Ipas’s global colleagues to converge on Washington to protest extremist conservative agenda

Mark used by permission. This historic event is non-partisan and not connected with any election campaign.

On April 25^th Ipas staff, colleagues and friends from all over the world will join hundreds of thousands of other marchers in Washington, DC, to speak out in support of women’s reproductive rights and to protest U.S. policies that endanger the lives of women worldwide.

“Both domestically and abroad, right-wing extremists are aggressively pursuing an anti-choice, anti-woman agenda that hurts women, families and communities,” said Ipas Senior Policy Advisor Leila Hessini.

"Now is the time to take America back from extremist forces and call for equal access to information and high-quality health care for all women - a value that most Americans share."

Sponsored by a coalition of international nongovernmental organizations working in reproductive health, about 100 women's-health leaders from more than 50 countries will travel to Washington for the historic March for Women's Lives. They will march Sunday under the banner "United for Women Worldwide," and many will attend two separate demonstrations Saturday: a morning rally at the Vatican Embassy to protest the Vatican's worldwide efforts to limit access to reproductive health services and an afternoon event in Lafayette Park.

The afternoon event will highlight the negative impact of the Global Gag Rule, or Mexico City Policy, which bars U.S. family planning assistance to foreign nongovernmental organizations that are involved in any but a very few abortion-related activities, even if they use their own money.

“Data show that this misguided policy disrupts family planning services, HIV-prevention efforts and even well-baby care,” Hessini said. “It leads to more unwanted pregnancies, more unsafe abortions and more deaths and injuries of women and girls.”

Government-imposed restrictions on women’s access to comprehensive, medically accurate reproductive health information and services also hinder American women’s ability to exercise their sexual and reproductive rights, Hessini said. In the last 10 years, she noted, close to 400 barriers to safe, legal abortion have been put into place at the state level – affecting primarily poor women, women of color, rural women and adolescents.

In addition, last year saw the first-ever ban on a medically-necessary abortion procedure with no exception for women’s health: a ban that is so ambiguously worded, Hessini said, that it could effectively outlaw abortions as early as 12 weeks. The pro-choice community is also very concerned that the Roe v. Wade decision through which the Supreme Court established women’s constitutional right to abortion is within one vote of being overturned.

"This administration claims to be pro-family, but many of its policies ignore the realities of women's and families' lives in America today," Hessini said. "In the U.S. as worldwide, adolescents, poor women and women of color suffer most from these politically-driven policies.

"We need only look abroad to countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to see that restricting women's access to safe, legal abortion does not reduce abortion - it only makes it unsafe. And women and girls needlessly die as a result.

"That's why Ipas will be out in full force on April 25^th."

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