AIDS-Free World has presented a first-ever legal challenge to Jamaica's anti-gay laws, by filing a petition at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on behalf of two gay men whose names are being withheld to protect their safety.
Four years ago, in 2007, a Brazilian judge prosecuted 1,500 women for procuring abortions. That same year, a twenty-year-old woman, Ana María Acevedo, died in Argentina of cancer-related complications because her doctors refused to treat her; she was pregnant and an abortion might have saved her life.
The world reaches seven billion people at a time of renewed debates about demographic changes, individual human rights and women's rights specifically, attacks on basic reproductive health care, and accelerated environmental disruption.
For decades, students’ likelihood of receiving sex ed in NYC public schools has come down to the luck of the draw. New York City’s universal standard for sex education, announced in August, seeks to put an end to the loose patchwork of programs across the city. But the usual suspects are using fear-mongering and falsehoods to push their agenda of ignorance.
When it comes down to it, these laws represent legal rape. If rape is the insertion of an object into the body of an unwilling person, then what else can you call laws insisting that a woman submit to pregnancy regardless of her age, the circumstances under which she became pregnant, her health, or her general well-being?
The UN Special Rapporteur's report calls for decriminalization of and the removal of legal barriers related to human rights abuses around abortion, conduct during pregnancy, contraception, family planning, and provision of sexual and reproductive health education and information.
Unlikely allies from both sides of the traditional “abortion” debate have come together in opposition to Prop 26, Mississippi's egg-as-person initiative.
