Decriminalization of abortion in Mexico spurs international calls for stronger reforms

Daniela Pulido | Facultad de Derecho PUCP, PE
November 30, 2024

Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Thursday called on Mexican authorities to strengthen abortion access and eliminate remaining criminal code barriers after the Congress of the State of Mexico voted to decriminalize abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

HRW emphasized that while the State of Mexico’s reform marks substantial progress, implementation remains crucial. The organization advocated for comprehensive service delivery and the complete removal of remaining legal barriers that might discourage healthcare providers or patients.

Continued: https://www.jurist.org/news/2024/11/decriminalization-of-abortion-in-mexico-spurs-international-calls-for-stronger-reforms/

30.11.2024

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abortion law reform

Congress of the State of Mexico

decriminalization of abortion

France marks 50 years since journey to decriminalise abortion began

Fifty years ago the French parliament passed a groundbreaking bill that would eventually decriminalise abortion, championed by health minister Simone Veil, amidst intense opposition.

29/11/2024
By: Sarah Elzas with RFI

After three days of fierce debate, the first draft of the bill was passed on 29 November, 1974. And while the right to abortion has since been enshrined in the French constitution, a world first, the bill’s adoption by the National Assembly half a century ago was far from a given.

Newly elected president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing had promised to decriminalise abortion, but his justice minister, Jean Lecanuet, who was tasked with drafting the legislation, refused to do it for personal, ethical reasons.

Continued: https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20241129-fifty-years-ago-france-started-on-path-to-decriminalising-abortion

29.11.2024

Valéry Giscard d’Estaing

Jordan’s Abortion Conundrum

The country’s strict laws leave women with impossible choices and facing financial struggles, stigma and dangerous procedures

Meghan Davidson Ladly
November 29, 2024

Amal watches her children play on the living room floor of her house on a quiet street in a suburb of Jordan’s capital. As dusk settles over the sloping hills of Amman, she sinks into a sofa and lights a cigarette, adjusting her hijab.

“It is illegal, but you can’t know how I feel,” she says. “I couldn’t think of anything except getting rid of this pregnancy. Even my kids — I couldn’t think of them. And I knew I had to make a decision.”

Continued: https://newlinesmag.com/spotlight/jordan-abortion-conundrum/

World: States Must Step Up Protection for Abortion Care Providers

29 November 2024
Amnesty International

On international Women Human Rights Defenders Day, a coalition of human rights organizations are launching a new set of guidelines for governments to protect frontline abortion rights defenders, including healthcare providers.

Amnesty International, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), Ipas, MSI Reproductive Choices, the Organisation Pour Le Dialogue Pour L'Avortement Sécurisé (ODAS Centre) and the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM) published the Key principles and actions to safeguard abortion care providers as human rights defenders.

Continued: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/11/world-states-must-step-up-protection-for-abortion-care-providers/

New Zealand – Remembering the lives lost to illegal abortion in NZ

Nov 29, 2024

Before abortion was decriminalised in the late 1970s, generations of New Zealand women had to risk their own lives to terminate a pregnancy.

Some took pills and potions from back-street chemists, others threw themselves down staircases, took rugged horse rides, drank gin in the bath and inserted coat hangers into their vaginas.

Until the 1970s, about 20 women a year died as a result of abortions gone wrong, historian Jock Phillips tells RNZ's Nine to Noon, and this difficult aspect of Aotearoa's history deserves to be better understood.

Continued: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/535258/remembering-the-lives-lost-to-illegal-abortion-in-nz

Nigeria – IRISE harps on safe abortion, convenes stakeholders’ meeting for sustainable support system

November 29, 2024
Cyriacus Nnaji

AS efforts are being made globally to ensure a safer reproductive health system, a Non-Governmental Organisation, Initiative to Resist Institutional Slavery and Exploitation (IRISE) has convened a stakeholders’ meeting to find solution to unsafe abortion practices which are destroying not just the youth but also women of reproductive age.

This much was revealed at a stakeholders’ meeting convened by IRISE on 23th of November, 2024… Leading to the meeting was a survey conducted in October, 2024 aimed to understand community specific factors affecting Sexual Reproductive Health Rights (SRHR) and the impact of unsafe abortion practices in Oshodi-Isolo.

