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Governments, donors urged to act


September 8, 2004
Countdown 2015

Ipas applauds women's-health activists, NGO leaders, parliamentarians and others who last week called on the international community to make safe, legal abortion accessible and available to every woman who chooses it, in order to protect women's health, lives and rights.

Improving access to family-planning services is essential, participants of the three-day Countdown 2015 meeting in London said, but unwanted pregnancies cannot be eliminated altogether, and women will continue to have abortions. Final conference documents note that making safe, legal abortion accessible to women “free from the threat of violence or coercion” is imperative to reduce pregnancy-related deaths of women and to ensure that women can exercise their reproductive rights.

“It is very encouraging to see the global NGO community endorse a realistic approach to abortion which respects the realities of women’s lives,” said Charlotte Hord Smith, Ipas’s Director of Policy, who attended the meeting. “The Cairo agreement was a breakthrough in many ways, but it did not go far enough on abortion. This new consensus is much more far-sighted and is consistent with Ipas’s work over the last 30 years.”

About 700 individuals from 109 countries attended the Aug. 31-Sept. 2 Countdown 2015 gathering to assess progress in achieving goals set at the 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo. Then, 179 nations endorsed a long-term plan to protect health, development, rights and the environment, and pledged to ensure sexual and reproductive rights and health for all by 2015. Halfway to that target, participants in the London meeting focused on identifying successes and remaining challenges in fulfilling that pledge.

Notably, the Cairo agreement recognized unsafe abortion as a major public-health concern and called on governments to make abortion safe and accessible in circumstances in which it is not against the law. Countdown 2015 conferees went further.

“The time has come,” said Steven W. Sinding, Director-General of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), which co-sponsored the meeting, “… to ensure that every woman in every country has access to safe abortion services when she needs them.” The meeting’s action agenda reiterates a call to “establish, preserve and fully implement laws, norms and regulations that make safe, legal abortion accessible and available to every woman who chooses it.”

Conference documents also emphasize the need for donor countries to devote more resources to sexual and reproductive health. Such investment brings economic as well as social and health benefits, they note.

“Donors governments, including the United States, have fallen far short of the financial commitments they made in Cairo,” said Ipas’s Smith. “In particular, the regressive U.S. Mexico City Policy – or Global Gag Rule – has split the reproductive-health community and seriously impeded progress in addressing the global problem of unsafe abortion."

The Global Gag Rule, reinstituted by President George W. Bush in January 2001, disqualifies foreign nongovernmental organizations from receiving U.S. family-planning funding if they provide counseling on abortion, provide legal abortion services except in very narrow circumstances, or participate in political debate surrounding abortion. It has forced many organizations to choose between meeting women’s comprehensive reproductive-health needs and accepting U.S. funds and has led to severe service cutbacks in some countries.

Along with the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights and the Women’s Health Foundation, of Indonesia, Ipas organized a daily working group on abortion at the Countdown 2015 meeting. Discussions in those sessions stressed that numerous countries have made efforts since the ICPD to reform restrictive abortion laws and to make safe services more accessible but that many barriers remain.

”Unsafe abortion is still a major cause of maternal death,” Smith said, “particularly among young, poor and rural women. Governments, donors, the entire global community can and must do more to prevent those needless deaths. Liberalizing abortion laws is a critical step in making abortion safe. It’s an urgent matter of social justice as well as public health.”

In London, Ipas also launched the last in a global series of reports on progress addressing abortion-related ICPD recommendations, based on surveys of interviews with key individuals and organizations on four continents. At a September 1 press conference, Ipas President Elizabeth Maguire said the research revealed that governments have not done enough to make abortion safe and accessible where it is legal, as promised in Cairo. Liberalization of abortion laws, along with effective implementation of revised laws, is the only real way to stop deaths and injuries of women from unsafe abortion, she said.

For more information, contact:
Kirsten Sherk
Senior Associate, Media Relations
e-mail: sherkk@ipas.org
phone: 919.960.5612
fax: 919.929.0258