a Polish human rights organisation, during a speech to LIBE and FEMM parliamentarians on 21 April.
As sexual violence on children and young women is increasingly reported, pregnant women, including rape survivors, struggle to access sexual healthcare under Poland’s strict abortion laws
by Mathilde Grandjean
April 20, 2022
Since the start of the war, over 4.6 million Ukrainian refugees – 90% of whom are women and children – have fled their homes to seek sanctuary in neighbouring countries. Poland has received the highest number of displaced Ukrainians, as nearly 3 million refugees have entered the country since February. Amongst them are rape survivors and pregnant refugees in urgent need of medical help, including access to emergency contraception and abortion.
However, Poland’s near-total ban on abortion added to a lack of key sexual and reproductive health medicines and products obstruct humanitarian efforts to provide medical assistance to rape survivors and refugees who wish to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.
Tuesday, 19 April 2022
By Liv Klingert
The controversial debate on abortion in Poland has been reignited following the arrival of Ukrainian women refugees who have been victims of sexual violence by Russian soldiers in Ukraine.
Under current restrictive abortion laws, it is uncertain whether women who become pregnant through rape and seek refuge in Poland can still have legal and safe abortions there, De Standaard reported.
Continued: https://www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/218090/ukrainian-refugees-ignite-abortion-debate-in-poland
By Irungu Houghton
Apr 2nd 2022
A policy storm is brewing at just the right time. Last week, women and youth activists took to Nairobi streets to stop the launch of the Health Ministry’s Reproductive Health Policy 2020-2030. Two days later, Malindi High Court Judge Reuben Nyakundi delivered an iconic ruling in favour of women’s right to abortion.
Coming five months before the election of 47+1 administrations, parties, political aspirants, and the public need to pay attention. The nation has fundamentally changed since the Health Ministry first drafted the Reproductive Health Policy (2020-2030) in 2018. For two solid years, Covid-19 subjected women and girls to a double-barrelled threat. Sexual and gender-based violence increased five-fold alongside rising living costs, joblessness and economic distress.
Strict abortion prohibitions do not stop women and girls from having abortions; they just force them to have unsafe abortions, putting their lives and health at risk.
Tamara Taraciuk Broner, Santiago Menna – Human Rights Watch
January 5, 2022
In mid-November, a Paraguayan government hotline received a report of suspected sexual abuse against a 13-year-old Indigenous girl in a community near the border with Brazil. The case was assigned to Roselí Echeguren, a lawyer in a government office for the protection of children’s rights in Paraguay.
Echeguren told Human Rights Watch that community members had noticed that the girl had started to wear a girdle. Echeguren went to see the girl and took her to the hospital, where doctors confirmed that she was pregnant. The girl told her she had kept silent “out of fear.”
Continued: https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/01/05/paraguays-draconian-abortion-law-punishes-rape-survivors
Every year almost half of all pregnancies about 121 million are unintended
MWANGI ALVIN
6 December 2021
Globally, an estimated 736 million women—almost one in three—have been subjected to intimate partner violence, non-partner sexual violence or both at least once in their lives.
The rates of depression, anxiety disorders, unplanned pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections and HIV are higher in women who have experienced violence compared to women who have not.
Abortion: The double torture of a girl in Bolivia
Written by George Holan
December 3, 2021
The ordeal of an 11-year-old girl who became pregnant after repeated rapes by a relative has given visibility, albeit fleetingly, to the enormous obstacles that stand in the way of access to legal abortion in Bolivia.
After weeks of disseminating the case in the local media and thanks to the intervention of the Ombudsman’s Office, the girl was finally able to terminate her pregnancy on November 6. Since then, the subject has disappeared from public discussion, as if it had been an exceptional case.
Continued: https://plainsmenpost.com/2021/12/03/abortion-the-double-torture-of-a-girl-in-bolivia-opinion/
By Kara Fox, CNN
Wed December 1, 2021
(CNN) An epidemic of childhood pregnancy in Paraguay is being fueled by widespread sexual abuse and restrictive abortion laws, according to a new Amnesty International report.
At least 1,000 girls aged 14 or younger gave birth in the country between 2019 and 2020, the report says. It adds that more than 12,000 teenage girls between the ages of 15 and 19 gave birth in 2019.
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