Continued: https://authorityngr.com/2024/11/29/irise-harps-on-safe-abortion-convenes-stakeholders-meeting-for-sustainable-support-system/

29.11.2024

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Charles Christopher

Initiative to Resist Institutional Slavery and Exploitation

UK – Nigel Farage’s frightening comments on abortion prove he is a second-rate Trump

I had an abortion the better part of a decade ago - it was a turning point in my life

November 29, 2024
By Rebecca Reid

Years ago a man told me that I was being paranoid about abortion rights. We’d been drinking wine all afternoon and for some reason I threw in to the conversation that my biggest fear about Donald Trump’s 2016 presidency was the roll back of reproductive freedom. I remember vividly him taking a drag on his cigarette and saying “not going to happen” before moving on to talk to someone else more fun. And I’ve thought about him, and his certainty, every time there has been a significant step towards the erasure of a woman’s right to choose.

So I thought of him again today when I read that Nigel Farage had weighed in on the regulations about abortion. Speaking to reporters at a Reform UK press conference, Farage was asked whether he thinks that the term limits on abortions are too late. He said: “You know, is 24 weeks right for abortion, given that we now save babies at 22? That, to me, would be worthy of a debate in Parliament.”

Continued: https://inews.co.uk/opinion/nigel-farage-abortion-second-rate-trump-3406686

29.11.2024

third-trimester abortions

Nepal – Access denied: Unsafe abortion continues despite legalisation 22 years ago

Ten percent of women are denied abortion services, and 42 percent with pregnancies beyond 10 weeks are turned away, new report says.

Arjun Poudel
November 29, 2024

Although abortion was legalised in Nepal in 2002, unsafe abortions are still rampant in many places throughout the country, and women are denied services, a new report shows.

According to the report prepared by Center for Research on Environment Health and Population Activities (CREHPA), and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), one in 10 women seeking abortions at health facilities was denied care.

Moreover, four in 10 women (42 percent) with more than 10 weeks of pregnancy or who were unaware of their gestational age were denied an abortion.

Continued: https://kathmandupost.com/health/2024/11/29/access-denied-unsafe-abortion-continues-despite-legalisation-22-years-ago

29.11.2024

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barriers to access

Center for Research on Environment Health and Population Activities

USA – “We Never Assumed Anything”: A Lifetime of Providing Abortion Care

In their new book We Choose To, Dr. Curtis Boyd and Glenna Halvorson-Boyd reflect on their decades helping women who needed abortions—before, during, and after Roe.

Regina Mahone
November 29, 2024

Five years ago, when Curtis Boyd, MD, and Glenna Halvorson-Boyd, PhD, RN, set out to write a book about their lives and 50-year-career providing abortion care in Texas and New Mexico, Roe was still the law of the land. But their book, which was published in September, made its debut two years after that landmark case was overturned and just a few short months before Donald J. Trump will retake the White House. As they explain in the Afterword of We Choose To: A Memoir of Providing Abortion Care Before, During, and After Roe (Disruption Books), the work they devoted their lives to, expanding access to abortions, is being undone—and once Trump is back in power, that reversal will only accelerate. We can expect that Trump will seek out ways to impose international abortion bans like the global gag rule, and his supporters would like to see him enforce the Comstock Act, which would ban mailing abortion pills. Knowing all of that, Glenna’s question in the Afterword hits hard: “Why did we bother?”

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/curtis-glenna-boyd-abortion-provider-interview/

Europe – Reproductive Rights: “Law Can Be an Instrument for Transformative Change”

Nov 28, 2024

On 6 December 2024, Sciences Po’s Gender Studies Programme and Law School will hold a Symposium on Reproductive Rights. In order to better understand the goals of the symposium and what it will entail, its two organisers, Helena Alviar García, full professor at the Sciences Po Law School, and Marie Mercat-Bruns, Full University Professor at the Cnam and affiliated to Sciences Po Law School, have answered some questions.

Why are reproductive rights important?
Marie Mercat-Bruns: Reproductive rights are essential to understand the current trends we face with regard to issues of gender equality, privacy and freedom to control one’s body. But beyond, the individual choice of women to procreate or not lies the question of structural inequalities to access contraception, health care, work-life balance and equal opportunity all over the globe. Beyond the intimate question of self-determination and risks of physical harm linked to the criminalisation of abortion, lies the question of access to justice, judicial power and the limits of the democratic process in preserving rights of women or transgender persons, acquired in some countries, more than forty years ago.

Continued: https://www.sciencespo.fr/ecole-droit/en/news/reproductive-rights-law-can-be-an-instrument-for-transformative-change/

28.11.2024