This is a cross-posting of the Sexual and Reproductive Rights Situation Report, a monthly column I write for Gender Across Borders. 

Since the devastating  7.0 earthquake shook Haiti on January 12, 2010, Haitians have dealt with shortages of basic needs like water and food; flooding; and even churchy American do-gooders coming for their children.  As in any humanitarian crisis, the women of Haiti have been struck harder and in different ways than men because of existing inequality and gender disparities.   As the humanitarian community continues to formalize and learn from its major challenges, it is paying increasing attention to women’s rights and gender issues in the post-disaster setting.  I’m going to focus more specifically on women’s reproductive and sexual rights and the ways in which they are threatened in humanitarian crises.     

 The situation for reproductive health in Haiti was already dire before the earthquake.  The country had the highest maternal death rates in the region by far, with 670 of every 100,000 deliveries resulting in the death of the mother, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).  This PBS documentary, available on Family Care International’s website, chronicles the tragedy of maternal death in Haiti, pre-quake.  The 63,000 pregnant women in Haiti when the earthquake struck are at even greater risk in the aftermath of the disaster.  According to CARE, a humanitarian relief and anti-poverty NGO active in Haiti, “breastfeeding mothers and young children are at greatest risk” after the quake.    Soon after the earthquake, Sophie Perez, CARE country director in Haiti, said:     

There are a lot of pregnant women in the streets, and mothers breastfeeding new babies.  There are also women giving birth in the street, directly in the street… the situation is very critical.

Pregnant women and other vulnerable populations may be less able to fight for scarce resources, and their unique health needs may not be met.  There are many sexual and reproductive health issues that are intensified in a humanitarian crisis.     

 Although each disaster is unique, the humanitarian community, including NGOs, government agencies and multilaterals, has begun to attempt to learn from previous disaster response efforts to improve upon outcomes.  After the earthquake in Haiti, dozens of NGOs coordinated to write a letter to Secretary of State Clinton and the head of USAID encouraging a gender perspective in the US’ relief efforts, and pointing to the lessons learned and documented in a seminal document- the Gender Handbook in Humanitarian Action.    

In the last decade, several working groups on reproductive rights in post-conflict and post-disaster settings have formed, including the Inter-agency Working Group on Reproductive Health in Crises.  One of its theoretical initiatives is something called the Minimum Initial Service Package (MISP), which sets out to prioritize interventions at the outset of a humanitarian crisis to maximize positive reproductive health outcomes.  The Inter-agency Working Group is advocating for the MISP to be “provided within the context of other critical priorities, such as water, food, cooking fuel, and shelter,” which emphasizes the basic nature and life-or-death importance of reproductive health services.   

Another such group is the Reproductive Health Response in Conflict Consortium (RHRC Consortium), made up of academia and NGOs including the Women’s Refugee Commission.   Much of the work on gender in humanitarian crises is based on work that these and other agencies did on the reproductive health issues for refugees and displaced persons; many of the issues are the same.   Here’s a video from the Women’s Refugee Commission on the reproductive health situation in Haiti since the earthquake:     

RHRC Consortium released a statement following the Haiti earthquake demanding that disaster response address the health needs of women and girls.  The statement brought up a number of sexual and reproductive health issues in the post-disaster period that I hadn’t thought of before.  In addition to the needs of pregnant women and new mothers, a holistic view of sexual and reproductive health includes access to contraceptives, responsive treatment for survivors of sexual violence including emergency contraception and post-exposure prophylaxis for HIV, and continuity in ART therapies for HIV positive individuals. UNFPA and the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (UN-INSTRAW) point out other issues including “limitations on accessing prenatal and post-natal care… greater risk of vaginal infections, pregnancy complications including spontaneous abortion, unplanned pregnancy and post-traumatic stress.”      

INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence explains in a statement on Haiti:    

Women experience the most negative consequences of catastrophic events, particularly with regards to higher rates of injury and death, displacement, unemployment, increased incidents of HIV rates, sexual and domestic violence, increased poverty, and the disproportionate responsibility for caring for others. This is especially true for women marginalized by race, sexual orientation, gender identity, class, health, ability, age, housing, and legal status.     

All of these issues highlight how existing vulnerability is magnified and intensified during a humanitarian crisis.  Women are already in a position of vulnerability due to the “interaction of biological and social risk factors.”  The World Health Organization (WHO) identifies among these risk factors gender roles, social taboos around menstruation and appropriate behavior for women and girls, existing economic and social marginalization and vulnerability to domestic and sexual violence.      

Although women’s lives and health are often threatened in the post-disaster period, they are a tremendous resource for reconstruction.  International women’s rights NGO MADRE, along with Haitian partner Zanmi Lesante, has written on women’s expertise and the marginalization of women’s experience in reconstruction.  ”When relief is distributed by women, it has the best chance of reaching those most in need.”  It’s also more likely that real reproductive health needs will be met.      

