abortion rights

Governments need to address the failures of the last 20 years and have a holistic, forward-looking, and relevant development agenda post-2015, we believe Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) must be central to the goals and targets and go beyond a very narrow reflection of SRHR as “maternal healthcare” or “reproductive health” only. Human rights must be explicitly referenced, with the understanding that any meaningful efforts towards sustainable development must posit people as the drivers of development rather than passive receivers of aid priorities and programming.

We need to hold governments accountable to their existing commitments, and continue to take action to ensure that national policies effectively guarantee access to safe, legal, affordable, accessible, high quality, youth friendly abortion services, along with information about how to locate and access such services. It is also vital that this existing commitment on access to safe and legal abortion be included in the outcomes and recommendations of the ICPD, MGD review processes that will inform the development of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Post2014-2015 development agenda.

Inability to exercise SRHR results in many acts of violence against women including rape, forced sterilisation, early marriage, female genital mutilation and assaults against transgendered individuals and those in same sex relationships.

..violence against women also constitute systematic denial, withholding and obstruction of access to reproductive health services, including access to safe and legal abortion because of its detrimental effect on the lives of women and girls. This type of violence is structural or institutional violence.

We, a group of civil society activists and advocates for sexual and reproductive health and rights, are writing to you to express our concern about the recent death of Savita Halappanavar, who was repeatedly denied an abortion in Galway. This tragic case demonstrates, once again, that the prohibition of abortion in Ireland is not just undermining the autonomy of the women across the country; it is leading to unacceptable suffering and even death.

…systematic denial and withholding of access to safe and legal abortion through restrictive laws on the one hand and through obstructing access to services on the other hand constitutes an act of institutional violence which has a detrimental effect in the lives of all women in need of safe abortion services, specifically impacting the most marginalised groups such as young unmarried women, women with disabilities, HIV positive women, ethnic minorities, sex workers, LGBT and others.

It is deeply worrying that the government of Ireland -a member country of the European Union- still does not protect, respect and fulfill women’s rights even thought they have signed and ratified international instruments, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and ICPD PoA Declarations, which establish sexual and reproductive rights as human rights. The women’s right to access to integral reproductive health services, including abortion, is ingrained in the international human rights standards, which assures the right to life, health, privacy, and non-discrimination of women.