Individuals have a human right to comprehensive health care, including family planning and contraception. This right is recognized in many international agreements. But global access is an unrealized vision. We study national laws and policies that affect contraceptive access for women around the world. We examine the legal issues surrounding contraceptive care in the U.S., including discrimination against women by insurance companies that refuse to cover contraception. We undertake initiatives to make emergency contraception more readily available domestically and internationally.

In the U.S., we adhere to the promise of women's equality inherent in Roe v. Wade. We fight growing obstacles placed in the way of women seeking abortions, promote new reproductive technologies that expand access to abortion, and ensure that the constitutional right to reproductive privacy is strengthened. Internationally, we monitor global abortion laws.

In the U.S., we confront efforts to restrict young people's right to reproductive health services, including abortion and contraception, and to eliminate comprehensive, accurate sexuality education in schools. We work to implement international agreements that guarantee women's reproductive rights, which are essential to remedying women's and girls' unequal status in society and limits their ability to protect themselves from coercive sexual relations and practices, such as female genital mutilation.

Discrimination against low-income women in the U.S. compromises their access to a full range of reproductive health care. We are committed to eliminating funding restrictions that prevent low-income women from exercising their right to choose whether and when to have children. We work to remove barriers to reproductive health services that result from market-driven changes in health care systems. The primary focus of our international work is assuring the reproductive rights of low-income women. We advocate the needs of refugee women to have access comprehensive reproductive health care. We seek to expand human rights principles to protect against abuses of reproductive rights. We exposed the sexual abuse and harassment against low-income women in government-funded health clinics in Peru.

We are working to integrate gender perspectives into the International Criminal Court so that reproductive rights violations, such as rape, forced pregnancy, and other forms of sexual violence, are regarded as international crimes. In the U.S., anti-choice violence and intimidation tactics make abortion and other reproductive health services inaccessible to many women. We are exposing the vast financial and legal resources of the anti-choice movement, and to assist health care providers and their patients with legal support against anti-choice harassment and terror.

We give recent law school graduates the opportunity to participate in legal advocacy for reproductive rights. In the U.S., our Blackmun Fellowship Fund enables lawyers to be involved in litigation at the forefront of the struggle for reproductive rights. The Blackmun Fellowship Fund, founded in 1995, is named after Justice Harry A. Blackmun, the U.S. Supreme Court Justice who wrote the opinion in Roe v. Wade. This landmark decision changed the lives of women for generations to come, and over 25 years later, stands as a high water mark on reproductive rights.

In our international work, we seek to train recent law school graduates in many legal and policy tools to promote women's reproductive rights(see International Fellowships). In particular our new generation of international lawyers learn about international and comparative law and strategies by which to enhance reproductive rights.