The issue of participatory planning is front-and-center these days as NGOs plan Haiti’s future.  Oxfam has been campaigning  to push world leaders to include Haitian organizations and voices in the decision-making process during reconstruction (sign on to the campaign here).      

The Gender and Disaster Network has summed up the need for an even more nuanced view of participation that includes populations often left out of the process in their Six Principles for Engendered Relief and Reconstruction.  First, they point out, Gender analysis is “integral to plan for full and equitable recovery.”  Part of engendering reconstruction is basing program development on the true needs of women, based on gender-disaggregated data, and not on stereotypes. 

They advocate working with grassroots women’s organizations- the women who know what needs to happen to create a more just society and ensure future resilience.  GDN also points out that the act of participation, based on a human rights approach, builds conditions for empowerment and develops capacity among women. 

If disaster is not to disproportionately endanger women and girls and further entrench their social inequality and vulnerability, women’s unique needs and perspectives must be respected, accounted for and implemented in every stage of the after-disaster process of response and recovery.    

Take action: Support International Planned Parenthood Federation’s partner in Haiti, PROFAMIL, in rebuilding and providing reproductive health services; or the Global Fund for Women’s Crisis Fund which will support Haitian women’s organizations as they rebuild.

I just returned from a four-day training on volunteer organizing with Oxfam America, which was held in Washington DC.  Oxfam’s strategic action plan this year is around climate change and poverty.  As usual Oxfam really has it together–it’s a critical political moment.  There is climate legislation in draft form in the House, and around the corner in the Senate.  In December, the international community will come together in Copenhagen to renew some version of the Kyoto protocol.  It’s critical that any agreement include what is being called adaptation funding to help poor communities cope with climate change and its effects.

I’ll be organizing for the New York City Action Corps, so be on the lookout for notices about events and political action oportunities.

Global warming wasn’t too terribly important to me until I realized that its effects are being felt primarily by poor communities around the world.   Desertification, deforestation and severe weather are already creating disastrous effects.

This is a classic case of externalities being borne unequally– with the developed world largely responsible for the emissions causing the problem and those in marginalized communities disproportionately bearing the brunt. 

Speaking of unequal impact, women in the developing world are far more vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and have less voice in community disaster response planning or resource allocation.   In the developing world, women are responsible for between 60% and 80% of food production, and are generally also responsible for collecting water and fuel like firewood.  When the weather is unpredictable, agriculture becomes more difficult.  Women often have to travel further for water and firewood, taking valuable time away from activities like education.  More on this from the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO).

Today colleagues and friends in Mexico are celebrating the 2-year anniversary of the passage of legislation that decriminalizes abortion in Mexico’s capital city.  Below is a note to supporters from GIRE’s executive diretor.  The new law has meant the end of women seeking emergency obstetric care for injuries resulting from unsafe clandestine abortions.

The statement:

Today is the 2nd anniversary of the decriminalization of abortion in Mexico City. This historic reform means that any woman can safely terminate a pregnancy during the first 12 weeks of gestation in 14 of the city’s public hospitals.

The legal termination of pregnancy is a great symbolic victory in the long struggle for women’s right to choose, in addition to being a resounding public health success, as recognized yesterday in the forum: “Two Years of Exercising Our Rights: Legal Termination of Pregnancy” organized by the Mexico City government and non-profit organizations; GIRE included.

According to data presented by Minister of Health, Armando Ahued Ortega, over 23,000 women have accessed safe and legal abortion since April 2007; women who otherwise would have placed their health and lives at risk in clandestine abortions. Proof of this is that in two years not one woman has sought emergency care for complications of an abortion. In other words, the law that today has been in effect for two years has positively influenced women’s lives, health and autonomy.

Today, we celebrate!

Sincerely,
María Luisa Sánchez Fuentes
Executive Director

Global Feminist Profiles is a column I write for Gender Across Borders that highlights feminist leaders all over the world who are creating change and empowering their countrywomen to demand equality.  This is the inaugural edition, so I’m profiling  a famous feminist I know myself!

The history of Mexico’s feminist movement over the last thirty-eight years is inexorably linked to Marta Lamas.  Marta, called Mexico’s leading feminist, was instrumental in the birth of the movement and in the construction of brilliant discourse on issues critical to women’s rights, including gender construction and abortion.  Since the foundational years of the movement, Marta Lamas has been a theoretician and an organizer, an inspiration and an agent for change. 

