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| In a protest in Mexico, activists laid out photos of women who died of complications from unsafe abortion. |
| Sara Gomez |
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To mark this year's Human Rights Day, the United Nations is calling on governments and people around the world to actualize the international laws and standards that exist to protect human rights.
Discrimination, according to the United Nations, is at the root of human rights violations. And the principle victims are women and girls.
Governments around the world have pledged to protect women’s rights to life, health, bodily integrity, privacy, liberty, freedom from discrimination and freedom from cruel, unusual and degrading treatment. Access to safe, affordable reproductive care — including abortion services — falls under this umbrella of human rights protections. Still, nearly 67,000 women — of all ages — continue to die each year from unsafe abortions, and millions more suffer complications, injury and disability. The world’s governing bodies must pay attention and live up to their promises.
In its inaugural issue this summer, Ipas’s Because magazine discussed abortion and human rights, excerpted here:
In Latin America, the contradictions are particularly evident. Most Latin American governments openly affirm that all people have basic human rights to receive health services and to be treated fairly, without discrimination and with dignity. At the same time, most Latin American countries permit abortion only to save a woman’s life; Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic and Chile ban abortion under any circumstance. These laws, which forbid abortions for rape victims and women whose lives and health are endangered by pregnancy, have drawn condemnation from Amnesty International, the United Nations’ Committee Against Torture and other international organizations.
“The criminalization of abortion under all circumstances, without exception, violates the legal status of women by not allowing them to save their own lives or reduce the risk to their physical or psychological health," Juana Jiménez, head of the Autonomous Women’s Movement, a Nicaragua-based organization that has organized to fight the ban. “[The ban] runs counter to conventions on human rights and the rights of women.”
The full text of this article appears on page 11 in Because.
For more information, contact media@ipas.org