NEW AND NOTEWORTHY
What If Roe Fell? 2007
The second edition of the Center's "What if Roe Fell?" report shines a light on the latest anti-choice strategies designed to criminalize abortion at every stage of a woman's pregnancy. The report documents the way in which direct assaults on Roe at the state level have surged since the first edition of the report, in 2004, analyzes the reasons for this trend and arms citizens to fight back.
Imposing Misery: The Impact of Manila's Contraception Ban on Women and Families
Likhaan, ReproCen, and the Center for Reproductive Rights have released a report documenting the devastating impact of Manila's contraception ban on women and their families. In 2000, the mayor of Manila, Jose "Lito" Atienza, issued an Executive Order (EO) "upholding natural family planning" and "discouraging the use of artificial methods of contraception like condoms, pills, intrauterine devices, surgical sterilization, and other [methods]." This sweeping EO, in effect, bans city health centers and hospitals from providing contraception to women in need of this essential reproductive health care service. Poor women are suffering the most under this ban.
The report, Imposing Misery: The Impact of Manila�s Contraception Ban on Women and Families, is based on a series of compelling interviews with women affected by the EO, government and health officials, and nongovernmental organizations. Its conclusions are clear: the EO harms the lives and health of women, as well as their families, by depriving them of the basic human right to make decisions about their own bodies and whether and when to have children. Further, the report establishes that the EO violates national and international law.
This report alerts the Manila City and national government to the violations resulting from the EO and issues recommendations to nullify the policy. Likhaan, ReproCen, and the Center for Reproductive Rights are working to ensure that Manila residents have easy and affordable access to a full range of family planning options, in accordance with the Philippines� obligations under constitutional, national, and international law. In addition, these three organizations have called on the new mayor, Alfredo S. Lim, who took office this July, to revoke the ban.
Failure to Deliver: Violations of Human Rights in Kenyan Health Facilities
Providing women with affordable, accessible, and safe health services is a key obligation of the government of Kenya. However, as a new report produced by the Center for Reproductive Rights and the Federation of Women Lawyers—Kenya vividly illustrates, Kenya�s health care sector suffers from systemic and widespread problems that deny women high quality family planning and maternal health care.
Through interviews with women, health care providers, and government officials, Failure to Deliver: Violations of Women's Human Rights in Kenyan Health Facilities documents a wide range of violations of women's fundamental human rights. Findings include physical and verbal abuse of women seeking maternity services, detention of women and their babies for unpaid medical bills, and staff and equipment shortages that impair the ability to provide good care.
Very few formal channels exist to provide redress for the serious human rights violations taking place in both public and private health care facilities throughout Kenya. This report throws into sharp relief the need to remedy the rights violations that women in Kenya have endured, and to implement systematic changes to ensure that women's rights are protected when they seek reproductive health care.
GAINING GROUND: A Tool for Advancing Reproductive Rights Law Reform
Women�s equality and status in society are directly linked to their enjoyment of reproductive rights. Around the world, human rights law and international commitments require governments to reform laws and policies that deny women these rights. Advocates play a crucial role in shaping reforms and ensuring that they translate into genuine progress for women. In this process, advocates can learn from�and build upon�legal and policy advances in other countries and regions.
Gaining Ground is a resource for advocates promoting law reform at the national level. Each chapter, devoted to a key reproductive rights issue, provides positive examples of recently adopted laws and policies from around the world. Gaining Ground is aimed at helping advocates generate ideas for reform and assess what can be realistically achieved in their own countries.
LITIGATING REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS: Using Public Interest Litigation and International Law to Promote Gender Justice in India
This report explores the use of Public Interest Litigation (PIL) to promote gender justice and advance women�s reproductive rights in India. Women�s reproductive rights in India are severely undermined by gender-biased practices. As a result, women face a wide range of human rights abuses that breach fundamental provisions of the Indian Constitution and international conventions ratified by the Indian government.
This publication shows how a variety of actors can, through the strategic use of PIL, play a role in ensuring that the Indian government upholds its obligations to protect women and provide justice to those whose rights have been violated.
Click here to learn more about the Women of the World Series > > (Flash movie)
Recent Spanish-language book
Beyond the Law: Justice and Gender in Latin America
Luisa Cabal, Cristina Motta, editors, Red Alas
Siglo del Hombre Editores, Ediciones Uniandes, Bogotá, 2005
What is the role of law in transforming women�s lives in Latin America? Have recent legal reforms made a difference for women�s equality and access to justice? Are there effective mechanisms for defending women's rights? This Spanish-language book responds, from various national perspectives, to these and other questions related to the role of law in overcoming women�s inequality.
The nine essays compiled in Beyond the Law: Justice and Gender in Latin America evaluate and criticize gender discrimination in laws and legal institutions in Latin American countries, offering several approaches that can generate crucial legal transformation in the area of women�s rights and empowerment.
This book is the first publication of the Red Alas network, a Latin American network of law professors that aims to reform legal education in the region from a gender perspective. The Center for Reproductive Rights supports and is a part of this network.
Our latest report from the acclaimed Women of the World series was released in December 2005.
A joint venture between the Center for Reproductive Rights, the Asian-Pacific Resource & Research Centre for Women (ARROW), and four NGO partners in East and Southeast Asia,WOW: East and Southeast Asia, provides an extensive compilation of laws and policies influencing women�s reproductive health in five countries of the region � China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, and draws attention to specific issues that require legal and policy reform. It serves as a resource for those interested in advancing and protecting women�s reproductive health and rights through legal advocacy, and ensuring that states comply with their obligations to respect, protect and fulfill women's reproductive rights under international law.
Download WOW: East and Southeast Asia > >
Legal Grounds: Reproductive and Sexual Rights in African Commonwealth Courts
Read the report online (PDF)
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Reproductive and sexual rights, which are guaranteed in international and regional human rights treaties, mean nothing if they are not recognized and enforced by national-level courts. Legal Grounds: Sexual and Reproductive Rights in African Commonwealth Courts is an attempt to provide much-needed information about decisions and gender-relevant jurisprudence of national courts throughout African Commonwealth countries. It offers a crucial starting point for women�s rights advocates who are seeking to further develop their litigation and grassroots strategies.
Annual Reports