She has criticized modern feminism, however.  She’s written that the modern movement is divided by identity politics, that conservative forces hold back new critical theoretical analysis, and that there aren’t enough young feminists.  She does have faith in us, though– she said to one interviewer that

I have a lot of hope for the young generation of feminists.  There is a generation of young girls who are seeing things in a new way; and I hope that they will bring a new discourse and new answers.

The Leader of a Movement

An anthropologist by training, Ms. Lamas currently serves as a Political Science professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM) and editorialist for several important Mexican newspapers (El Processo and Diario Monitor).  Ms. Lamas describes herself as “a feminist activist and an intellectual, a mix of theory and practice.”  She was there as the feminist movement grew and refined its tactics and messages.  When she saw a hole in the movement, she founded a committee or a journal or an organization to fill it. 

Marta Lamas is now one of the leading feminist intellectuals not just in Mexico, but in the entire region.  In 2005, Ms. Lamas was recognized by the international community when she was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize as part of the  project “1,000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize for 2005.”  She has written a host of books and articles on feminism, gender and abortion, and since 1990 has edited the regions’ most important feminist journal, debate feminista. Her most recent book is entitled Feminism: Transmissions and Retransmissions (Feminismo: transmisiones y retransmisiones).

In 1992, after informal participation in various committees and feminist action groups, Marta Lamas and several colleagues co-founded the Information Group on Reproductive Choice (GIRE, by its initials in Spanish).  GIRE was founded because Lamas and her colleagues saw that the debate around abortion had been dominated by extreme positions and misinformation.  They set out to systematize and disseminate information on abortion and reproductive and sexual health and rights from the bioethical, social and legal perspectives to lawmakers and the press.  Over time, GIRE’s legal function has grown, and it is now the leading legal and legislative organization on these issues in Mexico, and a vanguard in the region.

Marta also founded the Simone de Beauvoir Leadership Institute, and describes Ms. De Beauvoir as an idol. Marta is president of the board of a women’s fund in Mexico called Semillas (Spanish for “Seeds,” and a rough acronym for their full name, Mexican Society for Women’s Rights) that raises money from women to support women’s initiatives.  Semillas explicitly recognizes that “women are the central motor for the majority of families in Mexico, but women are left out of the human rights discussion in social, economic, political and cultural discussions.” Their model is one of empowerment and of social investment: “Women Investing in Women.”  There is great power in that model in Mexico, where women for so long had little control over financial resources—both the investors and the women who receive funding are empowered through the exchange.  Speaking of empowerment, Marta also serves as coordinator of the Independent Sex Workers’ Support Group.

Victories

Years of effort by Marta Lamas and her feminist sisters bore fruit in 2007 when abortion was decriminalized up to 12 weeks gestation in Mexico City (more complete discussion of the legislation here and here).  The legislation was undoubtedly the result of the 38 years of work by the movement, driven by Ms. Lamas’ ingenious positioning of the issue of abortion.  GIRE lawyers helped draft the legislation, and later helped coordinate its defense against unconstitutionality lawsuits at the Mexican Supreme Court. Marta Lamas testified.

 

Marta Lamas is known in Mexican intellectual and political society for her cutting analysis, and for her off-color sense of humor.  She’s performed with two political cabarets, one called Las Leonas.  These days for the release of new issues of debate feminista Marta performs with an act called Las Moscas Muertas that presents spectacles characterized by original political folk songs, physical humor, and wild props. 

Mosca Marta

I worked for more than a year at GIRE and met Marta a number of times—I was even her secret Santa! But I’m still in total awe of her.  She has been called, tongue-in-cheek, the Gloria Steinem of Mexico.  But this title doesn’t do justice to the influence her thought has had on both feminist and gender theory and the vibrant activism that theory has driven in Mexico.  The progress brought by feminism in Mexico, however stilted and stalled by machismo and the political machine, is inarguably in part a result of Ms. Lamas’ brilliance, passion, and commitment. 

Brook Elliott-Buettner is a freelance human rights policy researcher and writer living in New York. More information and work is available at www.brookelliottbuettner.com.

 

Gentle Reader: This is a column I wrote for the newly-launghed glog on international feminist topics, Gender Across Borders.  This is a monthly contribution I’m calling the Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) Situation Report.

Welcome to the first installment of the Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) Situation Report! This monthly column will highlight advances or setbacks in SRHR policy internationally.

In this month’s SRHS Sit Report we’re highlighting Spain.The Spanish Parliament is currently considering legislation that would decriminalize abortion.  The law under consideration is a pretty good one, too.  It’s still being drafted, but public statements by the left-leaning administration have been emphasizing women’s rights and autonomy.  In a lot of countries with restrictive abortion laws arguments are focused around the public health consequences of unsafe clandestine abortion.  Although often that’s necessary because of the social climate, instrumental arguments are always more vulnerable to future challenge than are arguments based on intrinsic value.  And women’s autonomy is a pretty intrinsic value.

