STEVIE EMILIA, THE JAKARTA POST
Jakarta / Tue, September 29, 2020
Abortion – safe or unsafe, legal or illegal – has existed throughout history. Yet, it continues to be the most sensitive and controversial issue in reproductive health.
The WHO has disclosed that an average of 73.3 million – safe and unsafe – abortions took place worldwide per year between 2015 and 2019, with the rate of abortions being higher in developing regions than in developed ones.
Pro-choice activists demand decriminalisation referendum happen despite conservative opposition
Darcy Jimenez
Tue 29 Sep 2020
Earlier this year, pro-choice activists in Gibraltar were hopeful that their territory’s abortion laws – the harshest in Europe – could soon be overturned.
Terminations are banned in the tiny British territory, even in the cases of rape, incest, or foetal abnormality where the foetus will not survive. Abortions are punishable by life imprisonment, except when the woman’s life is in danger.
Twenty years after medication abortion was approved in the U.S., patients are still jumping through hoops to access it.
By Melissa Jeltsen, HuffPost US
09/28/2020
Twenty years ago today, the Food and Drug Administration approved mifepristone, a drug used to terminate early pregnancies that held the promise of revolutionizing abortion care in the U.S.
Colloquially called the abortion pill, mifepristone is taken in combination with another drug, misoprostol, and allows patients under 10 weeks pregnant to have an abortion in the privacy of their home, instead of inside an abortion clinic. Reproductive rights activists lobbying for the drug envisioned a future where women could have the pills prescribed by their primary physician and dispensed at their local pharmacy, transforming abortion into just another part of normal health care.
Continued: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/abortion-pill-mifepristone_n_5f720134c5b64e0666608a12?ri18n=true
Interview, 28 September 2020
Médecins Sans Frontières
The United States policy known as the Global Gag Rule has had a devastating impact on women’s access to sexual and reproductive healthcare since it was reinstated and greatly expanded by the Trump Administration more than three and a half years ago. The policy – which already forces health providers to choose between providing information to patients or receiving US funding – is now set to be expanded even further. Dr Manisha Kumar, head of Médecins Sans Frontières' (MSF) task force on safe abortion care, explains the risks facing women and girls.
Continued: https://www.msf.org/proposed-changes-us-anti-abortion-rule-threaten-wider-harm-women
9/28/2020
by MARIE BASS
The approval of medication abortion care—20 years ago on Monday—was supposed to usher in a new era of abortion access in this country, to lessen the political and cultural stigma of abortion, to end the vitriol, quiet the noise, and give women an important new option to end an early pregnancy. This vision has yet to be realized.
Instead, with the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the vacancy on the Supreme Court, the constitutional right to abortion is under greater threat than ever before.
SEP 28, 2020
CLAIRE PADILLA
The restrictive, colonial, and archaic 1930 Revised Penal Code abortion law has never reduced the number of women inducing abortion. It has only endangered the lives of hundreds of thousands of Filipino women who have made personal decisions to induce abortion for various reasons (economic - 75%; too young, under 25 years old - 46%; health reasons - one-third; rape - 13%) but are unable to access safe abortion services.
No restrictive law nor religious dogma has stopped these Filipino women, especially poor women with at least 3 children, to end their unintended or unwanted pregnancies.
Continued: https://www.rappler.com/voices/thought-leaders/opinion-why-we-need-decriminalize-abortion
28 September 2020
1. Why is Amnesty International revisiting its position on abortion?
We have updated our position to align with evolving international human rights law and standards, to make it as inclusive as possible, and to ensure it addresses the full range of barriers that impede access to safe abortion and the full range of human rights violations due to criminalization of abortion.
Our position on abortion is informed by years of research and consultations with women and girls whose lives have been shattered by restrictive laws; as well as with medical providers, activists and legal experts.
Continued: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/09/amnesty-updated-abortion-policy-faqs/
September 28, 2020
Vinoj and Anisha in Voices
The whole world except for the woman
continues to debate the politics of abortion, the legality and morality of
abortion. Let us pause and think about the woman who deserves a respectful
termination if she chooses not to continue her pregnancy.
Even after 15 years of working in this field, we often find it difficult to
explain the need for what we do. We work to reduce deaths and disabilities due
to unsafe abortions; in other words, we work to increase access to safe
abortions. But the word abortion and its associations are so loaded that it is
assumed that indeed all those who die or suffer morbidities due to an unsafe
abortion deserve them. Isn’t it a sin to have sex outside of marriage or to not
want a child in marriage? It is these opinions and many more that push millions
of women in India every year to resort to unsafe methods of abortions.
Continued: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/voices/why-is-the-woman-missing-from-the-abortion-debate/
BY REPS. DIANA DEGETTE (D-COLO.), BARBARA LEE (D-CALIF.), JAN SCHAKOWSKY (D-ILL.) AND AYANNA PRESSLEY (D-MASS.), OPINION CONTRIBUTORS
09/28/20
Over the years, there have been numerous challenges in the way the United States has approached reproductive health. We rely on our public health institutions to make decisions using the best data to get the best outcomes. Twenty years ago, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved mifepristone, the pill for medication abortion with numerous restrictions on who could prescribe the medication, where it could be taken and where it could be dispensed.
Now, 20 years later, medication abortion care has been used by more than 4 million women and has proven to be a safe and effective option to end an early pregnancy. Mifepristone has long had the potential to transform health care access — yet, the same restrictions the FDA first placed on medication abortion needlessly remain in place to this day. This must change.
Meet the women across Europe who are resisting threats, both old and new, to reproductive rights in Poland.
Claudia Torrisi
28 September 2020
“It was the most incredible, amazing experience of my life,” the veteran women’s rights activist Mara Clarke told me. “It was totally insane. But also really wonderful. And proof that sisters and siblings can get shit done when they want to.”
In December 2019, three months before coronavirus was declared a global pandemic, a group of women from across Europe launched a bold, feminist response to Poland’s draconian anti-abortion laws: Abortion Without Borders.
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