The proposed legislation would bring Spain up to date and into line with the vast majority of European countries and would answer the call of the Council of Europe to “decriminalize abortion within reasonable gestational limits” in its recent Resolution on Access to Safe and Legal Abortion passed in April 2008.  The Resolution was an important recognition of abortion rights as human rights at the regional level in Europe, and explicitly recognized the link between the criminalization of abortion and maternal mortality.

Spanish President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s socialist administration introduced draft legislation in early 2007 (full text in Spanish Available here).   Since 1985, abortion has been legal in Spain under limited circumstances: to preserve the life, health or mental health of the pregnant woman, for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest, and in cases of fetal impairment.  Under those indications, has was mostly been pretty available—depending on where you live in Spain. In fact, until 2007 when abortion was decriminalized up to 10 weeks gestation in Portugal, a lot of Portuguese women traveled to neighboring Spain to obtain safe abortion services.

Part of the reason the reform was necessary is that although abortion services are fairly widely available in some areas, the legislation has been unevenly applied in Spain’s 17 semi-autonomous regions. In some areas providers and even women have been prosecuted for the crime of abortion.  In 2007, police raided clinics in Barcelona and Madrid, and in some areas have even gone to women’s homes.  In one case, police got an anonymous tip of a “murder” in progress and burst into a hospital where a woman was in the middle of a procedure and interrogated her.

Since it was instituted in 1985, Spain’s abortion law has been challenged several times.  In 1991, the Spanish Supreme Court dismissed charges against a woman who had undergone an abortion, saying that forcing her to give birth would have constituted a violation of her right to the free development of her person.  Since that decision, there have been several attempts to liberalize abortion law, but none have made it through the Parliament.

Over the last year, the Parliament has been considering the current proposed legislation and hearing evidence on the issue. It requested testimony from a panel of experts which included bioethicists, academics, and medical and legal experts. They also convened a parliamentary sub-commission on the legislation with a mandate to research the implications of the law including international human rights standards and European best practices.

Minister of Equality Bibiana Aído Almagro

According to Minister of Equality Bibiana Aído Almagro (who’s a vocal advocate for women’s rights), the Ministry is currently in the process of amending draft legislation.  Word has it the legislation will likely decriminalize abortion upon request up to the 14^th week of gestation and abortion of pregnancies that present grave risk to the health of the pregnant woman, or in cases of fetal malformation, up to 22 weeks.  Outside these indications, abortion would remain penalized, although Aído Almagro has made it clear that the government has no intention of imprisoning women for the crime of abortion.

Of course, the Catholic church is fighting back.  Right-wing voices have emphasized that the law may allow young women over the age of 16 to seek abortion services without notifying their parents, and have said that the law would make abortion into “just another form of contraception.” Bishops are calling for a “massive mobilization” against Zapatero’s administration.  The church’s arguments are familiar; and include the same old misinformation (actually abortion is not contraception, and numerous studies have shown that legality does not affect the number of abortions that take place—just how safe they are) and attacks on women’s ability to define their own lives and make their own decisions.

Lawmaker Carmen Montón Giménez

Socialist Parliamentarian Carmen Montón Giménez (who is also the spokesperson for the Socialist Group within the Parliamentary Equality Commission) is another fabulous feminist (with a blog).  She recently said to the plenary of the Parliament that the decriminalization of abortion for three indications (the current law) “was an advance and a social success, but did not recognize the capacity and will of women to decide about their own life and their own maternity.” (Full transcript in Spanish available here.) The new law would put the decision in the hands of the pregnant woman. Hopefully by the summer, Spain will join the growing list of nations that recognize women’s human rights and autonomy by passing holistic legislation decriminalizing abortion on demand.

Brook Elliott-Buettner is a freelance human rights policy researcher and writer living in New York. More information and work is available at www.brookelliottbuettner.com.

My article, “Reproductive Justice for Women in Mexico,” was published today in the journal Theoria: A Journal of Feminist Theories and Practice.  The journal is published by colleagues in Korea who are building a global feminist network.  A link to the English text is available on the Publications page.  I’m not sure that their website is up yet, but here is the link.

It seems like such a hallmark of the modern age that a hero of the Mexican leftist revolutionaries spoke out on Gaza (here).  The craziest thing to me is that it didn’t even get that much play.  The last time Subcomandante Marcos spoke I was living in Oaxaca and it seemed to me that he got a lot of media attention )although maybe only in the Mexican press).  Maybe that’s because the U.S. is tired of old Marcos, or maybe it’s because we are ready for the crisis in Gaza to slip from the main cover story to second-page news.

Welcome! On this blog I will post writing, thoughts and items of interest related to human rights policy, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and international development.  Please feel free to add to the discussion via the comments section.